Part 18

He departed languidly, his farewell coming back from the stairway: “So long, Lu!”

But the blush that had extended to include Mr. Allen’s ears, at the sound of so much praise of himself, did not vanish with the caller; it lingered and for a time grew even deeper. When it was gone, and its victim restored to his accustomed moderate pink, he pushed aside his work and went to a locked recess beneath his book-shelves. Therefrom he took the blue parasol, and a small volume in everything dissimilar to the heavy, calf-bound legal works that concealed all the walls of the room; and, returning to his swivel-chair, placed the parasol gently upon the desk. Then, allowing his left hand to remain lightly upon the parasol, he held the little book in his right and read musingly.

He read, thus, for a long time—in fact, until the setting in of twilight; and, whatever the slight shiftings of his position, he always kept one hand in light contact with the parasol. Some portions of the book he read over and over, though all of it was long since familiar to him; and there was one part of it in which his interest seemed quite unappeasable. Again and again he turned back to the same page; but at last, as the room had grown darker, and his eye-glasses tired him, he let the book rest in his lap, took off the glasses and used them to beat time to the rhythm of the cadences, as he murmured, half-aloud:

“The lamplight seems to glimmer with a flicker of surprise, As I turn it low to rest me of the dazzle in my eyes. And light my pipe in silence, save a sigh that seems to yoke Its fate with my tobacco and to vanish with the smoke. ’Tis a fragrant retrospection—for the loving thoughts that start Into being are like perfume from the blossoms of the heart: And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine—— When my truant fancy wanders with that old sweet-heart of mine.”

He fell silent; then his lips moved again:

“And I thrill beneath the glances of a pair of azure eyes As glowing as the summer and as tender as the skies. I can see——”

Suddenly he broke off, and groaned aloud: “My Lord!” he said all in a breath. “And thirty-five years old—blame near thirty-six!”

He needs interpretation, this unfortunate Lucius. He meant that it was inexplicable and disgraceful for a man of his age to be afraid of a boy of seven and a girl of five. He had never been afraid of anybody else’s children. No; it had to be _hers_! And that was why he was afraid of them; he knew the truth well enough: he was afraid of them because they _were_ hers. He was a man who had always “got on” with children beautifully; but he was afraid of Maud and Bill. He was afraid of what they would do to him and of what they would think of him.

There, in brief, is the overwhelming part that children can play in true romance!

“Lordy, Lordy!” sighed Lucius Brutus Allen. “_Oh_, Lordy!”

But at last he bestirred himself. He knew that Saruly, his elderly darky cook, must be waiting for him with impatience; she would complain bitterly of dishes overcooked because of his tardiness. Having glanced down into the Square and found it virtually devoid of life, for this was the universal hour of supper, he set his brown straw hat upon his head, and took the parasol under his arm—not because he meant to return it. He took it with him merely for the pleasure of its society.

Upon the bottom step of the flight of stairs that led down to the street, he found seated a small figure in a white “sailor suit.” This figure rose and spoke politely.

“How do you do?” it said. “Are you Uncle Lucius?”

“Who—— What’s your name?”

“Bill. Bill Ricketts,” said Bill.

Lucius made a hasty motion to reascend the stairs, but Bill confidingly proffered a small, clean hand that Mr. Allen was constrained to accept. Once having accepted it, he found himself expected to retain it.

“Mamma lef’ me sittin’ here to wait till you came downstairs,” Bill explained. “That man that came out said he couldn’t say but he was pretty sure you were up there. She told me to wait till either you came downstairs or she came back for me. She wants her parasol. Come on!”

“Come on where?”

“Up to your house,” said Bill. “She lef’ Maud waitin’ up _there_ for you.”

It was the truth. And after a rather hurried walk, during which the boy spoke not once unless spoken to, but trotted contentedly at Lucius’s side, confidingly hand-in-hand with him, when they came in sight of the small brick house in the big yard, where Lucius lived, a tiny white figure was discernible through the dusk, rocking patiently in a wicker rocking-chair on the veranda.

