CHAPTER VI

NEVA'S BEAU BRUMMEL

Many days have passed since Neva and her mother made their dramatic return from Bayville.

These days have seemed long to me, but short to Neva, for protracted meeting has been in progress--and she has had a beau swarm. The swell young clerk at the Racket Store, who says "_passé_," most Frenchily, and manicures his nails; a fat drummer who sells lard and sings bass; a "wild" young man who drives a fast horse, which the villagers all discuss above their breath, and who also does some other things which they take care to discuss--but in whispers; all these have been Neva's, besides Hiram Ellis, a young farmer whom she cares for most, but makes the most fun of behind his back.

I know that she cares for him, else she would never have counterfeited a swoon one hot night in church when the service held on an unconscionable time and she feared that Hiram would become impatient and start on his five-mile drive to his farm, without waiting to escort her home, as was his custom when she happened to be unaccompanied by any of the "town fellows."

From her point of vantage in the choir she could see that Hiram was restlessly moving his hands and feet about, although he was seated on the back bench and there was the church full of perspiring humanity between her and the gawky object of her secret love.

The minister continued to exhort and to perspire, as he drank glass after glass of water; and, as the time for mourners seemed to draw no nearer, Neva took that night's destiny into her own hands and fainted--a stiff, peculiar faint.

Fortunately she was sitting close by a small door which opens directly out into the cool night air, so that her carrying-out could be accomplished without any ungraceful display of uplifted feet and sagging petticoats. Neva's artistic temperament could never have endured that!

The performance created small notice outside the choir.

Hiram was around at that little back entrance in a twinkling, his good-natured, sunburnt face a picture of devoted anxiety. Neva was sitting on the steps shaking with a considerable degree of suppressed emotion, but not looking particularly ill, and insisting that her mother and Aunt Delia should go on back and hear the sermon to its end, if, indeed, it had an end. This they did, after seeing Hiram place Neva carefully in his buggy and start off home; but they failed to reach the choir in time to see the whisperings which had passed between two of Neva's rivals who sat there, and who were not unobservant of the peculiar nature of her fainting-spell.

"It wasn't like any faint _I_ ever saw before," some one openly declared to Mrs. Sullivan after the service was over, whereupon the whisperings between the rivals were renewed; and several days thereafter the townspeople were frankly discussing Neva Sullivan's "spell."

In less than a week after the incident which I have just related, because there is absolutely nothing of my _own_ happening that is worth relating, Neva ran over one day in a great flurry of excitement to consult my expert judgment as to what she should wear that night, as a young gentleman from the city had come down to see her and was coming out that evening to call.

"A young gentleman from the city! How exciting!" I congratulated her. "But I didn't know you knew any of the Beau Brummels up there!"

"That's the curious part of it," she explained as she sat down and panted a little, for she had run across the road and up our long walk. "I don't know him--never heard of him before. But he telephoned me from the hotel this afternoon that he had heard of me and had come down to see me on business. His name is Doctor Simmons, and he said he was very anxious to see me at once and give me some professional literature."

"Some professional _what_?" I asked, for she was talking very fast, and her enunciation at best is not like a normal school teacher's.

"Professional literature," she repeated, lingering over the words this time as if they were chocolate creams. "I told mamma maybe he is a poet. It sounded kinder like it, you know--him saying 'literature.'"

"I don't believe that poets carry around _professional_ literature," I said, trying to let her down easy, for she is a sad little visionary--and somehow I have a sympathy for visionaries. But he was a _man_, a new man, even though he might not be a poet, so Neva's solicitude concerning him was in nowise dampened.

"Well, that's what he said--'professional literature,'" she kept on flutteringly--inconstant little minx, when only a week ago she had disturbed "public worship" for the sake of driving home in Hiram Ellis' buggy!--"So mamma said I better come on over and ask you how I ought to dress to see him; and _oh_, how I ought to have the parlor fixed! You go up to the city so often, of course you know all the swell ways."

"I reckon I _do_," I said confidently, for I could see the chance that my hands had been itching for ever since I took the education of Neva in charge. "First, you must empty the room of candy-boxes, for if he is a prospective suitor, you see, all those boxes would frighten him away. He would think you are entirely too popular already."

