At the Age of Eve Part 7

"But who'll get the calf out of the fence corner?" mother asked anxiously, as father walked to the hat-rack for an umbrella.

"_Me!_" cried Bob, speaking for the first time, but to so much purpose that we all beamed grat.i.tude upon him.

So, after being "much tossed about by land and on the deep," the calf was finally loosed from his pillory, the Sullivans were settled in the sanctuary of their own home, the lovely dinner was eaten in silence, and our family went grumpily to bed.

Then this morning early the three belated dinner guests drove in from Bayville. The two lesser lights caught the nine-o'clock car into the city, but Mr. Chalmers drove on to the little hotel in the village and later presented himself, in due calling season, at our house, with apologies for the catastrophe of last evening. Mother said he had spoken of it as catastrophe before I came into the room, but when he mentioned the accident to me later on in the day, as we two sat quite apart from the others, he referred to it as _calamity_.

Father and Rufe urged him to spend the day, an invitation which mother warmly seconded after a moment's quick recollection of how many of the dainties left over from last night's feast could be creamed and pated and souffled.

He said it was rather necessary for him to be in town that day, but he stayed; and father and Rufe both remembered during the course of the forenoon that they had some matters to attend to which, if he would excuse them for half an hour or so, they would despatch with all possible haste and rejoin him before the ladies had quite had time to talk him to death!

Rufe really did have some telephoning to the city to get through with; it is his regular morning duty; and father had to drive across part of our place to give directions about some fences which had been washed away last night. Of course, mother was needed about the dining-room, but Cousin Eunice, bless her, unselfishly betook herself off up-stairs out of pure kindness of heart!

Even the day was one of those golden days which come at the very end of summer, when the cool morning air mounts to the head like old wine, and the rich afternoon sunshine seems to hover lovingly over the earth and rejoice in having fulfilled the summer's glorious promise. All through the morning the birds caroled as happily as if they thought it was winter instead of summer a-dying; then later, they settled down like the rest of the world in the hushed silence of the hot afternoon, when the heat causes a brilliant haze over the fields around; and it seems as if all nature rests.

All my life this hour of summer afternoons has held a strange, undefinable sadness. When I was a little girl and used to spend long hours out under the trees reading, my book would always drop from my hand as this period of stillness came on, and my eyes would wander away to the intense blue of the sky and the dazzling whiteness of the distant clouds, while a small but persistent voice seemed to keep mocking my memory with the query: "_Can't_ you remember what used to happen on days like this?"

And my memory would grope longingly away after the lead of that tormenting voice, and it would visit all the far-away lands of Romance, summer lands of sunshine always, Italy, India, Egypt--but it never would remember exactly. "Where Ta.s.so's spirit soars and sings,"

I used to repeat in a mystified wonder, for the beauties of his land were as familiar to me as my own fields and meadows.

Then I grew older and learned about reincarnation of the spirit.

"That's it!" I cried exultantly, hugging the beautiful mysticism to my heart. "That is _bound_ to be it!"

Life took on a new significance, and then for months I felt myself one with the initiated! I was radiantly happy and achingly miserable with this new, intangible philosophy; then Alfred Morgan came along and told me that my vague memories were imagination; and that my restless longings came from a perpetual idleness. And I believed him, because I could not hear any statement from Alfred Morgan's lips without believing it.

"I'd rather have tuberculosis than an imagination like yours, Ann," he had said, and he advised me to learn to cook.

Perhaps it was the extraordinary beauty of the day and the surroundings that led our talk into unusual channels as Richard Chalmers and I walked out together through the golden afternoon haze.

Yes, we had our hour alone again, as in the morning; but not by accident this time. He had graciously demanded it.

"Can't you rescue me from Clayborne's relentless newspaper spirit?" he had asked in a low tone while we were at the table. I smiled a.s.sent, whereupon he looked at me gratefully and a few minutes later announced that I had promised to show him the orchard where those magnificent peaches grew.

So it happened that when the rest of the family dispersed in different directions, early in the afternoon, I pinned on a big, flat hat--a white embroidered affair, with a great bow of black velvet ribbon--and walked with him out into the glow. Down the avenue of cedars we went and up the broad road, for the orchard can be reached through a big gate opening off the pike, and the distance is much longer around that way. We soon gained the desired shade of its luxuriant leafiness, and I pointed out to him our most noteworthy trees. He admired their beauty without looking at them.

After walking around the orchard a bit we finally sat down on a fragment of stone wall, a prehistoric structure, which still protects a portion of the grounds; and he took off his hat and began to fan with it. His forehead was a little damp, and, as he wiped away the perspiration, I observed again the exceeding fairness of his skin. His hair, too, is so nearly light that the sprinkling of gray is almost unnoticed, save by the closest scrutiny.

