The Heart of Arethusa Part 44

As she watched them, a sort of mist began obscuring them from her, and so she brushed at her eyes to wipe it away, but it only seemed to keep on growing to be more decided as a mist; and then it dissolved itself into tears which fell thick and fast, hot tears which splashed on the window-sill ... all because of Timothy's treatment of her on this home-coming afternoon. Arethusa felt as if Timothy's friendship were lost to her forever. Shamed and humiliated by Mr. Bennet, it had remained for life in its cruelty to add this last blow. For unless his feeling for her was absolutely changed, he would never have treated her like this. Arethusa knew Timothy too well.

He had read Mr. Bennet correctly, she remembered now, thinking about her best friend; or about the one who had always, till so recently, been her best friend. He had called Mr. Bennet a "four-flusher." Would that she had not been so blinded in her infatuation as not to heed this warning! She could recall a great many times when Timothy had been proved right in his deductions, which surely ought to have made her place more value on the one concerning Mr. Bennet than she had.

Arethusa felt, just then, as if she would even rather that Miss Eliza should know of that Episode at the January Cotillion than that Timothy should know about it. Timothy's good opinion of her, suddenly, seemed to Arethusa to possess a great charm.

After awhile she crept back into bed, her teeth chattering with the cold, and cried herself to sleep.

In the days which followed Arethusa was kept very busy telling her aunts all that she had done and seen in those three months she had been away from them. And early in the next week, Elinor packed all of the pretty evening frocks which Arethusa, for various scruples, had left hanging in the closet of the green and white room in Lewisburg and sent them down to the Farm, thinking that Arethusa had forgotten them, and might like to have them. There was the Green Frock, and the one like tinted autumn leaves, and the White Dress of her Very Own Party, and many others besides, all reminders of evenings with Mr. Bennet. But even so, Arethusa was glad to see them. She had not realized that she loved them so dearly, until she saw them again. It was just as it had been with the people at the Farm. She spread all the gay beauty of the contents of that box out in the sitting room, and tried them all on, pirouetting and turning and making vivid for the three old ladies who listened to her the parties to which she had worn them.

Miss Let.i.tia was loud in her outspoken admiration of every single frock; her simple heart could not decide which one she liked best, and her seamstress instinct marveled at the wonder of their making. Miss Asenath was more quiet in her approval, but her eyes sparkled at the brightness of their various colors all around her. Miss Eliza was noncommittal, though it was very evident that she found much to displease. When Arethusa tried on the Green Frock which she so dearly loved, she openly expressed her displeasure.

"Did your stepmother," and if ever her rigid little body had signified disapproval of anything it did then, in every line, "did your stepmother permit you to go around dressed like that?"

"All the girls wear dresses like this," replied Arethusa, defensively.

"Then--," began Miss Eliza, with decision, but she snapped her lips together just like a trap and did not finish.

Arethusa, with cheeks that flamed, put away the Green Dress, hung in the darkest corner of the high old walnut wardrobe in her room. The exhibition of the box of clothes ceased abruptly for the time being, and Arethusa fled far away from any chance of Miss Eliza's questions.

The Green Dress had been her attire that Fatal Night of the January Cotillion.

Timothy took his time about coming over to see Arethusa, although, had she but known it, it required every bit of self-control he possessed to stay away. He had wanted to rush right over that first afternoon, but his heart was mighty sore still, and he was taking the only way he knew to make Arethusa understand that he did not care in the least how much she gazed adoringly at that very objectionable Mr. Bennet.

She did not see it just exactly that way, however, and as the days went by and she watched for him and he did not come, she put her own construction upon his behavior, and it was right along the line of her conclusions in regard to him that night when she had gazed up at the stars, thinking of him.

But he strolled over, late one afternoon quite formally, just as if he, who had half lived at the Farm all of his life, was making a polite and necessary social call upon its inmates.

Miss Eliza gave him a most vigorous tongue-lashing--before he was quite seated she began it--for going to dances. She considered him headed straight for destruction and had had no opportunity to tell him so. She had seen him but once since he came back from that visit to Arethusa.