At sight of them she jumped up and came running to the gate to meet them. But there she paused, gravely.

She made a curtsey, formal but charming.

“How do do, Uncka Wucius?” she said. “Mamma would wike her paraso’.”

Saruly, looming dark and large behind her, supplemented this information: “Miz Ricketts done lef’ the little girl here to wait fer you, Mist’ Allen. She tell me ask you please be so kine as to bring the chillun along home with you, an’ her parasol with ’em. She tell _me_ the chillun been a little upset, jest at first, ’count o’ movin’ to a new place, but they all quieted down now, an’ she think it’ll be safe fer you to stay to dinnuh. An’ as ev’ything in my kitchen’s plum done to a crisp ’count o’ you bein’ so late, Mist’ Allen, if you leave it to me I think you bettuh.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Saruly,” said Lucius, gently. “I think I’d better.”

And then, with the parasol under his arm, and the hand of a child resting quietly in each of his, he turned with Bill and Maud, and, under the small, bright stars of the May evening, set forth from his own gate on his way to Lucy’s.

“YOU”

MURIEL ELIOT’S friends and contemporaries were in the habit of describing her as “the most brilliant girl in town.” She was “up on simply everything,” they said, and it was customary to add the exclamation: “How on earth she finds the _time_!” And since Muriel also found time to be always charmingly dressed, in harmony with her notable comeliness, the marvel of so much upness in her infant twenties may indeed need a little explaining.

Her own conception was that she was a “serious” person and cared for “serious reading”—that is to say, after she left college, she read, not what is acceptably called literature, but young journalists’ musings about what aspires to be called that; she was not at all interested in buildings or pictures or statues themselves, but thought she was, read a little of what is printed about such things in reviews, and spoke of “art” and “literature” with authoritative conviction. She was a kind-hearted girl, and she believed that “capitalism” was the cunning device of greedy men to keep worthy persons under heel; hence it followed that all “capital” should be taken away from the “capitalist class” by the “people;” and, not picturing herself as in any way uncomfortably affected by the process of seizure, she called herself a “socialist.”

In addition to all this, Muriel’s upness included “the new psychology” and the appropriate humorous contempt for the Victorian Period, that elastic conception of something-or-other which, according to the writing young ladies and gentlemen who were her authorities, seemed to extend from about the time of Custer’s Last Fight to the close of President Wilson’s first administration. Muriel, like her original sources of information, was just becoming conscious of herself as an authority at about the latter date—she was sixteen then; and at twenty she began to speak of having spent her youth in the Late Victorian Period. That obscure decade before her birth, that time so formless and dark between the years of our Lord 1890 and 1900, was Mid-Victorian; people still mistook Tennyson and Longfellow for poets.

Sometimes older women thought Muriel a little hard; she was both brilliant and scholarly, they admitted; but the papers she wrote for the women’s clubs were so “purely intellectual,” so icily scientific, so little reticent in the discussion of love, marriage and children, that these ladies shook their heads. The new generation, as expressed by Muriel, lacked something important, they complained; for nothing less than maidenliness itself had been lost, and with it the rosebud reveries, the twilight half-dreams of a coming cavalier, the embowered guitar at moonrise. In a word, the charm of maidenhood was lost because romance was lost. Muriel lacked the romantic imagination, they said, a quality but ill replaced by so much “new thought.”

They made this mistake the more naturally because Muriel herself made it, though of course she did not think of her supposed lack of romance as a fault. She believed herself to be a severely practical person, and an originally thinking person, as a quotation from one of her essays may partly explain. “I face the actual world as it is; I face it without superstition, and without tradition. Despising both the nonsense and the misery into which former generations have been led by romance, I permit no illusions to guide my thinking. I respect nothing merely because it is established; I examine mathematically; I think mathematically; I believe nothing that I do not prove. I am a realist.”

