LATER, engaged in repairing a shelf—at a super-union scale—for his mother, he heard the steam shriek of a calliope announcing the parade. From a window he could see the thronged sidewalks, the crudely fantastic figures of the clowns, enveloped in a dusty haze of light. His thoughts withdrew from that vapid spectacle to the rapt contemplation of Eliza Dreen. He pictured Eliza and himself in the dramatic situations which diversified the moving pictures of his nightly attendance: he rescued her from the wiles of Mexicans, counts, weirdly-wicked Hindoos; now he dragged her from the chimney into which she had been bricked by a Brotherhood of Blood; now, driving a monoplane above the hurtling express that bore her toward a fiendish revenge, he descended to halt the train at a river's brink while the bridge sank dynamited into the swirling stream—“Mercy, Tony!” his mother's practical voice rent the resplendent vision; “don't crush your greatuncle's epaulets.”
After the midday meal a minute review of the places where Eliza might be found discovered the Ellerton Country Club to hold the greatest possibility. Anthony was a virtual stranger to that focus of the newer Ellerton; except for the older enthusiasts who played golf every afternoon that it was humanly possible to remain outside it was the stronghold of the species Anthony had encountered in the dressing room at the Dreens' dance. The space at the back of the drugstore where he had lounged held unbroken the elder tradition of Ellerton. There he had cultivated a mild contempt for the studied urbanity, the formally organized converse and games, of the Club. But as a setting for Eliza it gained a compelling attraction. And, in his freshly-ironed flannels, he ordered his steps toward that goal. The Club House overhung the rolling green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking—teal Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic.
Then he saw Eliza... she was on the tennis court, playing with a vigorous girl with a bare and stalwart forearm. He divined that the latter was winning, and conceived a sweeping distaste for her flushed, perspiring countenance and thickset ankles. “How beautiful you look!” Eliza called, as he propped himself against the wire netting that, overrun with honeysuckle, enclosed the courts. He watched her fleeting form, heard her breathless exclamations, with warm stirs of delight. When her opponent played the ball beyond her reach his dislike for that efficiency became an obsession. The flying shadows lengthened on the rolled, yellow surface of the court; the group on the porch emptied their teacups and moved away; and the final set of games won by the “beefsteak.”
Eliza slipped into a formless chocolate-colored coat: racket in hand she smiled at him. “I'm rather done,” she admitted. She hesitated, then: “I wonder—are you doing anything?—if you would drive me home?” He assured her upon that point with a celerity that wrought a momentary confusion upon them. “The Meadowbrook and roan at the sheds,” she directed. In the basketlike cart they swung easily over the road toward Hydrangea House. Checked relentlessly into a walk the roan stepped in a dainty fume.
Eliza's countenance was as tenderly hued as the pearly haze that overlay the far hills; faint, mauve shadows deepened the blueness of her eyes; her mouth, slightly parted, held the fragile pink of coral; a tinge of weariness upon her bore an infinite appeal—her relaxed, drooping body filled him with a gusty longing to put his arms about her shoulders and hold her secure against all fatigue, against the assaults of time itself.
He had never before driven such an impatient and hasty animal; at the slightest slackening of the reins the horse broke into a sharp trot; and, beyond doubt, he could walk faster than any other brute alive. Already they were at the entrance to the driveway; the house appeared to hurry forward to intercept them. Eliza pressed a button, and a man crossed the grass to the roan's head. They descended, and she lingered on the steps with a murmur of gratitude. “Mrs. Dreen telephoned Ranke to meet the eight-forty,” a servant in the doorway replied to Eliza's query; “she's having dinner in town with Mr. Dreen.”
Eliza turned with a gesture of appeal. “Save me from a solitary pudding,” she petitioned Anthony; “you can go back with Ranke.... On the porch, such fun—father detests candles.” The voicing of his acceptance he felt to be an absurd formality. “Then if you can amuse yourself,” she announced, “I'll vanish for a little... cigars in the library and victrola in the hall.”