"Arethusa dances; ask her to tell you what it's like," he said, most ungraciously.

It was a horrid trick, altogether unworthy of him; but then Timothy was young and things were going hard with him these days. And Miss Eliza's tongue was very sharp; it cut.

So Miss Eliza immediately attacked Arethusa.

"Timothy's of course mistaken. I imagined you'd be going to places where other people did such things, that probably couldn't be helped in a city, but I know you wouldn't so far forget all I've tried to teach you as to indulge in it yourself. It's just public hugging, that's all it is, dancing nowadays!"

"But she did," put in Timothy. "I saw her."

"I can answer for myself, thank you, Timothy Jarvis!" Arethusa said this with a bit of her old asperity. "Yes, I danced, Aunt 'Liza; Father and Mother let me and they didn't think anything was wrong with it."

"Well, I must say! This beats anything I ever heard! I'm not surprised at Ross Worthington, for he was always a bit free in his ideas; but his wife certainly ought to know better than to allow a young girl to take part in such goings on! I must say! I must say!" Miss Eliza's gla.s.ses left her nose entirely in her excitement. "What else did you do in the City that you haven't told us about?"

And then ... Arethusa, to the great amazement of everybody, suddenly burst into tears and ran out of the room.

"What on earth ails the child?" inquired Miss Let.i.tia, anxiously.

"She's not the least bit like herself!"

"She needs a tonic," answered Miss Eliza decidedly. "I'll see that she begins it, tomorrow. All that carrying-on in the City! Ross Worthington ought to've been ashamed of himself to set by and allow it!" She shut her mouth very grimly. "I'll see to it that she doesn't go there soon again!"

"But he's her father, Sister," interposed Miss Asenath softly; "you must remember that."

"He's her father, 'Senath, and I can't dispute it. But he's an awful unnatural one, the way _I_ look at things! And I reckon, when you get right down to it, Arethusa's just as much my child as she is anybody's, seeing how I've taken care of her ever since she was born and had all the trouble of raising her. And if _I_ know it, she shan't go to Lewisburg again and come home like this, all worn out!

_I just won't have it!_"

And it was not hard for everyone in the room, Timothy included, to realize that Arethusa's future visits to her father would be few and far between, if there were any.

But Miss Asenath, alone of all of them who loved her, dimly guessed at Arethusa's real trouble. And she tried in every way she could to make her tell, for Arethusa had written Miss Asenath pages and pages of rhapsody of the Wonderful Mr. Bennet. But the girl veered away from such a subject, however adroitly introduced, just like a scared rabbit.

So after a little while, Miss Asenath gave up her attempt to find out definitely, and contented herself with showing Arethusa that no matter what it was that was troubling her, Aunt 'Senath loved her as much as ever. And her niece clung to the tenderness of this unfailing love as a drowning man clings to a straw; it was the most that was left to her, with the loss of Timothy's comradeship. She took that tonic Miss Eliza procured for her with meek obedience, although it might seem as if Miss Eliza had hunted until she had found the bitterest and nastiest that she could find. But Arethusa only grew paler and thinner than ever; she lost her appet.i.te also, in spite of the tonic. Ere long, Miss Asenath's intuition told her something else. It was Timothy causing this, she believed, and not something that had happened in the City.

And it was Timothy.

He was as top-loftical and as haughty as possible. He made his visits to the Farm of a scarcity and brevity that brought them near to being no visits at all. Such times as he did condescend to come over to see them, he spent the moments telling of all those gay affairs of which he was a part and which Arethusa did not attend, with a brave show of worldliness that deceived them all except Miss Asenath. Miss Eliza shook her head over him. She did not like this change in Timothy.

Arethusa alternated between a desire to slap him for his suddenly acquired society veneer which had such power to irritate her, and a desire to weep the bitterest and most scalding tears for the completeness of his defection. She could not help wondering, sometimes, if he had, by any most uncanny chance, heard of that Episode at the January Cotillion; and knew that Mr. Bennet had Kissed her and that she had believed that he wanted to marry her and he had Not. The Thought made her writhe in agony under the new blue and white "counter-pin."

