There was a silence, for if the dazzled young man could have spoken at
all, He could have found nothing to say; and, perhaps, the lady would
not trust her own voice just then. His eyes had fallen again; he was
too dazed, and, in truth, too panic-stricken, now, to look at her,
though if he had been quite sure that she was part of a wonderful dream
he might have dared. She was seated beside him, and had handed him her
parasol in a little way which seemed to imply that of course he had
reached for it, so that it was to be seen how used she was to have all
tiny things done for her, though this was not then of his tremulous
observing. He did perceive, however, that he was to furl the dainty
thing; he pressed the catch, and let down the top timidly, as if
fearing to break or tear it; and, as it closed, held near his face, he
caught a very faint, sweet, spicy emanation from it like wild roses and
cinnamon.
He did not know her; but his timidity and a strange little choke in his
throat, the sudden fright which had seized upon him, were not caused by
embarrassment. He had no thought that she was one he had known but
could not, for the moment, recall; there was nothing of the awkwardness
of that; no, he was overpowered by the miracle of this meeting. And
yet, white with marvelling, he felt it to be so much more touchingly a
great happiness than he had ever known that at first it was
inexpressibly sad.
At last he heard her voice again, shaking a little, as she said:
"I am glad you remembered."
"Remembered what?" he faltered.
"Then you don't?" she cried. "And yet you came."
"Came here, do you mean?"
"Yes--now, at noon."
"Ah!" he half whispered, unable to speak aloud. "Was it you who
said--who said, 'Remember! Across--across--"'
"'Across Main Street bridge at noon!'" she finished for him, gently.
"Yes."
He took a deep breath in the wonder of it. "Where was it you said
that?" he asked, slowly. "Was it last night?"
"Don't you even know that you came to meet me?"
"_I_--came to--to meet--you!"
She gave a little pitying cry, very near a sob, seeing his utter
bewilderment.
"It was like the strangest dream in the world," she said. "You were at
the station when I came, last night. You don't remember at all?"
His eyes downcast, his face burning hotly, he could only shake his head.
"Yes," she continued. "I thought no one would be there, for I had not
written to say what train I should take, but when I stepped down from
the platform, you were standing there; though you didn't see me at
first, not until I had called your name and ran to you. You said,
'I've come to meet you,' but you said it queerly, I thought. And then
you called a carriage for me; but you seemed so strange you couldn't
tell how you knew that I was coming, and--and then I--I understood you
weren't yourself. You were very quiet, but I knew, I knew! So I made
you get into the carriage--and--and--"
She faltered to a stop, and with that, shame itself brought him
courage; he turned and faced her. She had lifted her handkerchief to
her eyes, but at his movement she dropped it, and it was not so much
the delicate loveliness of her face that he saw then as the tears upon
her cheeks.
"Ah, poor boy!" she cried. "I knew! I knew!"
"You--you took me home?"
"You told me where you lived," she answered. "Yes, I took you home."
"I don't understand," he stammered, huskily. "I don't understand!"
She leaned toward him slightly, looking at him with great intentness.
"You didn't know me last night," she said. "Do you know me now?"
For answer he could only stare at her, dumfounded. He lifted an
unsteady hand toward her appealingly. But the manner of the lady, as
she saw the truth, underwent an April change. She drew back lightly; he
was favored with the most delicious, low laugh he had ever heard, and,
by some magic whisk which she accomplished, there was no sign of tears
about her.
"Ah! I'm glad you're the same, Joe!" she said. "You never would or
could pretend very well. I'm glad you're the same, and I'm glad I've
changed, though that isn't why you have forgotten me. You've forgotten
me because you never thought of me. Perhaps I should not have known
you if you had changed a great deal--as I have!"
He started, leaning back from her.
"Ah!" she laughed. "That's it! That funny little twist of the head
you always had, like a--like a--well, you know I must have told you a
thousand times that it was like a nice friendly puppy; so why shouldn't
I say so now? And your eyebrows! When you look like that, nobody
could ever forget you, Joe!"
He rose from the log, and the mongrel leaped upon him uproariously,
thinking they were to go home, belike to food.
The lady laughed again. "Don't let him spoil my parasol. And I must
warn you now: Never, never TREAD ON MY SKIRT! I'm very irritable
about such things!"
He had taken three or four uncertain backward steps from her. She sat
before him, radiant with laughter, the loveliest creature he had ever
seen; but between him and this charming vision there swept, through the
warm, scented June air, a veil of snow like a driven fog, and, half
obscured in the heart of it, a young girl stood, knee-deep in a drift
piled against an old picket gate, her black water-proof and shabby
skirt flapping in the blizzard like torn sails, one of her hands
out-stretched toward him, her startled eyes fixed on his.
