Part 3

Anthony produced his gloves in a crumpled wad from the tail of his coat and fought his way into them. He felt rather than saw the restrained amusement of his fellows. They spoke to him gravely, punctiliously proffered cigarettes; yet, in a vague but unmistakable manner, he was made to feel that he was outside their interests, ignorant of their shibboleth. In the matter of collars alone he was as a Patagonian to them. He recalled with regret the easy familiarity, the comfort, of Doctor Allhop's drugstore.

Then, throwing aside cigarettes, patting waistcoats into position, they streamed down to the music. The others found partners immediately, and swung into a onestep, but Anthony stood irresolutely in the doorway. The girls disconcerted him with their formal smiles, their bright, ready chatter. But Ellie rescued him, drawing him into the dance. After which he sought the porch that, looped with rosevines, crossed the face of the long, low house. There, with his back against a pillar, he found a cool spot upon the tiles, and sought such comfort as he could command.

Long windows opening from the ballroom were now segments of whirling color, now filled with gay streams, ebbing and returning. Fragmentary conversation, glowing cigarettes, surrounded him. Behind the pillar at his back a girl said, softly, “please don't.”

Then he saw Ellie, obviously searching for him, and he rose. At her side was a slim figure with a cloud of light hair. “There he is!” Ellie exclaimed; “Eliza... my brother, Anthony.”

He saw that her eyes opened widely, and that her hair was a peculiar, bright shade. Ginger-colored, he thought. “I made Ellie find you,” she told him; “you know, you must ask me to dance; I won't be ignored at my own party.”

He muttered awkwardly some conventional period, annoyed at having been found, intensely uncomfortable. In a minute more he found himself dancing, conscious of his limp tie, his crumpled and gaping shirt. He swung his partner heavily across the room, colliding with a couple that he shouldered angrily aside. The animation swiftly died from Eliza Dreen's countenance; she grew indifferent, then cold. And, when the music ceased, she escaped with a palpable sigh of relief. He was savagely mopping his heated face on the porch when, at his elbow, a clear voice captured his attention. “A dreadful person,” it said, “... like dancing with a locomotive... A regular Apache.”

He turned and saw that it was Eliza Dreen, gathering from her swift concern both that he had been the subject of her discourse, and that she was aware that he had overheard it. Back at his post at the pillar he promised himself grimly that never again would he be found in such specified company. He stripped his gloves from his wet palms, and flung them far across the lawn, then recklessly eased his collar. There was a sudden whisper of skirts behind him, when Eliza seated herself on the porch's edge, at his side.

IX

I AM a loathsome person at times,” she informed him; “and to-night I was rather worse than usual.”

“I do dance like a--locomotive,” involuntarily.

“It doesn't matter how you dance,” she proceeded, “and you mustn't repeat it, it isn't generous.” Suddenly she laughed uncontrollably. “You looked so uncomfortable... your collar,” it was lost in a bubbling, silvery peal. “Forgive me,” she gasped.

“I don't mind,” he assured her. All at once he didn't; the sting had vanished from his pride; he smiled. He saw that she wore a honey-colored dress, with a strand of pearls about her slim throat, and that her feet, in satin, were even smaller than Ellie's. Her hair resembled more a crown of light than the customary adornment. “I didn't want to come,” he confided: “I hate, well--going out, dancing.”

“It doesn't suit you,” she admitted frankly; “you are so splendidly bronzed and strong; you need,” she paused, “lots of room.”

For this Anthony had no adequate reply. “I have this with some one,” she declared as the music recommenced, “but I hope they don't find me; I hate it for the moment... I'll show you a place; it's very wicked of me.” She rose and, waving him to follow, slipped over the grass. Beyond the house she stopped in the shadowy vista of a pergola; vines shut out the stars, walled them in a virid, still gloom. She sank on a low stone bench, and he found the grass at her feet. A mantle of fine romance descended upon his shoulders, of subtile adventure, prodigious daring. Immaculate men, pearl-studded, were searching for her, and she had hidden herself from them with him. A new and pleasant sense of importance warmed him, flattered his self-esteem. He felt strangely at ease, and sat in silent contentment. The faint sound of violins, a burst of distant laughter, floated to him.