When she wrote this, she was serious and really thought it true; but as a matter of fact, what she believed to be her thinking was the occasional mulling over of scattered absorptions from her reading. Her conception of her outward appearance, being somewhat aided by mirrors, came appreciably near the truth, but her conception of her mind had no such guide. Her mind spent the greater part of its time adrift in half-definite dreaming, and although she did not even suspect such a thing, her romantic imagination was the abode in which she really dwelt.

There is an astronomer who knows as much about the moon as can yet be known; but when that moon is new in the sky, each month, he will be a little troubled if he fails to catch his first glimpse of it over the right shoulder. When he does fail, his disappointment is so slight that he forgets all about it the next moment, and should you ask him if he has any superstition he will laugh disdainfully, with no idea that he deceives both his questioner and himself. This is the least of the mistakes he makes about his own thoughts; he is mistaken about most of them; and yet he is a great man, less given to mistakes than the rest of us. Muriel Eliot’s grandmother, who used to sing “Robin Adair,” who danced the Spanish Fandango at the Orphan Asylum Benefit in 1877, and wrote an anonymous love-letter to Lawrence Barrett, was not actually so romantic as Muriel.

The point is that Muriel’s dreaminess, of which she was so little aware, had a great deal more to do with governing her actions than had her mathematical examinings and what she believed to be her thinking. Moreover, this was the cause of her unkindness to young Renfrew Mears, who lived across the street. Even to herself she gave other reasons for rejecting him; but the motive lay deep in her romanticism; for Muriel, without knowing it, believed in fairies.

Had she been truly practical, she would have seen that young Mr. Mears was what is called an “ideal match” for her. His grandfather, a cautious banker, had thought so highly of the young man’s good sense as to leave him the means for a comfortable independence; yet Renfrew continued to live at home with his family and was almost always in bed by eleven o’clock. He was of a pleasant appearance; he was kind, modest, thoughtfully polite, and in everything the perfect material from which the equerry or background husband of a brilliant woman is constructed. No wonder her mother asked her what on earth she _did_ want! Muriel replied that she despised the capitalistic institution of marriage, and she believed that she meant what she said; but of course what she really wanted was a fairy-story.

In those wandering and somewhat shapeless reveries that controlled her so much more than she guessed, there were various repetitions that had become rather definite, though never quite so. One of these was the figure of her Mate. Her revery-self never showed her this mystery clearly in contours and colours, but rather in shadowy outlines, though she was sure that her Mate had dark and glowing eyes. He was somewhere, and sometime she would see him. When she did see him, she would recognize him instantly; the first look exchanged would bring the full revelation to both of them—they would ever have little need of spoken words. But her most frequent picture of this mystic encounter was a painful one: she saw herself a bride upon the bridegroom’s arm and coming down the steps of the church;—a passing stranger, halting abruptly upon the pavement, gave her one look from dark and glowing eyes, a look fateful with reproach and a tragic derision, seeming to say: “You did not wait till _I_ came, but took that fool!”

Then he passed on, forever; and it was unfortunate for young Mr. Mears that the figure of the bridegroom in these foreshadowings invariably bore a general resemblance to his own. Renfrew had more to overcome than appeared upon the surface; he had shadows to fight; and so have other lovers—more of them than is guessed—when ladies are reluctant. For that matter, the thing is almost universal; and rare is the girl, however willing, who says “Yes,” without giving up at least some faint little tremulous shadow of a dream—though she may forget it and deny it as honestly as that astronomer forgets and denies the moon and his right shoulder.

Renfrew’s case with his pretty neighbour was also weakened by the liking and approval of her father and mother, who made the mistake of frequently praising him to her; for when parents do this, with the daughter adverse, the poor lover is usually ruined—the reasons being obvious to everybody except the praising parents. Mrs. Eliot talked Renfrew Mears and his virtues at her daughter till the latter naturally declared that she hated him. “I do!” she said one morning. “I really do hate him, mamma!”

“What nonsense!” her mother exclaimed. “When I heard the two of you chatting together on the front porch for at least an hour, only last evening!”

“Chatting!” Muriel repeated scornfully. “Chatting together! That shows how much you observe, mamma! I don’t think he said more than a dozen words the whole evening.”