"There ain't a girl in this town got half as many," she said rather wistfully, and I saw that the loss of the boxes meant bereavement to her. "Mine comes up to the top of the piano on _both_ sides, while Stella Hampton's don't more than fill in under the bottom of the center-table!"

"But you must remember that he is a doctor," I reminded her soothingly, "and they are awfully queer about _germs_. He might get it into his head that those empty boxes were regular nests for them--and they may be, for all we know."

"All right--if you say so," the poor child said sorrowfully, and I knew that her affection for me had been put to a fiery test.

"Then the McKinley picture! It ought to come down. It is dismal, somehow--it might cast a damper over his feelings."

"All right," she agreed again, much more willingly this time. "I know that Mr. Roosevelt _does_ look more cheerful, so, if you say so--"

"But I _don't_," I almost shrieked. "We can put a tall vase of roses in the space so that no picture will be needed."

"Oh, that will be lovely," she exclaimed gratefully; "and I'll wear flowers in my hair."

"I believe black velvet ribbon will be prettier--just a band, you understand--no combs or fancy pins. Your hair is too pretty to be disfigured with ornaments."

Her eyes showed slow, but gratified, comprehension.

"And my dress--" she hurried on.

"A rather plain white one," I suggested fearfully, for I apprehended trouble there as with the candy-boxes. "You see, he'll not like to find you with a dress which has lace all twisted and _tortured_ across the front--doctors are such humane creatures."

"I'm just dying to see what he looks like!" she exclaimed, her eyes dancing. "And I'm so much obliged to you."

"I hope you'll have a pleasant time with him," I started, when she looked at me in dismay.

"Oh, surely I'll see you again before he comes! Can't you come over a little later on, or maybe after I'm dressed--to see if I am fixed all right, and if the parlor looks swell?" Her big dark eyes held a flattering appeal.

"Why, of course! I'll be glad to get mother to run over there with me--just before time for him to come," and she gave my arm a gratified little squeeze and went away filled with charming anticipations.

As the mystic hour approached, mother and I threw crocheted things over our heads and started across the wide road which lay between the houses.

Drawing near the cottage we noticed a dim light bobbing about queerly just off the front porch, and mother clutched my arm in agony.

"Surely--_surely_ they're not hanging Japanese lanterns out in honor of his coming!"

"Oh, I hope not," I responded, feeling not at all certain as to the course which Neva's enthusiasm might take. But as we clicked the gate and passed on into the yard we discerned the generous outlines of Mr. Tim Sullivan rising from a rickety, three-legged chair, which he had placed directly in front of Mrs. Sullivan's nasturtium frame. This frame was but a poor skeleton affair, having been built in the yard early in the summer for the flowers to clamber up on, but the fall of the leaf was approaching, and the flowers had refused to clamber.

In one hand Mr. Sullivan held a small, smoky lamp, the flame of which was entirely a one-sided affair; and in the other he brandished a paint brush. We knew it was a paint brush because it out-smelt the lamp.

"Come in! Come right in," he invited us hospitably, and as he gallantly approached to light us on our way up the walk, we caught a whiff of his breath; and the paint brush and the lamp faded into insignificance in the smelling line.

"Why, what are you doing, Mr. Sullivan?" mother inquired as she strained her eyes toward the nasturtium frame and saw big splotches of green paint smeared about at intervals upon its wooden gauntness.

"I'm painting," he explained politely, as he held the lamp high above his head that it might cast its doubtful rays over the dark walk. "Just painting."

"But why paint to-night?" she persisted, doubtless wondering if this was being done in honor of the "city beau."

"Why, there ain't no time like the present, as I've always been told, you know, Mrs. Fielding," he further elucidated, his voice growing louder and louder as the distance between us increased, and as we gained the freshly-scoured front steps he moved back toward his field of operation and resumed his work. The wild sweeps of his brush gave, in the dim light of the unsteady lamp, the impression of some weird acrobatic performance.