“It seems as if the world were rushing on, out there, without us,” Eliza finally broke the silence, “as if they were keeping a furious pace, while we sat in some everlasting, quiet wood, like Fontainebleau. Don't you adore nature?”

“I knock about a lot outside,” he admitted cautiously, “often I stay out all night, by the Wingohocking Creek. There's a sort of cave where you can hear the falls, and the owls hunting about. I cook things in clay--fish, chickens,” he paused abruptly at the latter item, recalling the questionable source of his supply. “In winter I shoot rabbits with Bert Woods, he's a barber, and Doctor Allhop, you know--the druggist.”

“I am sure that your friends are very nice,” she promptly assured him.

“Bert's crazy about girls,” he remarked, half contemptuously.

“And you... don't care for them?”

“I don't know anything about them,” he admitted with an abrupt, unconscious honesty.

“But there must have been--there must be--one,” she persisted.

She leaned forward, and he met her gaze with unwavering candor. “Not that many,” he returned.

“It would be wonderful to care for just one person, _always_,” she continued intently: “I had a dream when I was quite young.... I dreamed that a marvellous happiness would follow a constancy like that. Father rather laughs at me, and quotes Shakespeare--the 'one foot on land and one on shore' thing. Perhaps, but it's too bad.”

Anthony gravely considered this new idea in relation to his own, hitherto lamented, lack of experience. It dawned upon him that the idea of manly success he had cherished would appear distasteful to Eliza Dreen. She had indirectly extolled the very thing of which he had been secretly ashamed. He thought in conjunction with her of the familiar group at the drugstore, and in this light the latter retreat suffered a disconcerting change: Thomas Meredith appeared sly and trivial, and unhealthy; Williams an empty braggard; Craik ineffectual, untidy. He surveyed himself without enthusiasm.

“You are different from any one I ever knew,” he told her.

“Oh, there are millions of me,” she returned; “but you are different. I didn't like you for a sou at first; but there is something about you like--like a very clear spring of water. That's idiotic, but it's what I mean. There is an early morning feeling about you. I am very sensitive to people,” she informed him, “some make me uncomfortable directly they come into the room. There was a curé at Etretat I perfectly detested, and he turned out to be an awful person.”

Her name was called unmistakably across the lawn, and she rose. “They're all furious,” she announced, without moving further. Her face was pale, immaterial, in the gloom; her wide eyes dark, disturbing. A minute gold watch on her wrist ticked faintly, and--it seemed to Anthony--in furious haste. Something within him, struggling inarticulately for expression, hurt; an oppressive emotion beat upon his heart. He uttered a period about seeing her again.

“Some day you may show me the place where the fall sounds and the owls hunt. No, don't come with me.” She turned and fled.

An unreasoning conviction seized Anthony that a momentous occasion had overtaken him; he was unable to distinguish its features, discover it grave or gay; but, wrapped in the impenetrable veil of the future, it enveloped and permeated him, swept in the circle of his blood's circulation, vibrated in the cords of his sensitive ganglia. He returned slowly to the house: the brilliantly-lit, dancing figures seemed the mere figments of a febrile dream; but the music apparently throbbed within his brain.

Ellie's cool voice recreated his actual sphere. He found their hack, the driver slumbering doubled on the seat. The latter rose stiffly, and stirred his drowsing animal into a stumbling walk. Beyond the illuminated entrance to Hydrangea House the countryside lay profoundly dim to where the horizon flared with the pale reflection of distant lightning.

“Eliza's a sweet,” Ellie pronounced. Anthony brooded without reply upon his opinion. The iron-like collar had capitulated, and rested limply upon his limp shirt; at the sacrifice of a second button his waistcoat offered complete comfort. “I am going to get a new dress suit,” he announced decisively. Ellie smiled with sisterly malice. “Eliza is a sweet,” she reiterated.