He crossed the sod to the porch on the other face of the house, and sat watching the day fade from the valley below. A violet blur of smoke overhung the chimney of the Ellerton Waterworks, printed thinly on the sky. A sense of detachment from that familiar scene enveloped him—the base ball field, the defunct garage, places and details, customary, normal, retreated into the distance, it seemed into the past, gathering upon the horizon of his thoughts as the roofs of Ellerton huddled beyond the hills, vanishing into shadows that inexorably deepened, blotted out the old aspects, stilled the accustomed voices, sounds.
A servant appeared, and placed a table upon the tiles, spreading a blanched cloth, gleaming crystal and silver. A low bowl of shadowy wood violets was ranged in the centre, and hooded candles lighted, spilling over the table, the flowers, a pale, auriferous pool of light in the purpling dusk. When Eliza followed, in filmy white, she seemed half materialized from the haunting vision of poignant beauty at the back of his brain. She was like moonlight, still and yet disturbing, veiled in illusion, in strange, ethereal influences that set athrill within him emotions immaterial, potent, snowy longing, for which he had no name.
The last plate removed, Anthony stirred his coffee in a state of dreamy happiness. The candlelight spread a wan gold veil over Eliza's delicate countenance, it slid over the pearls about her slim throat, and fell upon her fragile wrists. “It's been wonderful,” he pronounced solemnly.
“I've been terribly rude,” she told him, “I have hardly spoken. I have been busy studying you.”
“There's not much to study,” he disclaimed; “Mrs. Bosbyshell thinks I'm marked for failure.” In reply to her demand he gave a brief and diffident account of that eccentric old woman. “But,” Eliza discerned among the meagre details, “she trusts you, she lets you into her house. And you are perfect to her, of course.
“Any one could trust you, I think. Yet you are not a particle tiresome; most trustworthy people are so—so unexciting. But monotony is far as possible from your vicinity. What did you do, for instance, this morning?” He described to her the advent of the circus, the labor in the obscurity. “I was surprised to see the old thing up,” he ended: “it seemed so hopeless at first.”
“How wonderfully poetic!” she cried.
Until that moment poetry had occupied in his thoughts a place analogous to tea.—In his brief passage through the last school he had been forcibly fed with Gray's Elegy, discovering it unmitigated and sickening rot. When now, in view of her obvious pleasure, he would have to reconsider his judgment.
“That blind effort,” she continued, leaning forward, flushed with the warmth of her image, “all those men struggling, building in the dark, unable to see what they were accomplishing, or what part the others had. And then—oh! don't you see!—the great, snowy tent in the morning sun—a figure of the success, the reward, of all labor, all living.”
“How about the ones that loafed—didn't pull, or were drunk?”
“For all,” she insisted, “sober and drunk and shrinking. Can you think that any supreme judgment would be cheaply material, or in need of any of our penny abilities? do you suppose the supreme beauty has no standard higher than those practical minds that hold out heaven as a sort of reward for washed faces? Anthony,” it was the first time she had called him that, and it rang in his brain in a long peal of rapture, “if there isn't a heaven for every one, there isn't any at all. You, singing an idle song, must be as valuable as the greatest apostle to any supreme love, or else it isn't supreme, it isn't love.”
“You are so wonderfully good,” he muttered, “that you think every one else is good too.”
“But I'm hardly a bit good,” she assured him, “and I wouldn't be good if I could—in the Christian kind of way.” She gazed about with an affectation of secretiveness, then leaned across her coffee cup. “It would bore me horribly,” she confided, “that 'other cheek' thing; I'm not a grain humble; and I spend a criminal amount of money on my clothes. I have even put a patch upon my cheek to be a gin and stumbling-block to a young man.”
She had!
He surveyed with absurd pleasure that minute black crescent on the pale rose of her countenance. If she had been good before she was adorable now: her confession had drawn her out of the transplendid cloud where he had elevated her down to his side; she was infinitely more desirable, more warmly and delightfully human.
“I have been asking about you,” she told him later, with a slight frown; “the accounts are, well—various. I don't mind your—your friends of the stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are 'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty makes me cold. And, since you will come into my thoughts, and smile your funny little smile at me out of walls and other impossible places, I should like to picture you, not in pool rooms, but on the hills that you know so well. I should like to think of your mind echoing with the rush of those streams, the hunting of those owls, you told me about, and not sounding with coarse and silly and brutal words and ideas.”