We went into the house and found the feminine portion of the family in a state of conflicting emotions. Mrs. Sullivan was perfectly limp with rage over the misfortune of having Tim even mildly drunk and disorderly on the night when Neva's destiny might be hanging in the balance. Neva herself was perturbed, but radiant, and was praying cheerfully that something might happen to check her father's artistic endeavors before the arrival of her beau. That Doctor Simmons was a suitor for her hand, impressed by her beauty in some mysterious and romantic manner, it had not entered into Neva's silly little head to doubt; and since one of her friends had seen the young gentleman at the hotel in the afternoon and had telephoned her that he was the swellest-est dressed man to enter that town since Heck was a pup, her expectations were soaring at dizzy heights.

I found that fortunately she had spent the force of her own swell longings upon the attire of her mother this time, inasmuch as I had so urgently recommended simplicity for herself. The glittering combs and bandeau were adorning Mrs. Sullivan's head, rising resplendent from divers unaccustomed puffs and braids and curls. Mrs. Sullivan's hair ordinarily wore a look of conventual severity, as did her hat, but there was never any congeniality between the two. In fact they were never on speaking terms.

"I done it to please Nevar," she confessed to me, smiling wanly at her reflection in the mirror, "but if I had a-had my way I wouldn't a-done it. I don't like it. If I had a tubful o' wet clo'es on my head it couldn't feel no heavier!"

We were so cordially invited to remain and view the stranger from a speechless distance that we finally consented to do so, occupying straight chairs that would not creak and betray our presence as we sat at the front window of the room opposite the parlor and breathlessly awaited his arrival.

Presently he came and we were repaid for waiting. When I had mentioned him in the afternoon as being a possible Beau Brummel I little realized what an inadequate term I had employed. Beau Brummel with all his diamond-studded snuff-boxes was never rigged up to compare with Doctor Simmons. In stature he was tall, in demeanor grave, in color red-headed. His trousers were very light and his shirt was very pink, while a large diamond stud gleamed from his glossy bosom. Two other great stones were set in rings. His shoes were tan, but his hosiery was not; and his broad straw hat had birds embroidered in the band.

Neva received him nervously, her voice high-pitched and unnatural. Mrs. Sullivan bade us sit still while she tiptoed around through the back hall and up close to the parlor door, where she could overhear the announcement of his mission. Her maternal anxiety justified this.

We sat an interminable time, it seemed, listening to Miss Delia Badger's low-toned conversation, which she felt must for politeness' sake be kept up; but there was no light in the room, and we were thus saved the pain of looking at her parti-colored hair, so it might have been worse.

After a long time Mrs. Sullivan came in. We could not see her face, but her voice had the most doleful droop I had ever detected in its depths, and she collapsed into the nearest chair.

"He's a fit doctor," she announced briefly, after a moment's strained silence.

"A _what_?"

"A fit doctor. He cures fits up at his hospital in the city. Somebody from here wrote him that Nevar had done had one. He'll give a gold-trimmed fountain pen for ever' name of a fitified person you'll send him."

"How unkind of the one who wrote him about Neva!" mother exclaimed in an indignant whisper, but I was unable to speak.

"'Twas some of them mean girls in the choir," Mrs. Sullivan pronounced lifelessly. "They're always so jealous of Nevar having the most beaus and the prettiest dresses."

"Well, it's a shame!" mother repeated wrathfully.

"What I'm worrying about _now_ is how to git 'im off without Tim killing 'im," Neva's mother continued, still in an apathetic whisper. "If he could catch the nine o'clock car out o' town to-night he would be safe, but it's mighty near that time now. If he was to leave this early and Tim out there painting he would stop 'im and ask 'im his business. Then there would be a killing on the spot."

It was not clear whether Tim would kill Doctor Simmons for curing fits or Doctor Simmons would kill Tim for painting the nasturtium frame. But mother was all anxiety to avert either tragedy.

"Well, we'll run right on home this minute," she said, rising hurriedly, and her inspiration was so sudden and so happy that she forgot to whisper, "and ask Mr. Sullivan to go with us. Then Mr. Fielding shall make him a mint julep--while you explain to the fit doctor that he would better make haste back to his hospital."

