LOVE'S ARREARS
The days following the picnic had been no easier for Marley than they
had been for Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a fear took hold
of him; the whole experience, the most wonderful of his life, grew more
and more unreal. Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he was afraid
to go to her home; he wondered whether he should write her a note;
perhaps she would think him false, perhaps she would think he had
already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he did not know what to
do. He had seen her but once, and then at a distance; the Blairs'
well-known surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square, and George
Halliday stood leaning into the carriage chatting with Lavinia. Marley
had but a glimpse of Lavinia's face, pink in the shadow of the
surrey-top. As they drove away she had turned with a smile and a nod at
Halliday. The sight had affected Marley strangely.
He felt himself so weak and incapable in this affair that he longed to
discuss it with some one, and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at
her window with the _Christian Advocate_, which replaced, in her case,
the nap nearly every one else took at that hour.
"How old was father when you were married, mother?" he began.
He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the lives of their parents so
common to children; he had never been able to realize his parents as
having separate and independent existences before his own. Mrs. Marley
laid her paper by, and a smile came to her face.
"He was twenty-two," she said.
"Just my age," observed Marley.
Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.
"You're not thinking of getting married, are you, Glenn?" she asked.
"No." he said with a laugh.
"My goodness! You're just a boy!"
"But I'm as old as father was."
"Y--es," said Mrs. Marley, "but then--"
"But then, what?"
"That was different."
Marley smiled.
"Had father entered the ministry yet?" he said presently.
"Yes, we were married in his first year. He had been teaching school,
and the fall he was admitted to the conference he was sent out to the
Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were married in the spring."
Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her paper with a dreamy
deliberation.
"Ah, but your father was a handsome young man, Glenn!" she said
presently.
"He's handsome yet," Marley replied with the pride he always felt in his
father. And then he asked:
"Did he have any money?"
"Yes," she said, and she laughed, "just a hundred dollars!"
"A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn't he? And so did you!"
"We had more than that," said Mrs. Marley, solemnly.
Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her face seemed for an instant to
be transfigured in the afternoon glow.
He might have told her then; he was on the point of it, but a footfall
on the brick walk outside caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence
coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and he went out.
"Come on," said Lawrence. "Let's go out to Carters'."
Marley looked a question at him, and the smile which Lawrence never
could repress long at a time was twitching at the corners of his large
mouth.
"She'll be there."
"How do you know?" asked Marley.
Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.
When they got to the Carters' they found Mayme and Lavinia together in
the yard, strolling about in apparent aimlessness, yet with an
expectancy in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness. In
the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley's perplexities vanished.
Lawrence stood by with a grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter's eyes
danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately an elder, paternal
manner, and looked on at the lovers' meeting as from far heights that
were to be reached only after all such youthful experiences had long
since become possible in retrospect alone. Still smiling, they edged
away, and left the lovers alone.
"Is it really true?" Marley asked.
Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.
"And you are happy?" he asked.
"So happy!" she said.
And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes. She closed them an
instant.
"What is it?" he asked in alarm.
"Nothing."
"Tell me."
"It's nothing." She was smiling again, as if to show that her happiness
was complete. "See?" Her eyes were blinking rapidly.
"I'm glad," he said.
As they turned and walked across the yard Marley looked at her
nervously.
"Do you know," he said, "that I couldn't remember what color your eyes
were?" He spoke with all the virtue there is in confession.
"What color are they?" she asked, suddenly closing her eyes.
"They're blue," Marley replied, saying the word ecstatically, as if it
had a new, wonderful meaning for him.
"Connie says they're green."
"Connie?"
"Yes, don't you know? She's my younger sister."
"Oh." He did not know any of her family, and the baffling sense of
unreality came over him again.
"You'll know her," said Lavinia, and added thoughtfully: "I hope she'll
like you. Then there's Chad, my little brother."
Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies of an introduction into a
large family, the characters of which were as yet like the characters in
the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it would not reflect
on him to admit that he did not know Chad, seeing that he was merely a
little brother.
"He admires you immensely," said Lavinia.
"Does he?" said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving Chad. "How does he
know me?"
"He says you were a football player at college."
Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own prowess.
"But I knew your voice," said Lavinia.
"Did you? When did you hear it?"
"As if you didn't know!"
"Honestly," he protested. "Tell me."
"Why, that night that you serenaded me."
He was regretting that she had outdone him in observation, but she
suddenly looked up and said:
"Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!"
It was the first time she had ever called him Glenn, and it produced in
him a wonderful sensation.
They had come to a little bench, and, sitting there, they could only
look at each other and smile. Marley noticed that a little line of
freckles ran up over the bridge of Lavinia's nose. They were very
beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard of freckles as one of
the elements of a woman's beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about
the yard.
