THE GOLDEN STAIR.
Sir William Ware put aside his book, covered a yawn, glanced up at the
fireplace clock, which was about to chime nine; then, taking up the
telephone which had been ringing with shrill iteration for a moment or
two, casually laid his ear to it.
"Yes," he said.
"Sir William Ware?" vibrated the disk.
"Himself," responded Sir William, lightly.
"Well," said the voice at the other end of the line, "this is me."
"Eh?"
"Me."
"Ah." Sir William rubbed his chin in bewilderment; then he added,
humorously, "_Miss_ Me? Right, so far?"
"You have a short memory," commented the voice on the phone.
"You have chanced," said Ware, pleasantly, "upon a melancholy fact,
madam. But may I not ask the identity of--Jove! wait a bit, though! My
creaking wheels of recollection are beginning to revolve.... I have it!
I have it! Miss Nixon?"
"Yes," said Daisy's voice, in a matter-of-fact way, "it is. I want to
see you."
Sir William, at the speaker's naive directness, covered the transmitter
with his palm and rocked in enjoyment.
"Bravo!" he said, then, uncovering the instrument; "the city hasn't
spoiled you yet, my dear--has it?"
"I'm waiting near that cafe we were at before," said Daisy, "how long
will you be?"
Something in the bare blunt words made Sir William hug himself in an
almost boyish ecstasy. "I shall come," he answered, "on the wings of
Hermes. They should bring me into your presence in from three to five
minutes, young lady."
Daisy Nixon, after hanging up the telephone in the little candy store
across from the Cumberland Cafe, had waited barely four minutes in the
shadowed street just beyond the circle of light from the Cumberland's
windows, when she saw a tall figure, cane in hand, walk briskly into
that area of illumination. She crossed the street.
Ware, dangling his cane and glancing about enquiringly, saw her when she
was half-way across the circle of light and facing the full blaze of it.
Her bright frank eyes; her clear girlish fresh cheeks, on which a
certain nervousness kept the tide of color changing its shape and
margin; her round maidenly lines of bust and hip and ankle: all wrought
curiously and strongly and with a united effect upon Ware, as they had
on that night in the Harrison dining-room when his attention, drawn to
her casually by the accident to the soup-tureen, had changed at once to
the heartiest interest.
Material absolutely fresh and new! Molten and virgin gold, not yet
resistable to the stamp of the die!
"Well," he said, stepping forward hospitably, "how are you, my dear?
Shall we go in?"
"Yes." Daisy stepped inside, deliberately unpinned and hung up her hat,
and sat down opposite to the baronet at the table he had chosen along
the side of the room. It was the same table they had occupied on their
previous visit.
"Don't order much," she said; "I'm not hungry. I came here to talk."
"I think," said Sir William, "that talking will be much more enjoyable.
I dined late, myself. Suppose we have, say, a few grapes and a little
something to drink--an iced drink of some sort."
"Anything you like," said Daisy. She laid her hands on the table, caught
her lower lip under her teeth with a shy gesture that was delicious to
Ware, and said--quite plainly, and without yielding to that impulse of
coquetry which had made him so brief with her on their previous
meeting--"Were you in earnest, that time you asked me to marry you?"
"My dear," answered Sir William, leaning forward, and extending his hand
on the table until it was almost touching hers, "I made the proposal
quite seriously and in good faith. I should not do otherwise. If you are
still in a position to accept it, I make it again now."
Daisy looked across at the real eagerness in the fine eyes; at the face,
with its skin cleanly and handsomely tinted under the few faint lines
that indicated the light passage of the years; at the hand, smooth,
white and gently masterful. Then she dropped her glance; but her voice
was firm and her manner direct and frank as she answered him.
"I'll marry you," she said.
The white hand, with a strong and gentle pressure, came over hers, until
her fingers were between the thumb and the heel of the palm. Something
great and calm and authoritative seemed communicated with that touch.
Daisy felt quelled and dutiful, but, best of all, as she lifted her eyes
to his, she knew, less by his expression than by an unexplainable
feeling within herself, that she could trust him. For in all
essentials--so she read and knew calmly and surely that she read
aright--he was, as Daisy herself would have put it, simply, "a
gentleman."
"Thank you, my dear," he said, quietly, "I may say sincerely that I
think we shall grow very fond of one another. Waiter!--here, please."