Rather would she have died a thousand deaths than to have Timothy know of that Disgrace!

For he had been to the City twice since she had come home, with his other gadding about; flying trips--"on business," it is true he had said they were--yet he might have heard of it. All Lewisburg might be ringing with it. Such would undoubtedly explain quite satisfactorily his present scorn of her. He did not seem in the least anxious to marry her now.

Timothy, however, no matter what Arethusa thought concerning him and his gayety and his neglect of her, was having the hardest of hard times. If Arethusa cried herself to sleep at night, and he did not, being masculine and not much given to taking a refuge in tears, he suffered none the less keenly. It seemed to Timothy that he would never, as long as he lived, forget Arethusa's lovely face as she danced with Mr. Bennet that night of her New Year's Party. Every single time he saw her now, it seemed to bring before him the picture she was that night; wearing Mr. Bennet's flowers (he was quite sure that he knew now just who had sent her those flowers) and with that wonderful shine in her eyes just for Mr. Bennet. But he was determined that she should not know that it made any difference to him.

Poor Timothy!

He loved Arethusa more than he ever had, with all the wealth of love his clean young heart had in its power to give, now that he thought her unattainable and with all her own affection given to another man. And this same heart that loved her so ached and ached over Arethusa's paleness and thinness; but he accepted Miss Eliza's explanation as the literal one, that the winter in Lewisburg had been too much for her, and that all she needed was a tonic. Had Timothy talked a little to Miss Asenath, as in the old and far happier days, he might have formed very different conclusions. Yet he would have bitten out his tongue rather than have mentioned Mr. Bennet's hated name, even to gentle Miss Asenath, who never failed to understand all that troubled.

So Timothy and Arethusa played at their cross purposes all through the spring.

For the winter had sped itself away somehow and before anyone was really aware of its coming, spring had slipped upon all of them. The days grew warm once more and Arethusa might once again take her books back to the congenial solitude of Miss Asenath's Woods, where, with a thick, woolly carriage rug spread on the ground under the hollow tree, she lay for long hours and read or dreamed. Miss Eliza absolutely refused to countenance any sitting or lying on the damp earth of spring without that rug beneath her, in Arethusa's present state of seeming ill-health; but she made no objections to as many hours spent in the woodland as Arethusa pleased, only provided the rug was there too.

Timothy was very busy, as all farmers needs must be in the spring. The garden had to be got in, and the fields plowed and planted. He did not have nearly so much time for gadding, and Miss Eliza was pleased. She told him she was every chance she had to do so.

Timothy looked much older, Miss Asenath thought. He had a great deal more dignity, and his blue eyes seemed to have acquired depth. There were stern little lines in his face that had never been there before; just as if the boy Timothy had given place to the man. Miss Asenath loved these evidences of his growing.

But often, when he made his rare and formal visits to the Farm of an evening and he and Arethusa sat so decorously in front of the sitting-room fire with the family, she watched him then a trifle sadly.

Miss Asenath believed that she would almost be glad to hear him and Arethusa quarrel once more.

"Poor children!" she said to herself one night. "I wonder when they're going to even begin realising how much time they're wasting! All these precious days are slipping by and nothing can ever bring them back!"

And then, with her frail hands clasped on the locket at her throat, Miss Asenath fell to dreaming.

CHAPTER XXV

Arethusa gathered up her woolly rug and a dog-eared copy of "Jane Eyre," which would have known almost instant confiscation if Miss Eliza had glimpsed it in her possession, and proceeded to go down to the woodland. It was an afternoon in early May, and unseasonably hot. As she pa.s.sed through the kitchen, Mandy paused in her bread-making and looked around. She shook her head at the girl's evident intention, with disapproval.

"I wouldn' be gwine out theah to be settin' this arternoon, Arethusie.