CHAPTER XXII.THE WALTZ.
When Paul parted with Clarice that night he was conscious of a feeling of disquiet unusual to him. He had been angry with Clarice and made her cry. This of itself was enough to disturb him, but added to it was anotherfeeling, novel and bewildering. Clarice was jealous of Elithe, and not altogether without cause, although until she put it into words it had never occurred to him that possibly he was too attentive to her. He had thought of her a great deal and called upon her every day. He could not help his thoughts, but he could keep from calling, and he did for four days, three of which he spent in Boston. At the close of the fourth he could stand it no longer, and on his way to the tennis court stopped at the cottage, finding only Miss Hansford, a little grim and off color as she asked where he had kept himself. He told her, and then inquired for Elithe.
“Gone to the tennis court with Ralph Tracy, the Governor’s son,” Miss Hansford answered, with a good deal of elation in her voice.
“Gone to the tennis court with Ralph Tracy!” Paul repeated. “I didn’t know that she knew him.”
“Well, she does. He was here day before yesterday with one or two more high bucks. To-day he came with his sister to ask her to go to the court and to tell her she had been made a member.”
Here was news. Paul had not been near the tennis court since he took Elithe there and quarreled with Clarice, but he started for it rapidly now, finding Elithe there playing with Ralph Tracy. Clarice had not black-balled her. She had shut her lips together when her name was proposed, but had dropped her Yes into the box with the rest and shaken hands with her as a new member when she appeared on the grounds with Ralph Tracy. Some people are long in reaching the top of society’s ladder; others get there with a bound. Elithe was of the latter class. The fashionable young men of Oak City had taken her up, attracted by her beauty, her freshness and the absence ofanything conventional and stiff. She said what she thought, she laughed when she wanted to laugh. She confessed her ignorance of many things, and with her frank Western ways was altogether charming. Others besides Paul Ralston called to see her. There were invitations to clam bakes and blue fishing, and excursions on the boat, and concerts, and the skating rink, and to a ball at the Harbor Hotel.
It was Paul who gave the last invitation. Clarice was in New York for a few days, and he didn’t want to go alone, he said to Miss Hansford, to whom he preferred his request, knowing that by so doing he was surer to have it granted. Miss Hansford had given in to a good deal which she once held heterodox, but she looked on dancing as something flavored with brimstone. For her niece and the daughter of a clergyman to dance would be a deadly sin. She presumed Roger would not object, she said, as the ’Piscopals were always kicking up their heels. She used to kick hers up till she learned the folly of it.
“I want awfully to learn the folly of it, too,” Elithe said, as she stood anxiously waiting her aunt’s decision.
“Poor foolish child. You’ll know more when you are older,” Miss Hansford said, feeling herself giving way under the entreaty in Elithe’s eyes and Paul’s persuasive tongue.
Finally a compromise was effected. Elithe could go and look on, but not dance, and was to leave at eleven sharp.
“Not one little dance with me?” Paul said, taking Miss Hansford by the arm and whirling her round until she unconsciously fell into a step once familiar to her, but buried years ago when she laid aside her white dress and red ribbons and burned her long curls.
“Stop—stop,” she cried. “There’s Miss Dunton looking at us. I shall be churched. I know I shall.”
“Hardly,” Paul answered with a laugh as he released her and again asked permission for one dance with Elithe.
Miss Hansford was firm. She had given her ultimatum, and Paul and Elithe were obliged to accept it. It was after nine when they entered the ball-room at the hotel, where Elithe was at once besieged with suitors.
“I am not going to dance. I’m here to look on,” she said to them all, and then took a seat where she had a full view of the gay scene.
It was harder to look on than she had imagined, for she was fond of dancing, and nothing could be more inspiriting than the music hired for the occasion, as it was the ball of the season. She had joined in the grand march with Paul, who, at her request, tried a waltz or two and then sat down beside her, while with her head and hands and feet she kept time to the lively strains and studied carefully the step of a waltz she had never seen before. Every few minutes she asked Paul what time it was, saying: “I mustn’t be a minute late, you know.”
At last Paul laid his open watch in her lap, telling her to keep the time herself, which she did religiously, and at exactly eleven o’clock she left the ball-room with Paul. It was a bright moonlight night, and when they were on the broad avenue at a little distance from the hotel Elithe stopped suddenly and exclaimed: “This is glorious, and I feel as if I could fly. I did not promise not to dance outdoors with nobody in sight but the moon. I can do that step. I know I can. Look!”