“Well, don’t you like a good listener?”

“Yes,” Muriel replied emphatically. “Indeed, I do! A good listener is one who understands what you’re saying. Renfrew Mears has just lately learned enough to keep quiet, for fear if he speaks at all, it’ll show he doesn’t understand _any_thing!”

“Well, if he doesn’t, why did you talk to him?”

“Good gracious!” Muriel cried. “We can’t always express ourselves as we wish to in this life, mamma; I should think you’d know that by this time! I can’t throw rocks at him and say, ‘Go back home!’ every time he comes poking over here, can I? I have to be polite, even to Renfrew Mears, don’t you suppose?”

The mother, sighing, gave her daughter one of those little half-surreptitious glances in which mothers seem to review troubled scenes with their own mothers; then she said gently: “Your father and I do wish you could feel a little more kindly toward the poor boy, Muriel.”

“Well, I can’t, and I don’t want to. What’s more, I wouldn’t marry him if I did.”

“Not if you were in love?”

“Poor mamma!” Muriel said compassionately. “What has love to do with marrying? I expect to retain my freedom; I don’t propose to enter upon a period of child-rearing——”

“Oh, good gracious!” Mrs. Eliot cried. “What a way to talk!”

“But if I did,” Muriel continued, with some sharpness, “I should never select Renfrew Mears to be my assistant in the task. And as for what you call ‘love,’ it seems to me a rather unhealthy form of excitement that I’m not subject to, fortunately.”

“You _are_ so queer,” her mother murmured; whereupon Muriel laughed.

No doubt her laughter was a little condescending. “Queer?” she said. “No—only modern. Only frank and wholesome! Thinking people look at life as it really is, nowadays, mamma. I am a child of the new age; but more than that, I am not the slave of my emotions; I am the product of my thinking. Unwholesome excitement and queer fancies have no part in my life, mamma.”

“I hope not,” her mother responded with a little spirit. “I’m not exactly urging anything unwholesome upon you, Muriel. You’re very inconsistent, it seems to me.”

“I!” Muriel said haughtily. “Inconsistent!”

“Why, when I just mention that your father and I’d be glad if you could feel a little kinder toward a good-looking, fine young man that we know all about, you begin talking, and pretty soon it sounds as though we were trying to get you to do something criminal! And then you go on to say you haven’t got any ‘queer fancies!’ Isn’t it a queer fancy to think we’d want you to do anything unhealthy or excited? That’s why I say you’re inconsistent.”

Muriel coloured; her breathing quickened; and her eyes became threateningly bright. “The one thing I _won’t_ be called,” she said, “is ‘inconsistent!’”

“Well, but——”

“I won’t!” she cried, and choked. “You _know_ it makes me furious; that’s why you do it!”

“Did I understand you to say you never permitted your emotions to control you?” her mother asked dryly.

In retort, Muriel turned to the closet where she kept her hats; for her favourite way of meeting these persecutions was to go out of the house abruptly, leaving her mother to occupy it in full remorse; but this time Mrs. Eliot forestalled her. A servant appeared in the doorway and summoned her: “There’s someone downstairs wants to see you; I took him in the library.”

“I’ll come,” said Mrs. Eliot, and with a single dignified glance at her daughter, she withdrew, leaving Muriel to digest a discomfiture. For the art of domestic altercation lies almost wholly in the withdrawal, since here the field is won by abandoning it. In family embroilments she proves herself right, and the others wrong, who adroitly seizes the proper moment to make an unexpected departure either with dignity or in tears. People under stress of genuine emotion have been known to practice this art, seeming thereby to indicate the incompatible presence of a cool dramatist somewhere in the back of their heads; yet where is there anything that is not incompatible? Muriel, injured by the word “inconsistent,” had meant to withdraw in silent pain, thus putting her mother in the wrong; but, in the sometimes invaluable argot of the race-course, Mrs. Eliot got away first. Muriel felt severely baffled.

