The Boss of Little Arcady Part 31

"No--long before I became a fellow-slave with Clem--long before there was a juvenile mother or even a Clem in Little Arcady."

"May I ask how you got it?"

"Certainly you may! I don't know."

"May I see it?" I thought she felt a deeper interest than she cared to reveal.

"Unfortunately, no. If you only could see it, you would see that it is almost a perfect likeness--perhaps a bit more Little Miss than you could be now--but it's unmistakably true."

"I lost such a picture once," she said with a fall of her eyes. "Where is the one you have?"

"Sometimes it's behind my eyes and sometimes it is out before them."

"Nonsense!"

"To be sure! Only Jim and I, trained and hardened in the ways of belief, are equal to a feat of that sort."

"I see no merit in believing that."

"I don't know that there is, especially--not in believing this particular thing, but the power for belief in general which it implies--you see I am unprejudiced."

"Why should you want to believe it?"

I should have known, without catching the glint of her eyes under the hat brim, that a Peavey spoke there.

"If you could see the thing once, you'd understand," I said, an answer, of course, fit only for a Peavey.

"At all events, you'll not keep it long." The words were Peavey enough, but the voice was rather curiously Lansdale.

"I have made as little effort to keep it as I did to acquire it," I said, "but it stays on, and I've a notion it will stay on as long as Jim and I are uncorrupted. But it shan't inconvenience you," I added brightly, in time to forestall an imminent other "Nonsense!"

Being thus neatly thwarted, she looked over my shoulder and bent to her oars, for we had again drifted toward the troubled waters of the dam.

"I warned you--if you listened to me," I reminded her.

"Oh, I've not been listening--only thinking."

"Of course, and you were disbelieving. It's high time you put us ash.o.r.e.

I want to believe, and I want not to be drowned. So does Jim,--_both_ of 'em."

She pointed the boat to our landing, and as she leaned her narrow shoulders far back she shot me; one swift look. But I could see much farther into the water that floated us.

CHAPTER XXV

THE CASE OF FATTY BUDLOW

Lest Miss Katharine Lansdale seem unduly formidable, I should, perhaps, say that I appeared to be alone in finding her so. Little Arcadians of my own s.e.x younger than myself--and, if I may suggest it, less discerning--were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw.

Miss Lansdale's mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets. But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country.

Socially and industrially, one might say, she did not fit the scheme of things as the town had been taught to conceive it. Whereas, her daughter was a person readily to be understood in all parts of the world where men have eyes--as well by the homekeeping as by the travelled. Eustace Eubanks, more or less a man of the world by virtue of that adventurous trip to the Holy Land, understood her at one glance, as did Arthur Upd.y.k.e, who had fared abroad to the college of pharmacy and knew things.

But she was also lucid as crystal to G. Brown and Creston Fancett, whose knowledge of the outside world was somewhat affected by their experience of it, which was nothing. To all seven of the ages was this woman comprehensible. Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in the beef under his hand had been pa.s.sed.

In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously--to borrow a phrase from the _Argus_--"by each and all who had the good fortune to be present," for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times. She was incontestably feminine. She gave the woman-call. That she seemed to give it against her wish,--without intention,--that I was alone in detecting this, were trifles beside the point. Masculine Little Arcady cared not that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit--cared naught for this so long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call in its true note wheresoever she fared.

And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to masculine Little Arcady--with one negligible exception--she seemed to try perversely not to be so. She was amazingly gracious to it--still with one exception. She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth. She affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to please. She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue of romance.

It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.

The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each recurring crisis. For testimony in the present instance, I need only adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale but a scant half-dozen times. This came to me in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.

Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in a peaceful and orderly family. She sought to know if I could not prevent her boy from "making a fool of himself." It was never her way to bother with many words when she knew the right few.

With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring. It was a rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat. The dominant line of the composition I saw to be--

"When love lights night to be its day."

I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had read. She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough. But an emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms, however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself for the ordeal.

"I can't think," she began, "where the boy _learned_ such things!"

I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely self-taught under certain circ.u.mstances.

"Such shameless, brazen things!" she persisted. "We have always been _so_ careful of Euty--striving to keep him--well, wholesome and pure, you understand, Major Blake."

"There are always dangers," I said, but only because she had stopped speaking, and not in any hope of instructing her.

"If only we can keep him from making a fool of himself--"

"It seems rather late," I said, this time with profound conviction. "See there!"

Upon the margin of that captured sheet Eustace had exposed, as it were, the very secret mechanics of his pa.s.sion. There were written tentative rhymes, one under another, as "Kate--mate--Fate--late"--and eke an unblushing "sate." Also had he, in the frenzy of his poetic rapture, divined and indicated the technical affinities existing among words like "bliss," "kiss," and "miss."

Interference, however delicately managed, seemed hopeless after that, and I said as much. But I added: "Of course, if you let him alone, he may come back to his better self. Perhaps the young lady herself may prove to be your ally."

"Indeed not! She has set out deliberately to ensnare my poor Euty," said the mother, with an incisive drawing in of her expressively thin lips.

"I knew it the very first evening I saw them together."

"Mightn't it have been sheer trifling on her part ?" I suggested.

"Can you imagine that young woman _daring_ to trifle with Eustace Eubanks?" she demanded.

I could, as a matter of fact; but as her query seemed to repel such a disclosure, I lied.

"True," I said, "she would never dare. I didn't think of that."

"With _all_ her frivolity and lightness of manner and fondness for dress, she must have some sense of fitness--"