Why Joan? Part 17

He leaned toward her. "Do you? Do you, I wonder? Joan! Look at me! _Do_ you know what you are doing--to me?"

The darkness left only the white outline of their faces visible to each other. He struck a match, in order to see her better.

For a moment she tried to meet his eyes. They frightened her even while they drew her. The blood began to sing in her ears, as it had when he touched her hand. She wanted him to take her in his arms, to hold her--and at the same time she wanted to run away and hide. Their long gaze seemed to let down some barrier within her, to loosen curious impulses.... Why did he not take her, and have done with it?

"No," he muttered, as if she had spoken, "Come!"

Her body made a helpless movement toward him....

Then the match burnt his fingers and he dropped it.

"I--I thought you said you had a present for me," she quavered, with a little breathless laugh. She suspected what the present was, and she wanted to get this queerly painful scene over.

But the velvet case he drew out of his pocket was too large for a ring.

It contained a flexible chain of platinum for her wrist, set with jewels which glittered in the dusk.

"Oh!--oh, how lovely!" she exclaimed. Even Stefan Nikolai had never given her anything as splendid as this.

"May I put it on?" asked Desmond quietly.

She held out her hand in delight; and suddenly he had seized it and pushing her sleeve out of the way, was pressing his lips to her inner arm above the elbow, kissing it hungrily, fiercely, as if he could never have done.

She gasped and shrank a little. Getting engaged was not at all as she had pictured it.

"Wh--what a funny place to kiss me," she heard herself quavering, "when I've got a perfectly good mouth!"

After that she ceased for once to a.n.a.lyze her sensations....

A gibbous harvest-moon was gazing down at them with its wry face when the two awoke to the fact that the hour was late and cold, particularly for a girl dressed airily in chiffon. Joan gazed ruefully at the wreck of her prettiest gown, limp with dew and crushed beyond recognition. She felt rather limp and crushed herself, though withal triumphant. One does not get engaged every night, and it was fitting that certain sacrifices honor the event.

The lovers had little to say to each other, as the canoe slipped back down the whispering river under that gibbous moon. For once Eduard found no poetry to suit the occasion. Joan, busy with her tumbled hair, hoped and even prayed that she might be able to slip into her room un.o.bserved.

She hurried nervously out of the dark boathouse, despite entreaties to wait, and was half way to the house before he caught up with her.

"Oh, hurry!" she whispered. "They've all gone--every light in the house is out! It must be after midnight. Ned, what if they've locked the door?"

"They haven't. My sister knows we're still out--trust her for that!"

"But suppose she's waiting up for us?--Oh, Ned, whatever shall I say?"

"You might tell her, Beautiful," he teased, "that I've had you up under the beech-tree, kissing roses into your cheeks and stars into your eyes!--though I think any one who saw you just now might suspect that without being told."

She turned suddenly and clung to him. Something of Joan's independence had already slipped away from her, now that she had some one to cling to. "Ned, she doesn't like me! How am I ever going to win her over?"

"Kiss her," he suggested promptly. "Kiss her as you've been kissing me.

It couldn't fail!"

"Don't tease!" She lifted serious, wide eyes to his, and he saw that they were wet. "Don't you know that I shall never, never in all my life, kiss anybody else as I have kissed you?"

Touched, he drew her closer. She looked just then singularly childish and confiding. "Dear little girl, that thought herself so grown-up!" he whispered, his cheek on her tumbled hair.

When she stirred in his arms he still held her. "What's the use of hurrying now, Beautiful? The fat's in the fire--and who knows when we shall have another night like this, all to ourselves?"

But she would not stay. She felt, obscurely, that they had been engaged enough for one evening.

She found herself at last safe in her room--'safe' was the word in her mind--sitting on the edge of her bed, staring down at her ruined finery with eyes which did not see it. Her knees felt queerly weak under her, her lips were bruised, her cheeks and throat and arms burned still with remembered kisses--She said to herself, like the old woman with a shorn petticoat, "Can this be I?"