There were grateful whisperings from Mrs. Sullivan and her sister.

"And you'll have to use a lantern to wave the car down," mother turned back a moment to caution them, "for it's so dark they'll never see you if you don't."

But Mrs. Sullivan did not wait to tamper with the chimney of a lantern. The smoky little lamp had been placed, still lighted, upon the edge of the porch when mother had mentioned mint julep to Mr. Sullivan. His wife caught it up and bore it along bravely after we had crossed the road and entered the thick shade of our walk. She was closely followed by a very homesick physician, whose one desire was to leave this quiet little town, and an outraged but still admiring Neva.

As we gained our front porch mother whispered a quick word into father's ear and he hospitably bade Mr. Sullivan follow him into the dining-room, while she and I quickly turned and fled back down the walk to the front gate.

Yes, they had him safely down at the car track, and in a very brief while the car came along. Mrs. Sullivan made spasmodic little signals with the lamp, which brought the car to a standstill, and also brought forth a thousand rainbow gleams from the jewels in her hair. Doctor Simmons stepped upon that running-board with all the alacrity of a newsboy with a bundle of "extras." He deposited his package of professional literature upon the seat in front of him, then turned and gravely lifted his hat to the ladies.

"Thank goodness!" mother said with a sigh of genuine relief as we watched the car pull out. Then she turned to me and for the first time that evening I could discern a smile in her voice.

"Ann," she said, trying to speak seriously, "when I see other women's daughters I know that I have much to be thankful for. You _are_ a star-gazer and a poor cook, but, oh dear--you don't have beaus from the city."

"Touch wood before you boast," but she stopped and caught me by the arm.

"What do you mean, honey?" she questioned. "Has Alfred--"

"No, indeed. I don't mean anything except that I am at the age of Eve and--very hopeful."

"Well, you _know_ what we all think of Alfred," she said, then stopped still at the lower step and broke off a dead twig from a rosebush near by. A shaft of light was shining from the hall and I could see that her face was very earnest. It was the first time in my life she had ever spoken to me of lovers.

"And I think everything of Alfred that you do--and more," I assured her, "but I am not in love with him. I might be--if--under other circumstances----I might be, but not now!"

She deliberately lingered at the steps, and we heard pleasant sounds coming from the dining-room.

"Eunice and I fancied that Mr. Chalmers looked at you--er, rather attentively the other day," she ventured timidly, as if to try to draw me out, yet dreading a little the answer I might make.

"That might have been imagination," I parried.

"But--we also imagined that _you_ looked at him."

"Well," I answered with a laugh which I hoped would sound light, "haven't you just said that I am a _star_-gazer?"

With this admission I ran away up-stairs.

Yes, I had looked at him. And since then it seemed that there had been nothing for my eyes to rest upon that did not bear the impress of his face.

He had stayed through that long, perfect day, and had left when the cool, white night was at the zenith of its beauty. The cool, white night which, alas, had to be followed by a morning after! I had never, until then, felt this way about the morning, for it has always been my favorite time of day, my only thought upon arising being an eager craving for the sunshine. But then, I had never known until that time just what an exquisite thing night could be.

There is a little sepia copy of the Sistine Madonna hanging across the room from my bed where I can see it the first thing when I awake every morning; and, on bright days there is a golden bar of sunlight which comes traveling in and across the ceiling until it falls upon the picture. I lie still and watch it until it has reached the Virgin's heart, then I get up and open all the windows to the light. It serves me in place of a clock, and much better, for it is true as to time, and it has no unpleasant way of striking a sudden and disenchanting note which breaks in upon my dreams.

My warning little ray of sunshine was casting a spot of intense light directly upon the Mother's heart as I turned and glanced toward it for the first time on the morning after Richard Chalmers' visit, but I was so tired that I lay still until it had traversed the entire length of the wall and settled for a moment upon the floor. I was not enjoying that stretching, smiling, lazy luxuriance which I sometimes indulge in after a too brief sleep. That is a pleasant sort of lingering upon the threshold of the day, but this other feeling of mine was the deadening reaction which comes after a period of over-tension.