“It echoes with you,” he replied, “and you are more beautiful than hills and streams.”
For a moment she held his gaze full in the blue depths of her vision; then, with a troubled smile, evaded it. “I'm a patched jade,” she announced.
Ranke, the servant informed them, was ready to meet the train.
“You're going... Elbe's affair on the Wingohocking?”
“Absolutely.” She stood illusive against the saffron blur of the candles, the sweeping hem of night.
“I'll remember,” he blundered; “whatever you would wish... you have changed everything. The dinner was—I don't remember what it was,” he confessed; “but I remember an olive.”
He left the automobile at the edge of Ellerton, and proceeded on foot, passing the dully-shinning bulk of the circus tent. He heard the brassy dissonance of the band within, the monotonous thud of horses' hoofs on the tanbark; a raucous voice rose at the entrance to the side-show dwelling unctuously on the monstrosities to be viewed within for the price of a dime, of a dime, a dime. He recalled the spent lioness in her painted cage, the haggard and sick hyena, the abject trot of the wolves to nowhere.—A sudden exhalation of hatred swept over him for the hideous inhumanity of circuses and men. Eliza had lifted him from the meaningless babble of trivial and hard voices into a high and immaculate region of shining space and quietude. He didn't want to come down again, he protested, tothis.
ANTHONY passed the few, intervening days to the excursion on the Wingohocking in a state of rapt absorption: his brain sounded with every tone of Eliza's voice; she smiled at him, in riding garb, over that delicate trail of freckles; he saw her in the misty, amber dress of the dance; in white, illusively lit by the candles against the shadowy veranda. Now, for the first time, day that had succeeded haphazard to day, without relation or plan, were strung together, bound into an intelligible whole, by the thread of romance. He must get a firm grip upon reality, construct a solid existence out of the unsubstantial elements of his living; but, in his new felicity, he was unable to direct his thoughts to details inevitably sordid; he was lost in the miracle of Eliza Dreen's mere presence; material considerations might, must, be deferred a short while longer.
A stainless afternoon sky overspread finally the group gathered about covered willow baskets on the green bank of the stream. Behind them the meadow swept level, turning back the flood of the sun with a blaze of aureate flowers, to a silver band of birch; the upstream reach, wrinkled and dark, was lost between tangles of wild grapes; below, with a smooth, virid rush, the water poured and broke over rocky shallows.
Anthony launched his canoe from a point of crystalline sand, and, holding it against the hank, gazed covertly at Eliza. She was once more in white, with a broad apple-green ribband about her waist: she stood above him, slenderly poised against the sky; and she was so rare, he thought, so ethereal, that she seemed capable of floating off into the blue. Then he bent, hastily rearranging a cushion, for she was descending toward him. He stepped skilfully after her into the craft, and they drifted silently over the surface of the stream. A thrust of the paddle, in a swirl of white bubbles, turned them about, and they advanced steadily against the sliding current.
The still, watery facsimile of the banks were broken into liquid blots of emerald and bronze by the bow of the canoe. The air rose coldly from the surface to Anthony's face; from the meadows on either hand came the light, dry fragrance of newly cut hay; before them trees, meeting above, formed a sombrous reach, barred with dusty gold shafts of sunlight that sank into the clear depths. He heard behind the distant dip of paddles, and floating voices, worlds removed.
Eliza trailed her hand in the water. An idyllic silence folded them which he was loath to break.... He had rolled up his sleeves, and the muscles of his forearms swelled rhythmically under the clear, brown skin.
“You are preposterously strong,” she approved. His elation, however, collapsed at the condition following. “But strength is simply brutality until it's wisely directed. Mazzini and not Napoleon was my ideal in history.” Who, he wondered unhappily, was Mazzini? “I hated school,” he told her briefly; “I don't believe I have ever read a book through; I'd rather paddle about—withyou.”