"And, oh, how like you," said the lady; "how like you and nobody else
in the world, Joe, to have a yellow dog!"
"ARIEL TABOR!"
His lips formed the words without sound.
"Isn't it about time?" she said. "Are strange ladies in the HABIT of
descending from trains to take you home?"
Once, upon a white morning long ago, the sensational progress of a
certain youth up Main Street had stirred Canaan. But that day was as
nothing to this. Mr. Bantry had left temporary paralysis in his wake;
but in the case of the two young people who passed slowly along the
street to-day it was petrifaction, which seemingly threatened in
several instances (most notably that of Mr. Arp) to become permanent.
The lower portion of the street, lined with three and four story
buildings of brick and stone, rather grim and hot facades under the
mid-day sun, afforded little shade to the church-comers, who were
working homeward in processional little groups and clumps, none walking
fast, though none with the appearance of great leisure, since neither
rate of progress would have been esteemed befitting the day. The
growth of Canaan, steady, though never startling, had left almost all
of the churches down-town, and Main Street the principal avenue of
communication between them and the "residence section." So, to-day,
the intermittent procession stretched along the new cement side-walks
from a little below the Square to Upper Main Street, where maples lined
the thoroughfare and the mansions of the affluent stood among pleasant
lawns and shrubberies. It was late; for this had been a communion
Sunday, and those far in advance, who had already reached the pretty
and shady part of the street, were members of the churches where
services had been shortest; though few in the long parade looked as if
they had been attending anything very short, and many heads of families
were crisp in their replies to the theological inquiries of their
offspring. The men imparted largely a gloom to the itinerant
concourse, most of them wearing hot, long black coats and having wilted
their collars; the ladies relieving this gloom somewhat by the lighter
tints of their garments; the spick-and-span little girls relieving it
greatly by their white dresses and their faces, the latter bright with
the hope of Sunday ice-cream; while the boys, experiencing some solace
in that they were finally out where a person could at least scratch
himself if he had to, yet oppressed by the decorous necessities of the
day, marched along, furtively planning, behind imperturbably secretive
countenances, various means for the later dispersal of an odious
monotony.
Usually the conversation of this long string of the homeward-bound was
not too frivolous or worldly; nay, it properly inclined to discussion
of the sermon; that is, praise of the sermon, with here and there a
mild "I-didn't-like-his-saying" or so; and its lighter aspects were apt
to concern the next "Social," or various pleasurable schemes for the
raising of funds to help the heathen, the quite worthy poor, or the
church.
This was the serious and seemly parade, the propriety of whose behavior
was to-day almost disintegrated when the lady of the bridge walked up
the street in the shadow of a lacy, lavender parasol carried by Joseph
Louden. The congregation of the church across the Square, that to
which Joe's step-aunt had been late, was just debouching, almost in
mass, upon Main Street, when these two went by. It is not quite the
truth to say that all except the children came to a dead halt, but it
is not very far from it. The air was thick with subdued exclamations
and whisperings.
Here is no mystery. Joe was probably the only person of respectable
derivation in Canaan who had not known for weeks that Ariel Tabor was
on her way home. And the news that she had arrived the night before
had been widely disseminated on the way to church, entering church, IN
church (even so!), and coming out of church. An account of her house
in the Avenue Henri Martin, and of her portrait in the Salon--a
mysterious business to many, and not lacking in grandeur for that!--had
occupied two columns in the Tocsin, on a day, some months before, when
Joe had found himself inimically head-lined on the first page, and had
dropped the paper without reading further. Ariel's name had been in
the mouth of Canaan for a long time; unfortunately for Joe, however,
not in the mouth of that Canaan which held converse with him.
Joe had not known her. The women recognized her, infallibly, at first
glance; even those who had quite forgotten her. And the women told
their men. Hence the un-Sunday-like demeanor of the procession, for
few towns hold it more unseemly to stand and stare at passers-by,
especially on the Sabbath.--BUT Ariel Tabor returned--and walking
with--WITH JOE LOUDEN! ...