"You are a nervous freak," I said disgustedly as I finally jumped out of bed after a soft suggestion from Dilsey that I should find my bath prepared if I could only be induced to get up and go seek it. I crossed the convent-like little apartment which it has pleased my fancy to fix up as a sleeping-chamber and made for a mirror in the adjoining room, for there is "some little luxury there"--flowered curtains and Battenburg table-covers and punched score-cards. I wished to see if there were outward and visible signs of the change which was causing such inward tumult.

"You are a freak," I repeated as I looked in the mirror and noticed that my eyes appeared heavy and tired; and my tongue felt as thick as a Sunday morning newspaper. "It's a pity you can't keep your emotions stopped up in a vial and portion them out with a medicine-dropper--instead of _soaking_ yourself in them!"

Dilsey had left the water running, as she has learned to do on mornings when I am unusually lazy, for no woman who has a domestic heart in her bosom can lie abed and run the risk of the tub overflowing and making a mess of the bath-room floor. I slipped my feet into some flip-flop Turkish slippers--if Turkish women have to wear such footgear as this I don't blame them for sitting still most of the time; but then they have the comfort of trousers, poor dears!--and went to turn off the water.

"Of course he thinks you are an absurd young person who openly tried to make eyes at him," I mused, as I gave a savage twist that stopped that provoking sound of water wasting.

When I had imagined, upon first seeing him, that Richard Chalmers had warring elements in his character I was only saying about him the things I knew to be true of myself. "He does bad things sometimes, but he never enjoys doing them, because he has a conscience that will not let him." This is my own disposition, and I fancied that it might be his, because his eyes bear a dissatisfied look, as if he did not come up to his own ideal of himself.

Alfred Morgan is entirely different. I do not believe that he ever had a morbid regret in his life. In his work he is fanatically conscientious, doing the best he can and knowing that his best is as good as any other man's, for he does not attempt anything unless he is sure of his qualifications. This does not imply any lack of grief and worry when a patient "goes to the bad." He _does_ grieve, sitting with his head between his hands, while his black hair is ruffled up like a shoe-brush straight across his forehead. Sometimes he softly repeats, "Well, I'll swear! Well, I'll _swear_!"--in a baffled, helpless sort of way, but you know that he has not been helpless where any other man would have been potent. And he never has the soul-eating remorse which follows the knowledge that one might have done better.

As to Alfred's _life_, I imagine that it is kept in the same condition of fitness that his body is--clean and wholesome, yet full-blooded and entirely normal. If he should meet red-robed Folly on a pleasant highway he would undoubtedly linger a while, taking off his hat politely and addressing her as Human Nature. He would shake hands good-temperedly as he left her and promise to come again some time when his business engagements would permit. But he would never give the matter another thought probably.

Richard Chalmers' cold face proclaims an asceticism that would call the prettily dressed little Folly "Sin," yet I fancy that he would linger--much longer than Alfred, no doubt--and leave the gay fairy with a frown on his face, which would remain until the next morning, when he would throw his bootjack at his valet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I had just turned the water off! It's a good thing I did, too, before this digression, or the house would have been flooded.

Again, what I have said of Richard Chalmers is also true of myself. I had lingered on the pleasant highways with a delightful Folly all day yesterday, which seemed to me in the cold light of day this morning a sort of Sin. A sin against good sense, I concluded, or against good taste, _especially_ if he noticed.

"A horrid _young_ idiot! Of course that's what he considered you were." I kept torturing myself with these thoughts until others more agonizing still came to torment me. Suppose he had not thought of me at all!

The dash of the cold water restored me to something much more nearly like my normal self, and by the time I had combed the tangles out of my hair and spoken to a pair of redbirds which live in a tree right by my window I was feeling poetry again. A shower of scattered cigar ashes, which Dilsey had not yet swept off the front porch, with two or three red-and-gold bands which I had noticed on his cigars, set me singing.

"You're not an idiot at all, Ann," I commented, as I looked about to make sure that no one was near, then grabbed up one of these red-and-gold bands. "No _wonder_ you have lost your head over him, for he is perfectly beautiful, and you always did get intoxicated on beautiful things.--And if _he_ wasn't impressed too, his eyes were lying! No, they could not lie, because they are too lovely!"