Striking an attitude, she began a series of pirouettes and evolutions, and turnings and twistings, now with her head on one side, now on the other, her hands sometimes thrown up and sometimes grasping her dress, while she whistled the accompaniment in notes clear and shrill as a boy’s.Paul was entranced as he watched the little whirling figure whose white skirts brushed against him and then went sweeping off in front, making in the moonlight fantastic but graceful shadows on the smooth pavement.
“Can you do it?” she said at last, stopping in front of him and looking at him with a face which would have moved any man had he been twenty times engaged, and twenty times more in love with his betrothed than Paul was.
“Yes, I can do it,” he replied, putting his arm around her, not stiffly and gingerly, but holding her so close that his face at times almost touched hers, and he felt her breath stir his hair during the mad waltz across the causeway.
“I should like to go on this way forever,” Elithe said when they stopped at last by the path which led up to her aunt’s cottage. “I have not danced before since I came, and you don’t know how I like it.”
“Shall we try it again?” Paul asked, holding out his arms, into which Elithe went with the eagerness of a child.
There was another turn across the causeway and back, and then, flushed and panting, Elithe said she was satisfied and must go in.
“I hope auntie is asleep,” she continued, “and you’d better not come up the gravel walk. Your boots will make a scrunching and waken her.”
She bade him good-night, and ran lightly on the grass to the side door of the cottage. Miss Hansford was awake, and had been since she heard the clock strike eleven. Elithe would soon be there, she thought, and, getting out of bed, she looked out to see if she were coming. On the causeway at the farther side was some white object movingrapidly, but without her far-see-ers she could not make out what it was.
“Two fools on a tandem wheel, I guess,” she thought, returning to her bed and listening until she heard the key turn in the lock and knew Elithe had come. There was the scratching of a match as Elithe glanced at the clock and then stole noiselessly up the stairs, her heart thumping wildly, when, as she passed her aunt’s door, a voice called out, “Is that you, Elithe?”
“Yes-m,” was the answer, demurely given.
“What time is it?”
“Half-past eleven.”
“Half-past eleven!” Miss Hansford repeated. “Has it taken you half an hour to come home?”
“No, ma’am,” and Elithe stepped into her aunt’s room, and, standing in the centre of a broad patch of moonlight, which fell upon the floor from an uncurtained window, she continued: “We left the hotel at exactly eleven, but——” she hesitated, and her aunt asked:
“But what? What have you been doing since?”
“Whistling and waltzing on the causeway,” Elithe said, not defiantly, but as if she meant to tell the truth if the heavens fell.
“Whistling and waltzing!” Miss Hansford exclaimed, sitting up straight in bed like a Nemesis confronting the little girl standing in the moonlight wiping her wet face and pushing the damp hair from her forehead. “Do you know how wicked it is to waltz, and what is said of whistling girls and crowing hens?”
“Yes’m:
“Girls that whistle,And hens that crow,Make their wayWhere’er they go,”
“Girls that whistle,And hens that crow,Make their wayWhere’er they go,”
“Girls that whistle,And hens that crow,Make their wayWhere’er they go,”
“Girls that whistle,
And hens that crow,
Make their way
Where’er they go,”
Elithe replied.
Miss Hansford fell back upon her pillow vanquished and silent, while Elithe continued: “I didn’t dance a step at the hotel, because I told you I wouldn’t. Almost everybody asked me, and I wanted to so badly. I didn’t think it wicked to waltz outdoors. The music got into my brain and I had to!”
“More likely the Old Harry got into your brain,” Miss Hansford said, and Elithe replied: “Perhaps it was the Old Harry. Any way, I had a good time, and,—and,—I don’t care!”
Here was rebellion,—the first she had seen in her niece, and Miss Hansford knew she ought to check it, but for some reason she didn’t feel like it, and, greatly to Elithe’s astonishment, she said: “Neither do I care. Go to bed. It must be nearly midnight. You are sure you locked the door?”
Ten minutes later Elithe was asleep, dreaming of music and waltzing and two-steps and Paul Ralston’s arm around her, as they whirled on and on,—they two alone,—on into a vast sea of moonlight, where she became lost in a dreamless slumber, which lasted until breakfast was over the next morning, the work done up and her aunt sewing on the rear porch. Paul, too, had his dreams of skirts whirling in circles round him, of fairy feet dancing on their toes and coming nearer and nearer to him, and of a face so close to his that he kissed it, then with a start he awoke to find that it was Elithe he had kissed and not Clarice.