“But you have read deep in the book of nature,” she reassured him; “only a very favorite few open those pages. You are such a child,” she added obliquely, “appallingly unsophisticated: that's what's nicest about you, really.” That form of laudation left him cold, and he drove the canoe with a vicious rush against the reflections. “A dear child,” she added, without materially increasing his pleasure.
“Words are rot!” he exploded suddenly; “they can't say any of the important things. I could talk a year to you without telling you what I feel—here,” he laid a hand momentarily on his spare, powerful chest; “it's all mixed up, like lead and fire; or that feeling when ice cream goes to your head. You see,” he ended moodily, “all rot.”
“It's very picturesque... and apparently painful. Words aren't necessary for the truly important things, Anthony.”
“Then you know—what I think of you; you know... how everything else has moved away and left only you; you know a hundred things, all important, all about yourself.”
She set an uncertain smile against the rush of his words. The stream narrowed between high banks drawn against the sheer deeps of sky; the water flowed swiftly, with a sustained whisper at the edges, and, for a silent space, he paddled vigorously. Then a profound, glassy pool opened, sodded bluely to the shores, with low, silvery clumps of willows casting sooty shadows across the verd water; and, with a sharp twist, he beached the canoe with a soft shock upon the shelving pebbles. As he held the craft steady he felt the light, thrilling impact of Eliza's palm as she sprang ashore.
The others followed rapidly. The canoes were drawn out of the water, and preparations for supper commenced. Eliza and Ellie Ball, accompanied by a youth with a pail, proceeded to a nearby farmhouse in quest of milk. Anthony lingered at the water's edge, ignoring the appeal for firewood. The glow of the westering sun faded from the air, and the reflection of the fire lighted behind him danced ruddy op the grass. At intervals small fish splashed invisibly, and a kingfisher cried downstream. Then he heard his sister's voice, and a familiar and moving perfume hovered in his nostrils. He turned and saw Eliza with her arms full of white lilacs. Her loveliness left him breathless, mingled with the low sun it blinded him. She seemed all made of misty bloom—a fragrant spirit of ineffable flowers. The scent of the lilacs stirred profound, inarticulate emotions within him, like the poignant impression left by a forgotten dream of shivering delight.
He scorned the fare soon spread on the clothed sod, burning his throat stoically with a cup of unsweetened coffee. Eliza sat beyond the charring remains of the fire sinking from cherry-red embers to impalpable white ash. He observed with secret satisfaction that she too ate little: an appetite on her part, he felt, would have been a calamity.
'The meadows and distant woods were vague against the primrose west, the cyanite curtain of the east, when the baskets were assembled for the return. Anthony delayed over the arrangement of his craft until Eliza and himself were last in the floating procession. Dense shadows, drooping from the trees, filled the banks; overhead the sky was clear green. They swept silently forward with the current, a rare dip of the paddle. Eliza's countenance was just palely visible. The lilacs lay in a pallid heap at their feet. On either hand the world floated back darkly like an immaterial void through which an ebon stream bore them beyond the stars.
At a bend he reached up and caught hold of an overhanging branch, and they swung into a shallow backwater. A deep shelf of stone lay under the face of the bank, closed in by a network of wildgrape stems. “This is where I sometimes stay at night,” he told her; “no one knows but you.”
SHE rose, and, without warning, stepped out upon the rock. “Here's where you build your fire,” she cried at the discovery of a blackened heap of ashes. He secured the canoe and followed her. “Ideal,” she breathed. The sound of the fall below was faintly audible; the quavering cry of an owl, the beating of heavy wings, rose above the bank. “Don't you envy the old pastoral people following their flocks from land to land, setting up their tents by streams like this, waking with the dawn on the world? or gipsies... you must read 'Lavengro.'”
“I don't envy any one on God's little globe,” he asserted; “to be here with you is the best thing possible.”
“Something more desirable would soon occur to you.”
“Than you!” he protested; “than you!”
“But people get tired of what they have.”
“It's what they don't have that makes them old and tired,” he told her with sudden prescience; “when I think of what I am going to lose, of what I can never have, it makes me crazy.”
“Why do you say that?... How can you know?”
She was standing close to him in the constricted space, the tangible shock of her nearness sweeping over him in waves of heady emotion. The water gurgling by the rock was the only sound in a world-stillness.