“You go to thunder!” he retorted. But, “she's wonderful,” he admitted, and--out of his conclusive experience, “there is not another girl like her in all the world.”

“I'll agitate for the new suit,” Ellie promised.

X

THE following morning he reorganized his neckties, left a pair of white flannels to be pressed at the tailor's; then, his shoulders swathed in a crisp, sprigged muslin, sat circumspectly under the brisk shears of Bert Woods. Bert hovered above him, and commented on yesterday's fiasco. “It comes to the best of 'em,” Bert assured him: “'member how Ollie Stitcher fell down in the world's series at Chicago.” He recited, for Anthony's comfort, the names of eminent pitchers who had “fell down” when every necessity demanded that they should have remained splendidly erect.

His defeat still rankled in Anthony's mind, but the bitterness had vanished, the sting salved by that other memory of the impulsive charm of Eliza Dreen. He recalled all that she had said to him; her words, thoughtfully considered, were just those employed by humdrum individuals in their commonplace discourses; but, spoken by her, they were a thrill with an especial, a significant, importance and beauty. It was inevitable that she should have dreamed things immaculate, rare; things like... white flowers.

“Shampoo?” Bert inquired absent-mindedly.

“_And_ singed, and curled, and sprinkled with violets,” Anthony promptly returned. With a flourish, Bert swept aside the muslin folds.

Then, in the pursuit of a neglected duty, he crossed the town to a quiet corner, occupied by a small dwelling built of smooth, green stone, crowned with a fantastic and dingy froth of wood. A shallow, untended garden was choked with weeds and bushes, sprawling upward against closely-shuttered windows. He had not been to see Mrs. Bosbyshell for two weeks, he realized, with a stir of mild self-reproach. He was aware that his visits to that solitary and eccentric old woman formed her sole contact with a world she regarded with an increasing, unbalanced suspicion.

A minute or more after his knock--the bell handle was missing--a shutter shifted a fraction, upon which he was admitted to a narrow, dark hall, and the door bolted sharply behind him. A short, stout woman, in a formless wrap of grotesquely gorgeous design, faced him with a quivering, apprehensive countenance and prodigiously bright eyes. Her scant, yellowish-white hair was gathered aloft in a knot that slipped oddly from side to side; and, as she walked, shabby Juliet slippers loudly slapped the bare floor.

“Do you want some wood brought in?” Anthony inquired; “and how does the washer I put on the hot water spigot work?”

“A little wood, if you please; and the spigot's good as new.” She sat on a chair, lifting a harassed gaze to his serious solicitation. “I've had a dreadful time since you were here last--an evilish-appearing man knocked and knocked, at one door and again at another.”

Her voice sank to a shrill whisper, “he was after the money.” She nodded so vigorously that the knot fell in a straggling whisp across her eyes. “Cousin Alonzo sent him.”

“Your cousin Alonzo has been dead ten years,” he interposed patiently, going once more over that familiar ground. “Probably it was a man wanting to sell gas stoves.”

“You don't know Alonzo,” she persisted, unconvinced; “I should have to see his corp'. He knows I've a comfortable sum put by, and's hard after it for his wenching and such practices: small good, or bad, he'll get of it when my time comes.”

He passed through the hall to the kitchen, and, unchaining the back door, brought a basket of cut wood from a shed, and piled it beside the stove. Mrs. Bosbyshell inspected with a critical eye the fastening of the door. There was a swollen window sash to release above, a mattress to turn, when he was waved ceremoniously into a formal, darkened chamber. The musty spice of rose pot-pourri lingered in the flat air; old mahogany--rush bottomed chairs, flute-legged table, a highboy and Dutch clock--glimmered about the walls. A marble topped stand bore orderly volumes in maroon and primrose morocco, the top one entitled, “The Gentlewoman's Garland. A Gift Book.”

From a triangular cupboard, she produced a decanter with a carved design of bees and cobalt clover, and a plate of crumbling currant cake. “A sup of dandelion cordial,” she announced, “a bite of sweet. Growing boys must be fed.”

She sat, and with patent satisfaction watched Anthony consume the ropy syrup and cake.