He had always thought of it as it seemed that first night, enormous,
enchanted, with wide terraces and fountains, and white statues gleaming
through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no terraces, no statuary, no
fountains, and no wide lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded
with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered fence that had lost
several pickets. He looked around behind the house where he had fancied
long stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but now he saw nothing
but an old woodshed and a barn on the rear end of the lot. The cracks in
the barn were so wide that he could see the light of day between them as
through a kinetoscope. He heard a horse stamping fretfully at the flies.
"It was here," he said, "that I first saw you." He did not speak his
whole thought.
"Yes," she answered. "I remember."
"That was a wonderful night, the most wonderful of my life, except the
one at the lake."
He drew close to her. "I loved you at first sight," he whispered.
"Did you?" She looked at him in reverence.
"Yes,--from the very first moment. When you came into the room, I knew
that--"
"What?"
"That you were the woman I had always loved and waited for; that I had
found my ideal. And yet they say we never discover our ideals in this
life!"
He laughed at this philosophical absurdity.
"What did you think then?" he asked.
She cast down her eyes, and probed the turf with the toe of her little
shoe.
"I loved you then too."
He gazed at her tenderly, rapturously.
"Isn't it wonderful?" he said presently, "this love of ours? It came to
us all at once!"
She looked at him suddenly. Her short upper lip was raised.
"It _was_ love at first sight, wasn't it?"
"Yes. We were intended for each other."
They sat there, and went over that first night of their meeting and that
other night at Greenwood Lake, finding each moment some new and
remarkable feature of their love, something that proved its divine and
providential quality, something that convinced them that no one before
had ever known such a remarkable experience. They marveled at the
mystery of it.
But at last they must return to practical questions, and they resumed
the account of their family relations. Marley told Lavinia about his
father and mother, about his sister who had died, and then about his
grandparents, and his uncles and aunts. He told her even of Dolly,
behind whom she had driven to Greenwood Lake, and of his father's love
for fast horses, a love which sometimes drew upon his father the
criticism parishioners ever have ready for their pastor. And he told her
about his home, and how frequently his mother had to entertain transient
ministers, and how the church laid missionary work upon her, until he
feared the heathen would unwittingly break her down.
He was not conscious of it, but he felt it necessary to bring up all at
once the arrears of her knowledge of him and his family, of all his
affairs. Meeting as they had so strangely, so romantically, and falling
in love at first sight, according to the prearrangement of the ages,
they could excuse this otherwise strange ignorance of each other's
lives. They bemoaned all the years they had been compelled to live
without knowing each other, and their one quarrel with fate was that
they had had to wait until so late in life before meeting; and yet they
finally consoled themselves for this deprivation by discovering that
they had really always known and loved each other. They were now able to
compare strange experiences of soul and, in the new light they
possessed, to identify them as communings of their spirits across time
and space.
"I've always believed somehow in the Sweden-borgians," Lavinia said,
"but I never really understood before what they meant by affinities."
They looked at each other in a silence that became somber, and was
broken at last by Lavinia.
"I've told mama," she said.
"You have?" Marley gasped.
"Yes."
"And she--?"
"She was sweet about it. She will love you, I know."
Marley felt a sudden love for Lavinia's mother. And then his fear
returned at Lavinia's sinister,
"But--"
"But what?"
"She says we must wait."
"Oh!" Marley said with a relief. He felt their present happiness so
great that he could afford to waive any claim on the future. And yet he
was troubled; he felt that somehow a depression lay on Lavinia. He
wondered what its cause could be. Presently it came to him suddenly.
"And your father?" he asked.
"He doesn't know--yet."
"Will he--?"
"He's very--" she hesitated, not liking to seem disloyal to her father.
Finally she said "peculiar," and then further qualified it by adding
"sometimes."
The sadness that lies so near to the joy in lovers' hearts came over
them, and yet they found a kind of joy in that too.
"I'll go to him, of course," Marley said presently.
"Oh, you're so brave!"
But this tribute did not tend to reassure Marley. It rather suggested
terrors he had not thought of. Yet in the necessity of maintaining the
manly spirit he forced a laugh.
"Of course," he continued, "I'll go to him. I meant to from the first."
"But not just yet," she pleaded.
"Well," he yielded, not at all unwillingly, "it shall be as you say."
He could not dispel her sadness, nor could he conquer his own. A little
tremor ran through her, and he felt it electrically along his arm.
"What is it, sweetheart?" he pleaded. "Tell me, won't you? We must have
no secrets, you know."
"Oh, Glenn," she broke out, "I'm afraid!"
She spoke with intuitive apprehension.
"Of what?"
"Our happiness!"
He tried to laugh again.
"Do you think it will ever be?" she asked.
"I know it," he said earnestly. "I have nothing but faith--our love is
strong enough for anything!"
"You comfort me," she said simply.
Lavinia spent the night with Mayme Carter, and the house sounded until
long after midnight with the low, monotonous drone of their confidential
voices.