“I mean you.”
“Well, I'm not fairy gold; I'm not the end of the rainbow. I am just Eliza.”
“Just Eliza!” he scoffed. Then the possibility contained in her words struck him dumb. The feeling irresistibly returned that because of her heavenly ignorance, her charity, she mistook him to be worthy. The necessity to guard her from her own divinity impelled him to repeat, miserably, all that she had ignored.
“I'm not much account,” he said laboriously; “you see, I never stuck at anything, and, somehow, things have never stuck to me. It was that way at school—I was expelled from four. I'm supposed to be shiftless.”
“I don't care in the least for that!” she declared; “only one thing is really important to me... something, oh, so different.” Suddenly she laid her hand upon his sleeve, and, pitifully white, faced him. “I've had the beautifullest feeling about you,” she whispered; “Anthony, tell me truly, are you... good?” A sob rose uncontrollably in his throat, and his eyes filled with tears that spilled over his cheeks. For a moment he struggled to check them, then, unashamed, slipped onto his knees before her and held her tightly in his arms. “No one in the world can say that I am not—what you mean.”
She stooped, and sat beside him on the stone, holding his hand close to her slight body. “My dream,” she said simply. “I didn't understand it at first; you see, I was only a child. And then when I grew older, and—and heard things, it seemed impossible. That sort of goodness only bored other girls... they liked men of the world, men with a past. I thought perhaps I was only morbid, and lost trust in—in you.”
“It was a kind of accident,” he admitted; “I never thought about it the way you did. It seemed young to me.”
“I don't believe it was an accident in the least,” she insisted. A mist rose greyly from the darker surface of the stream, and settled cold and clammy about Anthony's face. It drew about them in wavering garlands, growing steadily denser. Eliza was sitting now pressed against him, and he felt a shiver run through her. “You are cold!” he cried instantly, and rose, lifting her to her feet. She smiled, in his arms, and he bent down and kissed her. She clung to him with a deep sigh, and met his lips steadily with her own. The mist slipped like a veil over Eliza's head and drops of moisture shone in her hair. Anthony turned and unfastened the canoe; and, suddenly conscious of the length of their delay, he urged it with long sweeps over the stream. Beyond the lilacs, distilling their potent sweetness in the dark, Eliza was motionless, silent, a flicker of white in the gloom.
They swept almost immediately into the broad reach where they had started. The lights from the windows of a boat house, the voices of the others, streamed gaily over the water. He felt Eliza tremble as he lifted her ashore.
“It's happiness,” she told him; “I am ever so warm inside.”
BY his plate at the lunch table he discovered, the following day, a small, lavender envelope stamped and addressed to Anthony Ball, Esq. He slipped it hastily into his pocket, and managed but a short-lived pretext of eating. Then, with the letter yet unopened, he left Ellerton, and penetrated into the heart of the countryside.
He stopped, finally, under a fence that crossed a hill, on a slope of wild strawberries. The hill fell away in an unbroken sweep of undulating, blue-green wheat; trees filled the hollow, with a roof and thread of silver water drawn through the lush leaves; on either hand chocolate loam bore the tender ripple of young com; and beyond, crossed by the shifting shadows of slow-drifting clouds, hill and wood and pasture spread a mellow mosaic of summer.
He tore open the envelope with a reluctant delight. At the top of the sheet E D was stamped severely in mauve. “My very dear,” he read. He stopped, suddenly unable to proceed; the countryside swam in his vision; he gulped an ecstatic, convulsive breath, and proceeded:
“It's too wonderful—I can't realize that you exist, and that I have found you in such a great world. Isn't it strange how real dreams are; just now the real world seems the dream, and my dear home, my mother, shadows compared to the thoughts that fill my brain of you, you, you.
“But I am writing mostly to tell you something that, perhaps, you didn't fully understand yesterday—and yet I think you must have—that, if you really want me, I am absolutely your own. I couldn't help it if I wanted to, and, oh, I don't want to! I let a man at Etretat kiss me, and I am glad I did, for it made me understand that I must wait for you.