A dress suit glided forward and an obsequious ear leaned down. The
waiter knew quite thoroughly what was "doing", although by the
expression on his face during the conversation between Daisy and Ware,
one would have thought he was working out in his head a problem in
trigonometry.
"May I speak to the manager?" said Ware.
The manager, who had curly jet hair, an immense slope of white
waistcoat, and an Alice-blue chin, appeared in exactly fifteen seconds.
"Have you," said Sir William, "a room where a marriage ceremony may be
performed?"
The manager started a smile--but it got no further than a slight twitch
in the eye-corners before something in Sir William's expression,--though
the baronet changed not a feature nor abated anything of his
pleasantness--checked it.
"Yes, sir," the manager answered, voice and face returning instantly to
business formality; "my office is at your service, sir, if you wish."
"That will do nicely, thank you," said Ware, rising; then to Daisy he
said, as he offered his arm, "we will go there now--shall we?"
Daisy nodded, without speaking. Her faith in him was as absolute as it
was instinctive and involuntary.
As the manager bowed them into the office--a room of fair size--and,
partially closing the door, made polite exit, Ware handed Daisy to a
seat, and himself dropped into the swivel-chair before the manager's
desk and took up the telephone.
"Hello!" he said, as he got his number; "that you, Mrs. Heathcote? Good
evening; how's your neuralgia?... Splendid, splendid--I _am_ glad to
hear that. I say, is George about?"
Evidently George was at hand; for in a second or two the transmitter
returned to Sir William's lips.
"That you, George? I say, are you busy?... Well, then, look here--could
you slip around to the Cumberland Cafe, Osborne Street.... No, no,
nothing about 'hay'; Cumberland Cafe, you ass.... Yes, that's it--can't
miss it--big, bright, plate-glass windows, half-way between Wardlow and
Pembina.... I say, that's very jolly of you, old man.... Yes, I--we--are
waiting.... Yes: I said 'we'.... None of your bally business--that is,
I'll explain when you get here. Make haste now, won't you?... Right-O!"
Sir William hung up the phone and turned to Daisy.
"That was the Reverend George Heathcote, my dear," he said, "rector of
St. George's. Do you know St. George's?"
Daisy knew it--a big Episcopal church, with beautiful chimes, that made
Sunday morning glorious. Right in the heart of the fashionable district.
Ivied to the gables, with a mighty stretch of green ground about,
bounded by a massive iron fence. And its rector was familiar "George"
and "old man" to him who was shortly to become her husband.
Daisy Nixon's heart bounded, and the color leapt into her cheeks. Three
months ago, clad in an old smock of Jack Nixon's and with a cuff
administered by Mother Lovina smarting and tingling on her ear, she had
waded, on an evening that she remembered well,--because it was her last
on a farm--down to a miry cattle-corral to sit in the rain and milk four
cows. It was in this moment, as the recollection of that final ineffably
drab farm evening slipped into her mind, that Daisy formulated a certain
daughterly resolve with regard to her parents--a resolve she was
afterwards able to keep.
"I should explain," said Ware, a touch of color in his cheeks and his
fingers playing a soft tattoo on the desk blotter, "why I am doing
things in this apparently hasty and stealthy manner. I have been
expecting, for the last moment or so, that you would ask me to
explain--and I may say that I consider it very sweet of you, my dear,
that you have refrained from asking."
"Whatever _you_ do," said Daisy, "is all right. I know that."
"Thank you, dear child. Nevertheless, I shall explain. In the first
place, I have a very headstrong old mother at home, who considers me, in
spite of my 58 years--yes, my dear, I am 58--not yet grown up. With her,
there might--I do not positively say there would, but there might--be
difficulties. In the second place, and to be quite frank with you and
with myself, this is the main reason for doing things on the dot, as it
were--I know that young people are to a certain extent impulsive and
that a great many things may happen in a short time, and I want you just
as you are now, before anything can happen to change you in any way. I
confess freely, my dear, that I really want you very much, and that it
has been harder than you may think, for me since I last talked with you
to keep my resolve to let you quite alone so that you might think this
matter out for yourself. That, having thought it out, you have not been
afraid or ashamed to voluntarily let me know your decision, is to me
convincing proof--though short-sighted people may think this
paradoxical--of that modesty which is to me your most precious quality."