A low but increasing murmur followed the two as they proceeded. It ran
up the street ahead of them; people turned to look back and paused, so
that they had to walk round one or two groups. They had, also, to walk
round Norbert Flitcroft, which was very like walking round a group. He
was one of the few (he was waddling home alone) who did not identify
Miss Tabor, and her effect upon him was extraordinary. His mouth
opened and he gazed stodgily, his widening eyes like sun-dogs coming
out of a fog. He did not recognize her escort; did not see him at all
until they had passed, after which Mr. Flitcroft experienced a few
moments of trance; came out of it stricken through and through; felt
nervously of his tie; resolutely fell in behind the heeling mongrel and
followed, at a distance of some forty paces, determined to learn what
household this heavenly visitor honored, and thrilling with the
intention to please that same household with his own presence as soon
and as often as possible.
Ariel flushed a little when she perceived the extent of their
conspicuousness; but it was not the blush that Joe remembered had
reddened the tanned skin of old; for her brownness had gone long ago,
though it had not left her merely pink and white. This was a delicate
rosiness rising from her cheeks to her temples as the earliest dawn
rises. If there had been many words left in Joe, he would have called
it a divine blush; it fascinated him, and if anything could have
deepened the glamour about her, it would have been this blush. He did
not understand it, but when he saw it he stumbled.
Those who gaped and stared were for him only blurs in the background;
truly, he saw "men as trees walking"; and when it became necessary to
step out to the curb in passing some clump of people, it was to him as
if Ariel and he, enchantedly alone, were working their way through
underbrush in the woods.
He kept trying to realize that this lady of wonder was Ariel Tabor, but
he could not; he could not connect the shabby Ariel, whom he had
treated as one boy treats another, with this young woman of the world.
He had always been embarrassed, himself, and ashamed of her, when
anything she did made him remember that, after all, she was a girl; as,
on the day he ran away, when she kissed a lock of his hair escaping
from the bandage. With that recollection, even his ears grew red: it
did not seem probable that it would ever happen again! The next
instant he heard himself calling her "Miss Tabor."
At this she seemed amused. "You ought to have called me that, years
ago," she said, "for all you knew me!"
"I did know her--YOU, I mean!" he answered. "I used to know nearly
everything you were going to say before you said it. It seems strange
now--"
"Yes," she interrupted. "It does seem strange now!"
"Somehow," he went on, "I doubt if now I'd know."
"Somehow," she echoed, with fine gravity, "I doubt it, too."
Although he had so dim a perception of the staring and whispering which
greeted and followed them, Ariel, of course, was thoroughly aware of
it, though the only sign she gave was the slight blush, which very soon
disappeared. That people turned to look at her may have been not
altogether a novelty: a girl who had learned to appear unconscious of
the Continental stare, the following gaze of the boulevards, the frank
glasses of the Costanza in Rome, was not ill equipped to face Main
Street, Canaan, even as it was to-day.
Under the sycamores, before they started, they had not talked a great
deal; there had been long silences: almost all her questions concerning
the period of his runaway absence; she appeared to know and to
understand everything which had happened since his return to the town.
He had not, in his turn, reached the point where he would begin to
question her; he was too breathless in his consciousness of the
marvellous present hour. She had told him of the death of Roger Tabor,
the year before. "Poor man," she said, gently, "he lived to see 'how
the other fellows did it' at last, and everybody liked him. He was
very happy over there."
After a little while she had said that it was growing close upon
lunch-time; she must be going back.
"Then--then--good-bye," he replied, ruefully.
"Why?"
"I'm afraid you don't understand. It wouldn't do for you to be seen
with me. Perhaps, though, you do understand. Wasn't that why you
asked me to meet you out here beyond the bridge?"
In answer she looked at him full and straight for three seconds, then
threw back her head and closed her eyes tight with laughter. Without a
word she took the parasol from him, opened it herself, placed the
smooth white coral handle of it in his hand, and lightly took his arm.
There was no further demur on the part of the young man. He did not
know where she was going; he did not ask.
Soon after Norbert turned to follow them, they came to the shady part
of the street, where the town in summer was like a grove. Detachments
from the procession had already, here and there, turned in at the
various gates. Nobody, however, appeared to have gone in-doors, except
for fans, armed with which immediately to return to rockers upon the
shaded verandas. As Miss Tabor and Joe went by, the rocking-chairs
stopped; the fans poised, motionless; and perspiring old gentlemen,
wiping their necks, paused in arrested attitudes.
Once Ariel smiled politely, not at Mr. Louden, and inclined her head
twice, with the result that the latter, after thinking for a time of
how gracefully she did it and how pretty the top of her hat was, became
gradually conscious of a meaning in her action: that she had bowed to
some one across the street. He lifted his hat, about four minutes
late, and discovered Mamie Pike and Eugene, upon the opposite pavement,
walking home from church together. Joe changed color.