“I won't write any more now because my head aches. From Eliza who loves you utterly.” Then he saw that she had written on the following page: “Don't worry about money and the future; I have my own, all we shall need for years, and we can do something together.”
He laid the letter beside him on the grass. The welling song of a catbird sounded unsupportably sweet, and a peaceful column of smoke rose bluely from the chimney below: it carried him in imagination to a dwelling set in a still, green garden, where birds filled the branches with melody, and Eliza and himself walked hand in hand and kissed. Night would gather in about their joy, their windows would shine with the golden lamp of their seclusion, their voices mingle... sink... sacred.
He dreamed for a long while; the sunlight vanished from the slope below him, from the darkling trees, touched only the farthest hills with a rosy glow. As the sun sank an errant air whispered in the wheat, and scattered the pungent aroma of the wild strawberries. A voice called thinly from the swales, and cows gathered indistinctly about a gate. Anthony rose. The world was one vast harmony in which he struck the highest, happiest note. Beyond the near hills the lilac glitter of the Ellerton lights sprang palely up on the blue dusk. As he made his way home, Anthony's brain teemed with delightful projects, with anticipation, the thought of the house in the hollow—abode of love, steeped in night.
ELLIE was in the garden, and interrupted his progress toward a belated dinner. “Father wants to see you,” she called; “at the Club, of course.” He wondered absently, approaching the Club, what his father wanted. The rooms occupied the second story of the edifice that housed the administration of the county; the main corridor was choked by a crowd that moved noisily toward an auditorium in the rear, but the Club was silent, save for the click of invisible billiard balls.
His father was asleep in the reading room, a newspaper spread upon his knees, and one thin hand twisted in his beard. Through an open window drifted the strains of a band on the Courthouse lawn. The older man woke, clearing his throat sharply. “Well, Anthony,” he nodded. Anthony found a chair.
His father leaned forward, regarding him with a keen, kindly gaze. “I'm told the garage has gone up,” he commenced.
“Sam took his car away; it was Alfred's infernal tinkering; he can't leave a machine alone.”
“Did you close affairs satisfactorily, stop solvent?”
“There's a little debt of about six dollars.”
The other sought his wallet, and, removing a rubber band, counted six dollars into Anthony's hand. “Meet that in the morning.” He leaned hack, tapping the wallet with deliberate fingers. “I suppose you have no plan for the immediate future,” he observed.
“Nothing right now.”
“I have one for you, though, as 'right now' as this week.”
Anthony listened respectfully, his thoughts still dwelling upon the beauty of the dusk without, of life. “You have tried a number of things in the past few years without success. I have started you in a small way again and again, only to observe the familiar course of a failure inevitable from your shiftless habits. You are not a bad boy, but you have no ability to concentrate, like a stream spread all over the meadow—you have no course. You're a loiterer.”
“Yes, sir,” said Anthony, from the midst of his abstraction.
“You are too old for that now, either it must stop at once, or you will become definitely worthless. I am going to make a determined effort—I am going to send you to California, your brother-in-law writes that he can give you something.”
The term California sounded in Anthony's brain like the unexpected clash of an immense hell. It banished his pleasant revery in disordered shreds, filling him with sudden dismay.
“I telegraphed Albert yesterday,” the even tones continued, “and have his answer in my pocket. You are to go out to him immediately.”
“But that's impossible,” Anthony interrupted; “it just can't be done.”
“Why not?”
He found himself completely at a loss to give adequate expression to his reason for remaining in Ellerton. His joy was so new that he had scarcely formulated it to himself, it evaded words, defied definition—it was a thing of dreams, a vision in a shining garment, a fountain of life at the bottom of his heart.
“Come; why not?”
“I don't want to go away from Ellerton... just now.”
“That is precisely what you must do. I can understand your desire to remain close by your mother—she has an excuse for you, assistance, at every turn.”
“That isn't the reason; it's... it's,” he boggled horribly, “a girl.”
“Indeed,” his father remarked dryly.
Anthony shrunk painfully from the unsympathetic voice of the elder. A new defiance of his father welled hotly within him, corrupting the bonds of discipline that had held him lovingly to his parent throughout the past. A chasm opened between them; and, when Anthony spoke again, it was with a voice of insipient insubordination.