My survey of him, while at close range, was quite brief, for, after a remark or two about the heat at this time of day, he turned to me suddenly and asked with disconcerting straightforwardness:

"What were you doing that day at the gates of the little cemetery?"

"Oh! Why, I was walking around--trying to get warm."

I longed to ask him what he was doing there.

"I figured that day that you were a faithful little soul, going out to visit some hallowed spot. You looked so strikingly dark and _vivid_ against the colorless background of the sky that I quite thought you were Oriental. Then the next time I saw you, in the lobby of the city hall--do you remember?--Well, you were with a tall, foreign-looking woman, a Russian, I imagined; so that convinced me--"

"She is a Pole," I corrected, "but she's the wife of Doctor Gordon, a great friend of ours."

"--and that convinced me," he went on, as if Ann Lisbeth's nationality were of no more moment to him than one of the bits of stone which I had gathered up from fragments scattered over the top of the wall, and was making white marks upon the solid rock sides with these tiny splinters, "that you were foreign." Then, in a lower tone, and with little hesitation in his delightful, drawling voice, he added: "I called you Rebecca--because I had to call you something."

"How disappointing to find me a plain American girl!"

"When I found this morning that you are an American girl--I deny the 'plain'--I gave a start which I know was noticed by everybody in the room! It isn't often that I lose my self-possession, but I was _amazed_ to find you here, in this little town--and my friend, Clayborne's, niece."

"His wife's cousin," I explained, but again he paid no attention to my interruption.

"I had haunted the theaters and shopping districts for weeks last winter--looking for Rebecca," he finished up. "No wonder I was surprised to find that you are _you_!"

He paused, waiting for me to say something, and, just because it was the last thing I wished to say, and because I would not, for the world, have had him suspect such a thing, I stammered out the truth!

"I--I wondered who _you_ were, too," I faltered. "You are so entirely Anglo-Saxon-looking; and the place is Hebrew! Besides, it was such a very cold day to visit a cemetery!"

He smiled a little, but politely caught at my bait.

"I had been to see old man Cohen, the s.e.xton. He is interested in politics."

Then we fell to talking about foreign types of faces, a subject which he discussed extremely well, having traveled everywhere, as I felt sure he had when I first laid eyes on him; and from the types of beauty, we fell to discussing the various countries. He looked surprised at what he termed the "wistful" note in my voice when I asked him questions about my favorite lands; and he smiled when I explained to him that I have never been anywhere.

"So much the better for your enthusiasm," he said with the provoking air of a person who has been everywhere and done everything--and found it all a bore. "I judge that you are a very enthusiastic young woman."

"My daily life is punctuated with exclamation points," I admitted, but I longed to ask him how he knew I was enthusiastic. Still, it has always seemed in bad taste to me for a girl to try to draw a man into a long discussion of her personality--a new acquaintance, I mean.

Mammy Lou's slogan, "Make yourself beautiful, and _skase_," can be applied in devious ways that she wotted not of when she handed it down to me.

"I suppose that is partly on account of your age?" he said, still looking at me with his amused smile.

My age! His tone and smile awoke a kind of resentment. He must feel himself infinitely older and wiser, else he would never a.s.sume that superior air.

"Age has nothing to do with it! It is entirely a matter of temperament," I contradicted, with a little show of feeling. He smiled more broadly, and a hot flush of shame spread over my face as I recalled my dreams of this man. I had thought of him for months, had imagined him in every great and heroic role; had made a hero of him.

Worse still, I fancied that he--perhaps--had thought of me; had stayed here to-day because he had found me! And here he was smiling down at me as he made playful remarks about my age!

"Why should you look distressed over a mention of your age?" he suddenly broke in, so gently that I looked up in surprise and found his face grave. He had been reading my thoughts--at least in part.

"Now, if you were as old as I--that would be something worth troubling over."

"You? Yet the papers always speak of your youth. They will call you the 'boy governor' when you're elected."

He was pleased at my words.

"Or the boy who also ran--perhaps! But age is only a relative condition. My political friends call me a boy because I am only thirty-seven years old. Yet, to _you_ that age may seem patriarchal.

Doesn't it?"

I thrilled at the look of earnestness in his eyes. He was the one now who was concerned over what I thought of his age.

"Rufe is thirty-seven," I answered, trying to make my tone non-committal.

"And yet you call him Rufe!"

"I've known him always. He's like my brother."

"Well, if you should some day grow to know me 'always,' could you--even if I am thirty-seven--could you call me Richard?"