Jewel Weed Part 36

"Do you see that?" he demanded.

Lena saw and dimpled.

"Now I propose," d.i.c.k went on, "to carry you down stairs, just as you are! I shall then arouse the whole household by my shouts and gather them around you; and when every man jack of them is there, I shall say 'Ladies and gentlemen, is it possible for a man whose wife looks like this to utter any serious accusation against femininity?'"

"d.i.c.k, don't be silly," said Lena, pouting with pleasure, and she glanced again at herself in the gla.s.s. "I am nice, am I not?"

"Nice!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed d.i.c.k, "Huyler and Maillard and Whitman and Lowney, all rolled into one big candy man, never dreamed of anything so sweet.

Did you really think I was disrespectful? Why, little Lena!"

Easter morning dawned, a G.o.d-given splendor of blue and spring softness, and the six stood, after breakfast, on the veranda and looked at the day.

"Time and the world are before you. Choose how you will spend the forenoon," said Mrs. Lenox.

"I should like to drive," Lena promptly replied. "Mr. Lenox was telling me last night about his new pair of horses. I know he is pining to show them off."

She cast one of her most fascinating glances at her unmoved host.

"Just the thing. How shall we divide up?" And Mrs. Lenox looked vaguely around.

"Miss Elton and I," said Norris boldly, "are going to row, just as we used last summer."

Madeline glanced sidewise at him with some astonishment, as he made this radical statement, but although she pondered a moment, she offered no objection. d.i.c.k also glanced at him longingly as he said "last summer".

Our lives seem made of little bits that have small relation with each other. Things just happen. And yet, when we look back over a long stretch we realize that life is a coherent whole, that it leads somewhere, and d.i.c.k's life had led a long way in the past year. So he too became grave but said nothing, as he resigned himself to a back seat beside Mrs. Lenox and watched Lena perched airily beside her host.

"Now I hope that matter will be amicably settled," Mrs. Lenox began, looking with a satisfied air at the two unmarried people who were starting toward the boat-house.

"What!" d.i.c.k exclaimed with a sudden start.

"Are you a bat that you can not see daylight facts?" she cried, turning upon him.

"I dare say I am." And he looked very sober. "Yes, I suppose it is all right. Norris is one of those fellows who always knows what he wants, and just plods along until he gets it."

"I said 'row'," Ellery remarked as he pushed the boat out from sh.o.r.e, "but I meant 'loaf and invite the soul'. The sunlight is too delectable for anything strenuous."

"But inviting the soul is always a solitary experience," objected Madeline.

"Perhaps. But it is delightful to know that there is a sister soul also inviting herself close at hand. I hope yours will accept the invitation.

'At home--the soul of Mr. Ellery Norris, to meet the soul of Miss Madeline Elton'."

A soft flush rose over Madeline's face and she devoted herself to the tiller ropes.

"P.S. Please come," Ellery went on with a laugh. "R.S.V.P."

"Aren't you 'flouting old ends'?" she smiled.

"I hoped I was flouting new beginnings," he answered soberly, and he rowed languidly in a silence which Madeline rushed to fill.

"I've been thinking ever since last night about d.i.c.k," she said. "He is so different from the buoyant creature of last summer. And it is only a year."

"Well, perhaps this is a phase." He rested on his oars and looked at her. "d.i.c.k is healthy, and joy is his normal state. He ought to be able to recover from his malady."

"Sometimes I think it is permanent."

"I am almost afraid, too. But you see you can not get any bargains in the department store of this world. You have to pay full price for everything. If you want self-indulgence, you have to pay your health; if you want health, you have to pay self-control. You never pay less than the value of what you get, and you are often horribly over-charged for a very inferior article. Now d.i.c.k wanted Lena Quincy. He bought a little gratification, and paid--"

"What?"

"Everything he had," answered Norris abruptly. "Do you think I have not watched his courage and ideals wither as if they had been frosted? He is numb. 'Heavy as frost,' Wordsworth said, and that's the weightiest figure he could find. It did not take her a month to begin to change him. In three months she has him well started. Isn't it a pity that the worse one of the two should have the controlling force? But d.i.c.k's very volatility that we love has laid him open to this thing."

"I'm glad," said Madeline slowly, "that he has his political interest."

"Yes, he's going into it with a kind of fury."

"Won't that give him a big outlet?"

"He may get a lot of satisfaction and do a really creditable thing."

"Your tone does not sound very hopeful."

"A single interest in life may accomplish more for the world, but I don't believe it is very satisfactory for one's self."

Madeline looked at him inquiringly.

"G.o.d gives us of His own creative power," he said reverently, and there came into his very practical face that dreamy look which she had seen there once or twice before. "He supplies us with the raw materials of the universe, gold and beauty and food and desire--and love--and He bids us out of these things to build a man. We can't build a successful man if we use only one ingredient. We get a complete man only when we use them all."

Madeline stared off across the waters, and Ellery watched her over shipped oars. At last he said, "But are you going to think only of d.i.c.k, and d.i.c.k, and d.i.c.k for ever?"

She turned on him a face flushed but utterly frank.

"I know what you are thinking," she said. "But you are mistaken, quite mistaken." And she met his eyes squarely in spite of her heightened color. "At this very moment I was thinking more of you than of him," she added.

"And what of me?"

"I was thinking how I misread you at first. I thought you a kind of grub."

"And now?"

"That you are dogged and persistent; and that therefore you stick to your ideals better than he."

"Do you know how comparatively easy that is, even for a plodder, when his ideals are set up before him in visible form, so that he can not forget them by day or by night? I wonder if you can realize what it means to have a face like yours looking up from every dirty strip of galley-proof, and a voice like yours sounding under the rumble of the big presses. It's something of a possession for an every-day man." A soft glow that might have been a trick of the spring sun spread over Madeline's face. There is no thought more intoxicating to a girl than to feel that she stands to a man for his ideals. A long sweet silence fell between them, while she mused on this thing, and he watched her in tense anxiety.

"Madeline!" he cried, suddenly leaning forward and catching her hands.

"I must tell you! You must know, and I must know!"

With the grasp of his fingers, the first physical touch of love, an electric pang seemed to leap through the girl's body; and in the flash were shown to her new heights and depths in herself, and a thousand dim things in the future. She felt, in the man, the revelation of that mystery by which the body's pa.s.sion slips into pa.s.sion of the soul--that soul-love, which by its very nature can never know la.s.situde nor revulsion. And what was actual in him, grew radiant with possibility in herself.