There remained to her, however, a retreat somewhat enfeebled by her mother’s successful withdrawal: Mrs. Eliot had gone out of the room; Muriel could still go out of the house. Therefore she put on a hat, descended the stairs and went toward the front door in a manner intended to symbolize insulted pride taking a much more important departure than the mere walking out of a room.

Her mother, of course, was intended to see her pass the open double doors of the library, but Mrs. Eliot’s back happened to be toward these doors, and she was denied the moving-picture of the daughter sweeping through the hall. The caller, however, suffered no such deprivation; he sat facing the doorway, and although Muriel did not look directly at him, she became aware of a distinguished presence. The library was shadowy, the hall much lighter; she passed the doors quickly; but she was almost startled by the impression made upon her by this young man whom she had never before seen. Then, as she went on toward the front door, she had suddenly a sensation queerly like dizziness; it seemed to her that this stranger had looked at her profoundly as she passed, and that the gaze he bent upon her had come from a pair of dark and glowing eyes.

She went out into the yard, but not, as she had intended, to the street; and turning the corner of the house, she crossed the sunny lawn to some hydrangea bushes in blossom, where she paused and stood, apparently in contemplation of the flowers. She was trembling a little, so strong was her queer consciousness of the stranger in the library and of his dark and glowing eyes. Such sensations as hers have often been described as “unreal;” that is to say, “she seemed to be in a dream.” Her own eyes had not fully encountered the dark and glowing ones, but never had any person made so odd and instantaneous an impression upon her. What else was she to conclude but that there must have been “something psychic” about it? And how, except by telepathy, could she have so suddenly found in her mind the conviction that the distinguished-looking young man was a painter? For to her own amazement, she was sure of this.

After a time she went back into the house, and again passed through the hall and by the open doors, but now her bearing was different. In a sweet, low voice she hummed a careless air from Naples, while in her arms she bore a sheaf of splendid hydrangea blossoms, thus offering, in the momentary framing of the broad doorway, a composition rich in colour and also of no mean decorative charm in contour, it may be said. “The Girl from the Garden” might have been the title she wished to suggest to a painter’s mind, but when she came into the view of her mother’s caller, consciousness of him increased all at once so overwhelmingly that she forgot herself. She had meant to pass the doorway with a cool leisureliness and entirely in profile—a Girl from the Garden with no other thought than to enliven her room with an armful of hydrangea blossoms—but she came almost to a halt midway, and, for the greater part of a second packed with drama, looked full upon the visitor.

He was one of those black-and-white young men: clothes black, linen white, a black bow at the collar, thick black hair, the face of a fine pallor, and black eyes lustrously comprehending. What they must have comprehended now was at least a little of the significance of the arrested attitude beyond the doorway, and more than a little of what was meant by the dark and lustrous eyes that with such poignant inquiry met his own. For Muriel’s fairly shouted at him the startled question: “Who are _you_?”

Time, life and love are made of seconds and bits of seconds: Muriel had gone on, carrying her question clamouring down the hall with her, before this full second elapsed. She ran up the stairs and into her own room, dropped the hydrangeas upon a table, and in two strides confronted a mirror. A moment later she took up the hydrangeas again, with a care to hold them as she had held them in the hall below, then walked by the mirror, paused, gave the glass a deep, questioning look and went on. After that she seated herself beside an open window that commanded a view of the front gate, and waited, the great question occupying her tumultuously.

By this time the great question had grown definite, and of course it was, “Is this He?” Other questions came tumbling after it: How did she know he was a painter, this young man of whom she had never heard? It is only in the moving pictures that a doctor must look like a doctor, a judge like a judge, an anarchist like an anarchist, a painter like a painter; the age of machines, hygiene and single-type clothing has so blurred men into indistinguishability that only a few musicians still look like musicians, a feat accomplished simply by the slight impoverishment of barbers. The young man in the library was actually a painter, but Muriel may well have been amazed that she knew it; for nowadays it is a commonplace that a Major General in mufti may reasonably be taken for a plumber, while an unimportant person soliciting alms at the door is shown into the house under the impression that a Senator is calling.