There, just over the way, was she who had been, in his first youth, the
fairy child, the little princess playing in the palace yard, and always
afterward his lady of dreams, his fair unreachable moon! And Joe,
seeing her to-day, changed color; that was all! He had passed Mamie in
the street only a week before, and she had seemed all that she had
always seemed; to-day an incomprehensible and subtle change had
befallen her--a change so mystifying to him that for a moment he almost
doubted that she was Mamie Pike. It came to him with a breath-taking
shock that her face lacked a certain vivacity of meaning; that its
sweetness was perhaps too placid; that there would have been a deeper
goodness in it had there been any hint of daring. Astonishing questions
assailed him, startled him: could it be true that, after all, there
might be some day too much of her? Was her amber hair a little
too--FLUFFY? Was something the matter with her dress? Everything she
wore had always seemed so beautiful. Where had the exquisiteness of it
gone? For there was surely no exquisiteness about it now! It was
incredible that any one could so greatly alter in the few days elapsed
since he had seen her.
Strange matters! Mamie had never looked prettier.
At the sound of Ariel's voice he emerged from the profundities of his
psychic enigma with a leap.
"She is lovelier than ever, isn't she?"
"Yes, indeed," he answered, blankly.
"Would you still risk--" she began, smiling, but, apparently thinking
better of it, changed her question: "What is the name of your dog, Mr.
Louden? You haven't told me."
"Oh, he's just a yellow dog," he evaded, unskilfully.
"YOUNG MAN!" she said, sharply.
"Well," he admitted, reluctantly, "I call him Speck for short."
"And what for long? I want to know his real name."
"It's mighty inappropriate, because we're fond of each other," said
Joe, "but when I picked him up he was so yellow, and so thin, and so
creeping, and so scared that I christened him 'Respectability.'"
She broke into light laughter, stopped short in the midst of it, and
became grave. "Ah, you've grown bitter," she said, gently.
"No, no," he protested. "I told you I liked him."
She did not answer.
They were now opposite the Pike Mansion, and to his surprise she
turned, indicating the way by a touch upon his sleeve, and crossed the
street toward the gate, which Mamie and Eugene had entered. Mamie,
after exchanging a word with Eugene upon the steps, was already
hurrying into the house.
Ariel paused at the gate, as if waiting for Joe to open it.
He cocked his head, his higher eyebrow rose, and the distorted smile
appeared. "I don't believe we'd better stop here," he said. "The last
time I tried it I was expunged from the face of the universe."
"Don't you know?" she cried. "I'm staying here. Judge Pike has charge
of all my property; he was the administrator, or something." Then
seeing him chopfallen and aghast, she went on: "Of course you don't
know! You don't know anything about me. You haven't even asked!"
"You're going to live HERE?" he gasped.
"Will you come to see me?" she laughed. "Will you come this afternoon?"
He grew white. "You know I can't," he said.
"You came here once. You risked a good deal then, just to see Mamie
dance by a window. Don't you dare a little for an old friend?"
"All right," he gulped. "I'll try."
Mr. Bantry had come down to the gate and was holding it open, his eyes
fixed upon Ariel, within them a rising glow. An impression came to Joe
afterward that his step-brother had looked very handsome.
"Possibly you remember me, Miss Tabor?" said Eugene, in a deep and
impressive voice, lifting his hat. "We were neighbors, I believe, in
the old days."
She gave him her hand in a fashion somewhat mannerly, favoring him with
a bright, negligent smile. "Oh, quite," she answered, turning again to
Joe as she entered the gate. "Then I shall expect you?"
"I'll try," said Joe. "I'll try."
He stumbled away; Respectability and he, together,
interfering alarmingly with the comfort of
Mr. Flitcroft, who had stopped in the middle of the pavement to stare
glassily at Ariel. Eugene accompanied the latter into the house, and
Joe, looking back, understood: Mamie had sent his step-brother to
bring Ariel in--and to keep him from following.
"This afternoon!" The thought took away his breath, and he became
paler.
The Pike brougham rolled by him, and Sam Warden, from the box, favored
his old friend upon the pavement with a liberal display of the whites
of his eyes. The Judge, evidently, had been detained after
services--without doubt a meeting of the church officials. Mrs. Pike,
blinking and frightened, sat at her husband's side, agreeing feebly
with the bull-bass which rumbled out of the open window of the
brougham: "I want orthodox preaching in MY church, and, by God, madam,
I'll have it! That fellow has got to go!" Joe took off his hat and
wiped his brow.