Saturday's Child Part 27

"And if we were engaged it would be all right, is that it?" Peter said, after an embarra.s.sed pause.

"Yes, but I don't want you to think for one instant---" Susan began, with flaming cheeks.

"I wish to the Lord people would mind their own business," Peter said vexedly. There was a pause. Then he added, cheerfully, "Tell 'em we're engaged then, that'll shut 'em up!"

The world rocked for Susan.

"Oh, but Peter, we can't--it wouldn't be true!"

"Why wouldn't it be true?" he demanded, perversely.

"Because we aren't!" persisted Susan, rubbing an old blot on the desk with a damp forefinger.

"I thought one day we said that when I was forty-five and you were forty-one we were going to get married?" Peter presently reminded her, half in earnest, half irritated.

"D-d-did we?" stammered Susan, smiling up at him through a mist of tears.

"Sure we did. We said we were going to start a stock-ranch, and raise racers, don't you remember?"

A faint recollection of the old joke came to her.

"Well, then, are we to let people know that in twenty years we intend to be married?" she asked, laughing uncertainly.

Peter gave his delighted shout of amus.e.m.e.nt. The conversation had returned to familiar channels.

"Lord, don't tell anyone! WE'LL know it, that's enough!" he said.

That was all. There was no chance for sentiment, they could not even clasp hands, here in the office. Susan, back at her desk, tried to remember exactly what HAD been said and implied.

"Peter, I'll have to tell Auntie!" she had exclaimed.

Peter had not objected, had not answered indeed.

"I'll have to take my time about telling MY aunt," he had said, "but there's time enough! See here, Susan, I'm dated with Barney White in Berkeley to-night--is that all right?"

"Surely!" Susan had a.s.sured him laughingly.

"You see," Peter had explained, "it'll be a very deuce of a time before we'll want everyone to know. There's any number of things to do. So perhaps it's just as well if people don't suspect---"

"Peter, how extremely like you not to care what people think as long as we're not engaged, and not to want them to suspect it when we are!"

Susan could say, smiling above the deep hurt in her heart.

And Peter laughed cheerfully again.

Then Mr. Brauer came in, and Susan went back to her desk, brain and heart in a whirl. But presently one fact disengaged itself from a mist of doubts and misgivings, hopes and terrors. She and Peter were engaged to be married! What if vows and protestations, plans and confidences were still all to come, what if the very first kiss was still to come?

The essential thing remained; they were engaged, the question was settled at last.

Peter was not, at this time, quite the ideal lover. But in what was he ever conventional; when did he ever do the expected thing? No; she would gain so much more than any other woman ever had gained by her marriage, she would so soon enter on a life that would make these days seem only a troubled dream, that she could well afford to dispense with some of the things her romantic nature half expected now. It might not be quite comprehensible in him, but it was certainly a convenience for her that he seemed to so dread an announcement just now. She must have some gowns for the entertainments that would be given them; she must have some money saved for trousseau; she must arrange a little tea at home, when, the boarders being eliminated, Peter could come to meet a few of the very special old friends. These things took time. Susan spent the dreamy, happy afternoon in desultory planning.

Peter went out at three o'clock with Barney White, looking in to nod Susan a smiling good-by. Susan returned to her dreams, determined that she would find the new bond as easy or as heavy as he chose to make it.

She had only to wait, and fate would bring this wonderful thing her way; it would be quite like Peter to want to do the thing suddenly, before long, summon his aunt and uncle, her aunt and cousins, and announce the wedding and engagement to the world at once.

Lost in happy dreams, she did not see Th.o.r.n.y watching her, or catch the intense, wistful look with which Mr. Brauer so often followed her.

Susan had a large share of the young German's own dreams just now, a demure little Susan in a checked gingham ap.r.o.n, tasting jelly on a vine-shaded porch, or basting a chicken in a sunny kitchen, or pouring her lord's coffee from a shining pot. The dream Susan's hair was irreproachably neat, she wore shining little house-slippers, and she always laughed out,--the ringing peal of bells that Henry Brauer had once heard in the real Susan's laugh,--when her husband teased her about her old fancy for Peter Coleman. And the dream Susan was the happy mother of at least five little girls--all girls!--a little Susan that was called "Sanna," and an Adelaide for the gross-mutter in the old country, and a Henrietta for himself----

Clean and strong and good, well-born and ambitious, gentle, and full of the love of books and music and flowers and children, here was a mate at whose side Susan might have climbed to the very summit of her dreams. But she never fairly looked at Mr. Brauer, and after a few years his plump dark little dumpling of a Cousin Linda came from Bremen to teach music in the Western city, and to adore clever Cousin Heinrich, and then it was time to hunt for the sunny kitchen and buy the shining coffee-pot and change little Sanna's name to Linchen.