“I met a girl last night,” he told her intimately; “she had hair like--like a roman candle.”

“Did you burn your heart up in it?”

“She told me that I was like the early morning,” he confided with a rush.

Mrs. Bosbyshell nodded her approval.

“An understandable remark; exactly what I should have said fifty years ago; I didn't know the girls of to-day had it in 'em. You've got a good heart, Anthony,” she enunciated. Anthony shuffled his feet. “A good heart is a rare thing to find in the young. But I misdoubt, in a world of mammon, you'll pay for it dear; I'm afraid you will never be successful, so called. It's selling men that that success is got, and buying women, and it's never in you to do those. _You_ wouldn't wish an old woman gone for the sum she'd laid aside.” Her fancies had been wilder than usual, he concluded, as the holt of the door at his hack slid home. Alonzo and her money, one he considered as actual, as imminent, as the other, occupied to the exclusion of all else her dimming brain. He had hoped to converse with her more fully on the inexhaustible subject of Eliza Dreen, but her vagaries had interrupted him continuously. He decided that she was an antiquated bore, but made a mental note to return before the store of wood was consumed.

XI

IN the evening he stopped from force of habit at Doctor Allhop's drugstore: the familiar group was assembled behind the screen at the rear, the conversation flowed in the old channels. Anthony lounged and listened, but his attention continually wandered--he heard other, more musical, tones; his vision was filled with a candid face and widely-opened eyes in the green gloom of a pergola. He passed out by the bevy at the sodawater fountain to the street.

In the artificial day of the electric lights the early summer foliage was as virulently green as the toy trees of a miniature ark; the sky was a breathless vault filled with blue mists that veiled the stars; under the locust trees the blooms were spilled odorously, whitely, on the pavement. He walked aimlessly to the outskirts of the town. Across the dim valley, against the hills merged into the night and sky, he could see glimmering the low lights of Hydrangea House. It would be pleasant, he thought, to be closer to that abode of delight; and, crossing the road, he vaulted a fence, and descended through a tangle of aromatic grass to the brook that threaded the meadow below. A star swam imaged on the black, wrinkled surface of the water: it suggested vague, happy images--Eliza was the star, and he was the brook, holding her mirrored in his dreams.

He passed cows, blowing softly into the sod; a flock of sheep broke before him like an argent cloud on the heaven of the fields; and, finally, reached the boundary of James Dreen's acres. He forced his way through the budding hedge from which the place had its name, and, in a cup of the lawn like a pool of brimming, fragrant shadows, sat watching the lights of the house.

Indistinct shapes passed the windows, each--since it might be she--carrying to him a thrill; indistinguishable voices reached him, the vague tones--they might be hers--chiming like bells on his straining senses. The world, life, was so beautiful that it brought an obstruction into his throat; he drew the back of his hand across his eyes, and, to his surprise, found that it was wet.

Presently, the lights sank on the lower floor and reappeared above. The blinding whiteness of the thought of Eliza sleeping seared his brain like a flare of powder. When the house retreated unrelieved into the gloom he rose and slowly retraced his steps. He lit a cigarette; the match burned with a steady flame in the stillness; but, in an unnamed impulse, he flung both aside, and filled his lungs with the elysian June air.

XII

THE next afternoon, returning from the unloading of a grain car at his father's warehouse, he discovered a smartly saddled horse fast to the marble hitchingpost before his door. It hardly required the glance at the silver “D” on the headstall to inform him who was within. He found Ellie and Eliza Dreen in the corner by the Canton tea service, consuming Pekoe and gingerbread dicky birds. Eliza nodded and smiled over her shoulder, and resumed an animated projection of an excursion in canoes on the Wingohocking. She wore a severe coat over white breeches and immaculate boots with diminutive gold spurs. Beneath a flat straw hat her hair was confined by a broad ribband low upon her neck, while a pink stock was held in position by a gaily-checked waistcoat.