“It isn't the silly stuff you think,” he told the other; “I'm engaged!”
“What on?” pithily came the inquiry. “Unfortunately I can't afford the luxury of a daughter-in-law. I thought you were something more of a man than to bring your wife into your mother's house.”
“I sha'n't; we can get along until I... find work.”
“Do you mean that your wife will support you?”
“Not altogether; she will help until—until—” he stopped miserably before the anger confronting him in the other's gaze: it was useless to explain, he thought; But if his father laughed at him, at his love, he would leave the room and never see him again. “I can't see why money is so damned holy!” he broke out; “why it matters so infernally where it comes from; it seems to me only a dirty detail.”
“It is the measure of a man's honor,” the elder Ball told him inexorably; “how it is made or got stamps you in the world. I am surprised to hear that you would even consider taking it from a woman, surprised and hurt. It shows all the more clearly the necessity for your going at once into a hard, healthy existence. Your mother will get you ready; a couple of days should do it.”
“... all unexpected,” Anthony muttered; “I must think about it, see some one. I'll—I'll talk to you to-morrow. That's it,” he enunciated more hopefully, “to-morrow—”
“Entirely unnecessary,” his father interrupted, “nothing to be gained by delay or further talk. The thing's arranged.”
“I think I won't go,” Anthony told him slowly. The other picked up the paper, smoothing out the creases. “Very well,” he replied; “I dare say your mother will do something for you.—Women are the natural source of supplies for the sort of person you seem at the point of becoming.” A barrier of paper, covered with print in regular columns, shut one from the other.
Anthony burned under a whelming sense of injustice. He decided that he would leave the room, his father, forever; but, somehow, he remained motionless in his chair, casting about in his thoughts for words with which to combat the elder's scorn. He thought of Eliza; she smiled at him with appealing loveliness; he felt her letter in his pocket, remembered her boundless generosity. He couldn't leave her! The band in the square below was playing a familiar operatic lament, and the refrain beat on his consciousness in waves of despairing and poignant longing. A sea of misery swept over him in which he struggled like a spent swimmer—Eliza was the far, silver shore toward which he fought. It wasn't fair—a sob almost mastered him—to ask him to go away now, when he had but found her.
“It's not Siberia,” he heard his father say, “nor a life sentence; if this—this 'girl' is serious, you will be closer working for her in California than idle in Ellerton.”
“I don't want to go away from her,” he whispered; “the world's such a hell of a big, empty place... things happen.” He dashed some bright tears from his eyes, and, turning his back on the other, gazed through the window at the tops of the maple trees—a black tracery of foliage against the lights below.
“Two or three years should set you on your feet, give you an opportunity to return.” Eternity could scarcely have seemed more appalling than the term casually indicated by his father, it was unthinkable! A club member entered, fingering the racked journals on the long table, exchanging trivial comments with the older Ball. It seemed incredible to Anthony, in the face of the cataclysm which threatened him, that the world should continue to revolve callously about such topics. It was an affront to the gravity, the dignity, of his suffering. He swiftly left the room.
IT was Saturday night, Bay Street was thronged, the stores brilliantly lit. He saw in the distance the red and blue jars of illuminated water that advertised Doctor Allhop's drugstore, and turned abruptly on his heel. In the seclusion of his room he once more read Eliza's letter: it was a superlative document of sweet commonsense, the soul of nobility, of wisdom, of tenderness, of divine generosity. In its light all other suggestions, considerations, courses, seemed tawdry and ignoble. The boasted wisdom of a world of old men, of material experience, seemed only the mean makeshifts for base and unworthy ends. The ecstasy sweeping from his heart to his brain, the delicious fancies, the rare harmonies, that haunted him, the ineffable perfume of invisible lilacs—these were the true material from which to fashion life, these were the high things, the important. And youth was the time to grasp them: a swift premonition seized him of the coldness, the ineptitude, the disease, of old age.