Nervousness, more than he had ever imagined his socially-inured self
could feel, was the cause of the latter half of this little speech of
Sir William's being slightly formal. This marrying of a girl "of the
people"--forty years distant from him and yet in her land of
boy-and-girl--which had been easy enough to do in theory, in his
study-chair, was a "bit of a pull" in actual execution. He had just
finished speaking, when there came a knock at the door.
"Ah!" he said, getting up, "I shouldn't wonder if that's our friend.
That you, George?"
"Yes--and I've jolly well run my legs off," exclaimed a voice, as a
bustling and rather stout figure in clerical coat burst cyclonically
into the room, dropped into a chair, and fanned itself with a
flat-crowned black hat. "I couldn't get it out of my head, some way,
that you are more in need of medical than spiritual attention at the
present moment, Will. Now, calm yourself, old man, and let me have the
whole story, and we'll examine the matter squarely and sensibly. I
assume," the Reverend George glanced at Daisy, whose color was rising,
"this is the young lady in the case. Jove, Will, I thought you had more
bally sense, especially at your time of life--I did, really."
Sir William looked at his ministerial friend open-mouthed; then, as the
clergyman's meaning burst upon him, he sat up in his chair with a jerk.
"Now, look here, George," he said, as the swivel creaked at the vigor
with which he gripped the chair-arms, "I should hate our forty-five
years of close friendship to end in fisticuffs. It will, though, I give
you fair warning, if--if--what the devil do you think I've been doing,
you ass! Must I repeat that, of our mutual choice--quite unforced by
circumstances, if I must say so baldly--Miss Daisy Nixon and I have
decided to be married."
Reverend George Heathcote, who was smooth-faced and good-looking, except
for a few myopic wrinkles around his eyes, put on his glasses and looked
keenly at Daisy, who met his glance with nose and chin well up, and
brown eyes flashing aggressively.
"Don't look at me like that," he said, after a moment, "please don't,
Miss Nixon. I'm a blundering idiot, but I mean well--I do, really. Can
you honestly, down in your heart of hearts, assert that you wish to
marry the shelf-worn relic in the office-chair there? Can you?"
"Yes," said Daisy, pugnaciously.
"Oh--very well." Rev. George Heathcote, adjusting his glasses firmly,
brought out from his pocket a black-covered book. Shuffling the leaves
till he found the desired place, he closed the book, slipping his finger
between the leaves; lowered it till it rested on his knee; and looked at
Sir William, who looked back at him a little challengingly. After a
moment of this scrutiny, the clergyman arose, went over beside his
friend, and laid a hand on Ware's shoulder.
"Dear old man," he said, "I do want you to consider this thing very
seriously. You've always been a bit of a boy, you know. I, of course,
know the fancies you've petted about marriage--I always thought they
were merely fancies, or I should have tried harder to reason you out of
them. Now, is your mind absolutely, irrevocably, and after due
deliberation made up? By the bye, have you thought of--your mother?"
Sir William Ware stood up, settling his coat about his fine spare
shoulders.
"I have thought about everything--considered everything, George," he
said. "I know you mean well, old chap," Ware, in turn, put his hand on
his old schoolmate's shoulder, "but really, I don't care to discuss the
matter any further, even with you. Besides, all this is, as you must
understand, very embarrassing, for Miss Nixon." He turned to Daisy.
"Come, dear," he said.
Daisy Nixon stood up; and, in the presence of two decorously
expressionless figures of the cafe staff--the manager and one of the
waiters--as witnesses, she was presently by brief and grave ritual
united in the bond of holy matrimony to Sir William Ware, Baronet.
As the ceremony ended, and she stood awed and a little pale, Sir William
approached and, very softly and tenderly, put his hands upon her
shoulders and stooped to kiss her. He would have kissed her forehead;
but Daisy, lifting her face with an altogether sweet gesture of
yielding, gave him her lips.
His countenance, upon which the girl's eyes had continued to look as it
approached near to hers for the caress, had not shown, in its nearness,
any grossness of line or texture, any twitching muscle betraying some
unexplainable dark trait. It was masculine, thoroughbred, honorable-eyed
and--clean. It was pleasant and thoughtful. Face and figure were full of
quiet mastery, yet had no outward suggestion nor pose nor plebeian
ostentation of "masterfulness."