Anthony dropped with affected ease on the sofa, and covertly studied the delicate line of her cheek. He now recalled indignantly that Mrs. Dreen had said Eliza was not good-looking; while her reference to Eliza's veracity had been entirely superfluous. She turned toward him, finally, with an engaging query. He saw across her nose a faint trail of the most delightful freckles in the world; her eyes were blue, that amazing blue of bachelor's buttons; while her mouth--he would have sworn this the first time such simile had been applied to that feature--was like a roseleaf. He made a totally inadequate reply, when Ellie rose, and, plate in hand, vanished in quest of a fresh supply of gingerbread. A sort of desperate, blundering courage took possession of him:

“I have been thinking a lot about you,” he told her; “last night I sat on your grass and wondered which was your window.”

“What a silly I--we were on the porch all evening.”

“It wasn't that I wanted to talk to you so much,” he tried to explain his instinctive impulses, desires, “as just to be near you.”

“I think,” she said slowly, “yes, I know--that is the prettiest thing that has ever been said to me. I thought about you... a little; really more about myself. I haven't recognized myself at all very lately; I suppose it's being home again.” She gazed at him candidly, critically. “You have very unusual eyes,” she remarked unexpectedly; “they are so transparent. Haven't you _anything_ to hide?”

“Some chicken feathers,” he affirmed. He grew serious immediately. “Your eyes are like--like--” the name of the flower so lately suggested by her lucid vision had flown his mind. Suspenders, bachelor's suspenders, exclusively occurred to him. “An awfully blue flower,” he temporized.

She crossed the room, and bent over the tea roses, freshly placed in the jar by the door. “I must go,” she said, her back to him; “I have been here a terrific length of time... I thought perhaps you'd come in.... Wasn't it shocking of me?”

The knowledge that she had considered the possibility of seeing him filled Anthony with incredulous joy. Then, sitting silently, gazing fixedly at the floor, he became acutely miserable at the sudden conviction of his worthlessness; shame prevented him from looking at her--surely she must see that he, Anthony Ball, the unsuccessful, without prospect, the truant from life, was an improper object for her interest. She was so absolutely desirable, so fine.

He recalled what she had said on the night of the dance... about constancy: if the single devotion of his life would mean anything to her, he thought grandiloquently, it was hers. He was considering the possibility of telling her this when Ellie unnecessarily returned with a replenished plate. He was grateful when neither included him in the remarks which followed. And he speedily left the room, proceeding to the pavement, where he stood with his palm resting on the flank of her horse.

In the slanting rays of the sun the street was a way of gold; when Eliza appeared she was ringed in the molten glory. She placed her heel in his hand, and sprang lightly into the saddle; the horse shied, there was a clatter of hoofs, and she cantered away. Ellie stood on the steps, graceful, unconcerned; he watched until the upright, mounted figure was out of sight, then silently passed his sister into the house.

XIII

HE was in his room when the familiar formula of a whistled signal sounded from the darkening street. It was Alfred Craik, he recognized the halt ending of the bar; he whistled like an old hinge, Anthony thought impatiently. He made his way to the lawn, and called shortly, over the crumbling iron fence. Alfred Craik was agog with weighty information.

“The circus is coming in at three-thirty tomorrow morning,” he announced. “The station agent told me... old Giller's lot on Newberry Street. 'Member last year we had breakfast with the elephant trainer!”

Circuses, Anthony told him in large unconcern, were for infantile minds; they might put their circus on top the Courthouse without calling forth the slightest notice from him; horses were no better than old cows; and as for clowns, the ringmaster, they made him specifically ill.

The greater part of this diatribe Alfred chose to ignore; he impatiently besought Anthony to “come off”; and warned him strenuously against a tardy waking. Once more in his room Anthony smiled at the other's pretty enthusiasm. Yet at half past three he woke sharply, starting up on his elbow as though he had been called. He heard in the distance the faint, shrill whistle of the locomotive drawing the circus into Ellerton. He sank back, but, with the face of Eliza radiant against the gloom, slumber deserted him. It occurred to him that he might, after all, rise and witness from his rarer elevation the preparations that had once aroused in him such immature joy.