What had become of her powers of observation, her cool intelligence, her impersonal decision that it was wiser not to love the man you marry lest he be given power to hurt you? There was nothing impersonal left in her feeling for Eduard Desmond! The change had come as suddenly as a summer thunderstorm. At one moment she was waiting, nervous, a little afraid, for the event that she had brought to pa.s.s. The next, he and she seemed to have been thrown into a sort of vortex, where they clung to each other madly, desperately, as if to escape destruction. And she had been quite as frantic about it as the man....

She thought, dazedly, that there was a good deal she would be able to tell the girls at the Convent now on the subject of proposals--yes, and Miss Louisa M. Alcott, too! Except that school-girls and literary old maids were not exactly the people with whom one would discuss such phenomena--

They had fancied, she and Betty and the rest, that some sort of formula was necessary to the occasion, a definite question asked and answered, a more or less formal, "Will you, Amy?" and "Yes, Laurie." Foolish innocents! She and Ned had not exchanged a sensible word from the moment they found themselves in each other's arms. Yet the understanding between them was unmistakable. They were completely engaged--almost, Joan thought with a shiver, as good as married!

This, then, was love. A very different thing from what she had expected!

A beautiful, rather terrible thing.... The touch of Puritan in the girl made her wonder whether anything so beautiful and terrible could be quite nice.

She slipped to her knees; not to pray, but simply to remember her mother. The vision of her mother always came better when she was on her knees--perhaps because of the old-time a.s.sociation of prayers with bedtime--and Joan felt a desperate need of her just then. She wanted to be a.s.sured that her mother understood, and had been through it all herself, and had come out of it--just her mother. She held out her jeweled bracelet childishly in the dark, as if for somebody to see. She knelt there tense, every nerve and fibre straining, whispering under her breath, "Mamma, are you here? Do you know?"

But the vision failed her. She had instead the warmth of a man's breath on her closed eyes, the roughness of his cheek on her throat....

She dropped her head in her arms and began to sob. She was very happy.

CHAPTER XVII

It was well into the middle of a fine blue and gold morning when Joan awoke, to find her coffee cold on the tray beside her bed. She had slept through even the entrance of the maid who called her; she who had expected not to sleep at all! An engaged girl, with her lover waiting--in the garden, perhaps, or down beside the river--their river!

The happiness of the night before came to her with a rush, and with it an enormous sense of relief. The thing was done, accomplished!

She ran to the window and peeped out eagerly, hoping he might be watching her window. But only the old gardener was in sight, pottering about among the roses. She blew a kiss from her finger-tips--whether to the gardener, the roses, or the sparkling water beyond she did not know--and began hurriedly to dress.

Singing under her breath, she tripped down the stairs. The big, sunny house was very still. Joan, going from room to room, gazed about her appreciatively. Hitherto the house, the garden, the wide, pleasant countryside had all served merely as a background, of which she was vaguely aware as actors are of a suitable setting for the play they produce. Now she felt that she really had leisure to enjoy her surroundings, which were usually very important to Joan.

She paused to examine a hunting-print, lingered over a fine etching, patted affectionately the soft, gay chintzes of the morning-room. What a relief after such an artificial house as her step-mother's! Nothing here in the least pretentious, no striving after periods, or artistry, or even originality, but everything good, well-chosen, used: luxury in abeyance to comfort; everywhere evidence of travel and culture, and the long habit of these things.

Joan drew a breath of satisfaction. Just such a home she hoped to make for Eduard, though on a smaller scale, perhaps, and with the addition of a little beauty; since it takes more than wealth to provide that.

She thought to find him in the billiard-room, or perhaps in a certain little vine-hung balcony where they sometimes met. But both were empty.

"Where's everybody this fine morning, Molly!" she asked a housemaid she met in the hall.

"Gone over to play golf, like as usual, Miss--'cep'n Mr. Eduard," added Molly, (the pantry having eyes of its own). "He took the first train to town--no'm, I guess it was the second train. Anyway it was real early for Mr. Eduard to be up."

"Oh," said Joan, blankly.

Then it occurred to her why he might have felt the sudden need of running into town. Bracelets are all very well in their way, but they are, after all, noncommittal. She glanced down at her ringless hands, and laughed.