For the first time in his life he thought of death in definite connection with himself: he was turning out the gas, preparatory for sleep; and, at the instantaneous darkness, he thought, with a gasp of fear, it would be like that. He stood trembling as a full realization of disillusion mastered him; all his hot, swinging blood, the instinctive longing for perpetuation aroused in him by Eliza, in sick revolt. Fearsome images filled his mind... the hole in the clay—closed; putrefaction; the linked mass of worms. In feverish haste he lit the gas; his body was wet with sweat; his heart pounding unsteadily.
The familiar aspect of his room somewhat reassured him; the thought dimmed, slowly conquered by the flooding tide of his living. Then he realized that Eliza too must die, and his terrors vanished before a loving pity for her earthly fragility. Finally, death itself assumed a less threatening guise; peace stole imperceptibly into his heart. A vague belief, new born of his passion, that dying was not the end of all, rose within him—there must be a struggle, heights to win, gulfs to cross, a faith to keep. With steady fingers he turned out the gas.—Eliza was his faith: he fell into a sound slumber.
HE made no comment when, in the morning, his mother made tentative piles of his clothing. He would see Eliza that afternoon, and then announce their decision. His mother attempted to fathom his feeling at the prospect of the journey, the separation from Ellerton; but, the memory of his father's cutting words still rankling in his mind, he evaded her questioning.
“If you are going to be miserable out there,” she told him, enveloping him in the affection of her steady, grey gaze, “something else might be found. I can always help—”
“You don't understand these things,” he interrupted her brusquely, annoyed by his father's prescience. They were sitting in her sewing room, a pile of his socks at her side. She wore her familiar, severe garb, the steelbowed spectacles directed upon the needle flashing steadily in her assured fingers. She was eternally laboring for her children, Anthony realized with a pang of affection. His earliest memories were charged with her unflagging care, the touch of her smooth and tireless hands, the defense of her energetic voice.
He must tell her about his engagement, but not until he had seen Eliza again, when something definite would be agreed upon. It was immensely difficult for him to talk about the subject nearest his heart-words diminished and misrepresented it: he wanted to brood over it, secretly, for days.
LATER he dressed with scrupulous exactitude, and proceeded directly to Hydrangea House. The afternoon was sultry, the air full of the soothing drone of summer insects, the dust of the road rose in heavy puffs about his feet. He crossed the stream and fields, saturated with sunlight, and came to the pillared portico of his destination.
“Miss Dreen,” Anthony said, stepping forward into the opening door.
“Miss Dreen cannot see you,” the servant returned without hesitation. Anthony drew back, momentarily repelled; but, before he could question this announcement, he heard grinding wheels on the gravel drive. Turning, he saw a motor stop, and Mrs. Dreen descend, followed by a man with a somber, deeply-scored countenance. Anthony moved forward eagerly as she mounted the steps. “Mrs. Dreen,” he asked; “can you tell me-” She passed with a confused, blank face, without stopping or acknowledging his salutation, and the door closed softly upon her and her companion.
A momentary flame of anger within Anthony quickly sank to cold consternation. Eliza had told her parents and they had dismissed the idea and him. It was evident they had forbidden her to see him. He walked indecisively down the steps, still carrying his hat, and stopped mechanically on the driveway. He gazed blindly over a brilliant, scarlet bed of geraniums, over the extended lawn, the rolling hills of Ellerton. Then his courage returned, stiffened by the obstacles which apparently confronted him: he would show them that he was not to be lightly dismissed; no power on earth should separate him from Eliza.
The servant had only obeyed Mrs. Dreen's direction; Eliza, he was certain, had no choice in the matter of his reception. Then, unexpectedly, he remembered his father's words, the latter's contemptuous reference to all appeals to women. He must go to Mr. Dreen, and straightforwardly state his position, tell him...what?Why, that he, Anthony Ball, loved Eliza, desired her, had come to take her away...where?In all the world he had no place prepared for her. He drove his hand into his pocket, and discovered a quarter of a dollar and some odd pennies—all that he possessed. Suddenly he laughed, a short, sorry merriment that stopped in a dry gasp. He turned and ran, stumbling over the grass, through the hot dust, toward Ellerton. Two years, he thought, California; California and two years.