I knew that the family would all be talking about him at the breakfast-table, which I found to be true, and they were so absorbed in their talk that they all, except mother, gave me a perfunctory greeting as I came in. Strange to say, they were not talking about his good looks.

"Well, he's had occasion to study the question in all its phases," Rufe kept on with the subject at hand as I slid into my chair and gave myself up to the charms of a breakfast food. "He's studied it in nearly every land. He spent a part of last year in--"

"I think one of the delights of wide travel is to be able to pronounce names of obscure places in such a way that stay-at-homes won't know what you're talking about," Cousin Eunice said, looking toward mother and me. She had not intended interrupting the masculine conversation, but Rufe stopped and listened to what she had to say, which proves that he is a model husband, I think--"Did you notice how he called Peru 'Payrhu' last night? Of course he's been there."

"I noticed the new-fangled way he had with several of his words," father said, a bit drily. "He differentiated between 'egoist' and 'egotist.' He seems to have been _there_, too."

"Surely," Rufe coincided so willingly that I was amazed. "But the quality of egotism possessed by this fellow is not the cheap, objectionable kind. He simply has unlimited faith in himself, and an unlimited ability of making other people do what he wants them to do."

"A tyrant, then?" father inquired with a half-smile at Rufe's enthusiasm.

"Not at all--a governor."

"Well, who is he and where did he come from?" mother asked, coming into the discussion in an abstracted sort of fashion. "I never heard of him until the last few months."

Then followed a long discourse concerning Richard Chalmers' past life, and his qualifications for the office which he might be called upon to fill--all of which fell like diamonds and rubies from their lips, for it was all creditable to him.

The look of strength, which had told its own story the first time I had ever seen him, and which had since then held me in the spell of a fascinated memory--it was all true, then! As I listened to the story of how the man had, by sheer strength and personality, raised himself from being simply a well-thought-of young lawyer, with a good deal of inherited wealth, to his present position in the minds of the state's best politicians, I felt that he must possess that steel-clad, relentless, yet necessary attribute--power.

Now, I revere power, whether in man, or beast, or automobile.

"Next to marrying it, the worst way on earth for a man to get money is to inherit it," father said, apropos of the story we had just heard. "It's bad for the man, and it's bad for the money."

We all laughed a little and agreed with father, then Rufe became aware of my presence for the first time.

"And Mistress Ann has not had a word to say upon this interesting subject," he said chaffingly, looking around as if he had not seen me before, which in truth he had not, for he had been so absorbed when I came in that he merely nodded a "good morning" without detaching his mind from his discussion. "He was so visibly impressed, too."

"Shut up, Rufe--teasing her," Cousin Eunice commanded after she had looked at my face.

"I swear I wasn't teasing," he insisted more soberly. "I don't believe Chalmers looks at a woman once a year--he hasn't time for them, and besides, he's a cold-blooded devil--but he looked at Ann many times throughout the course of the day, to say naught of 'toting' home a mud-turtle for her dear sake. Then when he was leaving last night he asked me again whether the Fieldings were related to me or to my wife."

"Did you tell him the truth or did you take the credit to yourself?" I inquired sarcastically.

"No, I confessed that the beauteous blossom springs from the same tree that produced that perfect flower, Mrs. Clayborne. But I told him that the fact of my having 'raised' you invested you with a 'dearness not your due'--from blood ties alone."

"Well, she will have the honor of being looked at by him a great many times this fall, when she goes home with us," Cousin Eunice said, then turning to mother she added: "And she will need a _bushel_ of pretty clothes, Aunt Mary."

"I want one black dress, with a spangled yoke," I hastily put in, but was interrupted by little shrieks of disapproval from the two. "I--thought I'd have to look kind of _old_," I wound up, as they regarded me with amused surprise.

After breakfast was over Cousin Eunice gathered up her tablet and pencil and nodded for me to come with her.

"I want to look at your face as I write," she explained with a sympathetic smile, "for I am hopelessly stupid and commonplace. I can't even think of a surname for my hero that isn't already the name of an automobile."