For Susan was engaged to Peter Coleman! She went home on this particular evening to find a great box of American Beauty roses waiting for her, and a smaller box with them--the pearl crescent again! What could the happy Susan do but pin on a rose with the crescent, her own cheeks two roses, and go singing down to dinner?

"Lovey, Auntie doesn't like to see you wearing a pin like that!" Mrs.

Lancaster said, noticing it with troubled eyes. "Didn't Peter send it to you?"

"Yes'm," said Susan, dimpling, as she kissed the older woman.

"Don't you know that a man has no respect for a girl who doesn't keep him a little at a distance, dear?"

"Oh,--is--that--so!" Susan spun her aunt about, in a mad reel.

"Susan!" gasped Mrs. Lancaster. Her voice changed, she caught the girl by the shoulders, and looked into the radiant face. "Susan?" she asked.

"My child---!"

And Susan strangled her with a hug, and whispered, "Yes--yes--yes! But don't you dare tell anyone!"

Poor Mrs. Lancaster was quite unable to tell anyone anything for a few moments. She sat down in her place, mechanically returning the evening greetings of her guests. Her handsome, florid face was quite pale. The soup came on and she roused herself to serve it; dinner went its usual way.

But going upstairs after dinner, Mary Lou, informed of the great event in some mysterious way, gave Susan's waist a girlish squeeze and said joyously, "Ma had to tell me, Sue! I AM so glad!" and Virginia, sitting with bandaged eyes in a darkened room, held out both hands to her cousin, later in the evening, and said, "G.o.d bless our dear little girl!" Billy knew it too, for the next morning he gave Susan one of his shattering hand-grasps and muttered that he was "darned glad, and Coleman was darned lucky," and Georgie, who was feeling a little better than usual, though still pale and limp, came in to rejoice and exclaim later in the day, a Sunday.

All of this made Susan vaguely uneasy. It was true, of course, and yet somehow it was all too new, too strange to be taken quite happily as a matter of course. She could only smile when Mary Lou a.s.sured her that she must keep a little carriage; when Virginia sighed, "To think of the good that you can do"; when Georgie warned her against living with the old people.

"It's awful, take my word for it!" said Georgie, her hat laid aside, her coat loosened, very much enjoying a cup of tea in the dining-room.

Young Mrs. O'Connor did not grow any closer to her husband's mother.

But it was to be noticed that toward her husband himself her att.i.tude was changed. Joe was altogether too smart to be cooped up there in the Mission, it appeared; Joe was working much too hard, and yet he carried her breakfast upstairs to her every morning; Joe was an angel with his mother.

"I wish--of course you can explain to Peter now--but I wish that I could give you a little engagement tea," said Georgie, very much the matron.

"Oh, surely!" Susan hastened to rea.s.sure her. Nothing could have been less to her liking than any festivity involving the O'Connors just now.

Susan had dined at the gloomy Mission Street house once, and retained a depressing memory of the dark, long parlor, with only one shutter opened in the bay window, the grim elderly hostess, in mourning, who watched Georgie incessantly, the hard-faced elderly maid, so obviously in league with her mistress against the new-comer, and the dinner that progressed from a thick, sad-looking soup to a firm, cold apple pie.

There had been an altercation between the doctor and his mother on the occasion of Susan's visit because there had been no fire laid in Georgie's big, cold, upstairs bedroom. Susan, remembering all this, could very readily excuse Georgie from the exercise of any hospitality whatever.

"Don't give it another thought, Georgie!" said she.

"There'll be entertaining enough, soon!" said Mary Lou.

"But we aren't going to announce it for ever so long!" Susan said.

"Please, PLEASE don't tell anyone else, Auntie!" she besought over and over again.