The Heart of Arethusa Part 9

He believed in the power of the spoken word. It was not given him to remain quiet for long. He might have managed it with the communion of a hand-clasp; but without, it was impossible.

Just then the pretty girl and her escort pa.s.sed by them again. Elinor's brown eyes watched the pair this second time until they had turned the corner of the deck.

"That girl," she said, half wistfully, "she is so delicious and young.

I can't help wishing she were mine. There is something too utterly adorable about a young girl."

"She seems merely silly to me," Ross replied. "I don't see anything particularly interesting or unusual about her that should make you want to own her, or any other callow young thing her age. However, if you say she is adorable, I suppose she is.... Merciful Heavens!!"

"Ross Worthington!"

"And I never thought of her, I'll swear, until this very moment!" he muttered.

"Thought of who?"

"The child."

"What child? Ross, will you kindly make one remark that is intelligible? What on earth are you talking about? Or who?"

"My child." He turned his face to hers, ruefully smiling. "Heaven knows what you'll think of me! But.... But, Elinor, I'll swear I never thought of her until this very moment!"

His wife very nearly went over backwards.

She had thought she was getting used to Ross, and had been sure she was quite prepared for anything he might do or say that smacked of the unusual, which seemed to be one of his peculiar gifts; but this far surpa.s.sed anything yet. She had known him very well for nearly three years and while he had once, long ago, told her of a previous marriage, he had never mentioned the existence of a child; or intimated in any way that there were any ties to have drawn him to America.

But that gleam of fun was not in her brown eyes for nothing, and so she laughed. And it was such a merry peal of unrestrained mirth that Ross rose, deeply offended.

"There is nothing at all ludicrous in this, I a.s.sure you, Elinor. It's quite serious!"

"I am quite ready to believe it is. But, Ross, I.... Please think for just a moment. I can't help laughing. It _is_ rather funny!"

Then he smiled himself. One of his greatest charms was the ability to view his own performances, as it were, from a detached perspective.

"You're quite right there, I'll have to admit. To leave you in ignorance of any family, and suddenly, after months and years of such ignorance, produce a daughter!"

"You say a daughter? Are there," Elinor's eyes danced mischievously, "are there any sons you have concealed at home, in case I should admire a pa.s.sing small boy? Are you going to spend the rest of your life thus immediately granting my idle wishes?"

"No, I'm afraid I've done my very best. I'm no genie of the lamp, although it does look a bit like it."

"Then sit down and tell me all about her," she patted his empty chair invitingly. "Begin at the very beginning and tell me everything you can about your daughter."

Ross obediently draped himself once more in the steamer-chair. But he buried his chin deep in his hands and sat staring long without speaking, across the slowly rising and falling rail, at the sea.

His own disclosure had been, as much, if not more, of a shock to himself as it had been to Elinor. He had not thought very definitely of Arethusa in weeks, or even months; and now, suddenly with the chance pa.s.sing of another young female creature, and his wife's admiration of her, his daughter's personality had intruded itself as one which must be reckoned with, and taken somewhat into his calculations. For the first time he realized that he had not been considering his child at all, in any plans he had made for the future; and the thought was a bit disturbing.

"What is her name?" prompted Elinor.

"Arethusa."

"Arethusa!"

"Yes. I know it's a most awful mouthful. But her mother named her," his voice softened, "her own name was Matilda; and she had always disliked it so." How long the time had been since he had thought of the mother, either! Once more he stared across the rail, out at the sunlit sea.

Elinor laid her hand gently on his arm for just a moment; a fleeting caress of sympathy for his sobered mood.

"Ross, dear," her speaking voice was unusually beautiful, as soft and clear as a bell, but it had never sounded more like low music than just now. "Ross, would you tell me something about her? Arethusa's mother, I mean. But if you'd rather not.... I've no sort of wish to arouse any memories which might hurt; but I can't help feeling, dear, that I would like to know something about her. I've never asked you before, because it seemed impertinent; but I really do not mean it at all in that sense."

"I know," he answered slowly. "But it was all so long ago, Elinor, there is nothing left to hurt. It seems sometimes now as if I had dreamed every bit of it. She was a slip of a thing; just a girl."

It had not been very long, his first cycle of love.

It was just a little more than two years from the summer day he had first met her, with her cornflower eyes as blue as the ribbons on the muslin dress she wore, and her dainty tininess, until that summer day when he had turned away from a low mound in the country cemetery, with hot rebellion in his heart that the one had been taken and the other left.

He had not wanted to go to that country party. With all a city boy's superiority he had yawned at the suggestion; then decided to go just to watch "the rubes"; and there he had found her, and his visit to the distant cousin had a.s.sumed a new significance. After they were married, he had wanted to take her away with him, but she had clung to her own home; and so he had stayed with her on the Redfield Farm, making lazy efforts to learn a trade that had no sort of attraction for him, just because she wished it.

But after she was gone, the farming had lost its excuse for being, and the tiny baby daughter, who cried when he picked her up, and who only wanted to eat and sleep, had no real power to hold him where she was.

He wandered restlessly about the country-side, trying to find some place where the mother's personality had never been; and then one day he had announced to Miss Eliza that he was going abroad, to work at something congenial where no memories made it hard for him to stay. He had not intended to remain very long, a year or two perhaps. But Ross followed the line of least resistance nearly always, and the friends he had made and the life he had lived had proved attractive; little by little the ties that had bound him to the Farm had slackened, until he hardly felt them at all.

Time had done what his first hot, youthful grief would never have admitted that it could do, and had faded the glowing colors in the pictures of that chapter in his life; and it was now, as he had said, almost like something dreamed.

"Then she died just after Arethusa was born?"

Ross nodded.

"That was an odd name to give her, dear; 'Arethusa'! Was she named for anyone?"

"No, just because her mother liked it. I was a great goose in those days, with large ideas of the necessity for the revival of Grecian 'pure beauty,' as I called it. Heaven knows where I got the phrase! I had just graduated from college that June before I met her and I had a lot of stuff I had taken to the country with me. Then I sent for more.

I used to devour volumes about vase paintings, and cla.s.sical ideals, and I read worlds of it aloud to her. Miss Eliza used to think it was atheistic, I'm quite sure. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't let me read my mythology in the house at least, aloud. Matilda and I had to go down to the Branch, so we wouldn't be heard. It was from Bulfinch, I believe, she got the story of the fountain nymph that seemed to appeal to her so strangely. And I was quite willing to saddle my daughter with it; it was like taking a firm stand for my ideas. They were hardly ideals." He sighed.

"You poor babies!" said Elinor softly, to herself.

"What did you do with the little girl, Ross?"

"Her great-aunts kept her. The same women, Miss Eliza and Miss Let.i.tia Redfield, that had raised her mother. Matilda's mother was their sister. Miss Asenath, the third aunt, is a cripple. You must know her some day, Elinor. She is 'pure beauty' and pure everything else. And what a friend she was to me when I needed her!"

"How old would she be?"

"Who, Miss Asenath? About seventy."

"No, of course not, dear goose! Arethusa."

"Oh, I don't know. Eighteen, I suppose. Yes, just about."

Elinor looked for a moment as if she did not believe what she had heard him say.

"Ross Worthington!"

"I'm all attention."

"Am I to understand that you actually haven't seen that child for eighteen whole years!"