Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

of her plans, seen none of their accomplishments, so to-night the old-fashioned settle which Bill had knocked together from lumber in the packing room and she had stained, two of the sorting tables, fitted into the corners beside the fireplace to make a dais, the conversion of another into a capital dining table by the simple expedient of lengthening its legs, the rag rug, discovered in the village, during a flying trip with Sylvia this morning in her car and ravished from the church fair it had been intended for, the sacks of sheeting Aunt Lucile had been sewing industriously all day, covered with burlaps and stuffed with hay to serve as cushions, the cheese-cloth tacked up in gathers over the windows and hemmed with pins,--all this, revealed at once, had the surprise of a conjurer's trick, or, if one were predisposed that way, the entrancement of a miracle.

She was a little entranced, herself, partly with fatigue for she had put in, one after the other, two unusually laborious days, but partly no doubt with her own magic, with this almost convincing simulation of a home which she and her assistants had produced. It didn't matter that she had gone slack and silent, because Sylvia, who just before supper had shown a disposition to dreamy elegiac melancholy, rebounded, as soon as she was filled with food, to the other end of the scale altogether and swept Rush after her into a boisterous romp, which none of Aunt Lucile's remonstrant asides to her nephew was effectual to quell.

She was an amazing creature, this product of the latest generation to begin arriving at the fringes of maturity, a reedy young thing, as tall as Graham, inches taller than Rush. She had the profile of a young Greek goddess and the grin of a gamin. She was equally at home in a ballgown--though she was not yet out--or in a pair of khaki riding breeches and an olive drab shirt. She was capable of assuming a manner that was a genuine gratification to her great aunt or one that startled her father's stable men. She read French novels more or less at random, (unknown to her mother. She had a rather mischievous uncle who was responsible for this development) and she was still deadly accurate with a snowball. A bewildering compound of sophistications and innocence, a modern young sphinx with a riddle of her own.

Mary watched her tussling and tumbling about with Rush, pondering the riddle but making no great effort to find an answer to it. Was she child or woman? To herself what was she? And what did Rush think about her? They were evidently well established on some sort of terms. Rush, no doubt, would tell you--disgustedly if you sought explanation--that Sylvia was just a kid. That he was fond of her as one would be of any nice kid and that her rough young embraces, her challenges and her pursuits, meant precisely what those of an uproarious young--well, nephew, say,--would mean. Only his eagerness to go on playing the game cast a doubt upon that explanation.

They went out abruptly after a while, just as it was getting dark, to settle a bet as to which of them could walk the farthest along the top rail of a certain old fence. Miss Wollaston saw them go with unconcealed dismay, but it was hard to see how even a conscientious chaperon could have prevented it so long as the child's elder brother would do nothing to back her up. To Mary, half-way in her trance, it didn't seem much to matter what the relation was or what came of it. It was a fine spring night and they were a pair of beautifully untroubled young animals. Let them play as they would.

Their departure, did, however, arouse Graham to the assumption of his duties as host and he launched himself into a conversation with Miss Wollaston; a fine example, Mary thought, of what really good breeding means. Her aunt's questions about life in the navy were not the sort that were easy to answer pleasantly and at large. They drew from him things he must have been made to say a hundred times since his return and sometimes they were so wide of the mark that it must have been hard not to stare or laugh. He must have been wishing, too, with all his might down in the disregarded depths of his heart, that the old lady would yield to the boredom and fatigue that were slowly creeping over her. Soon! Before that pair of Indians came back. But by nothing, not even the faintest irrepressible inflection of voice was that wish made manifest.

It broke over Mary suddenly that this would never happen. Aunt Lucile might die at her post, but she'd never, in Graham's presence, retire through a door which was known to lead to her bedroom. She rose and going around to her aunt's chair, laid a light hand on her shoulder. But she spoke to Graham.

"Let's go out and bring in the wanderers," she said. "Aunt Lucile has had a pretty long day and I know she won't be able to go to sleep until Sylvia is tucked in for the night."

When the door had closed behind them and they stood where the path, already faintly indicated, led down to the road, he stopped with a jerk and mutely looked at her.

"Do you know where that fence of theirs is?" she asked. "Yes, I guess so," he said. Then--it was almost a cry--"Must we go there? Right away?"

"I don't know that we need." (Why should he be tortured like that! What did it matter if the rigidity of some of her nightmare-born resolutions got relaxed a little?) "Where do you want to go with me?"

He didn't answer for a minute, but when he did speak his voice was steady enough. "There's a place up on the top of this hill where the trees open out to the east, a lovely place. I went up there last night after Rush had turned in. There'll be a moon along in a few minutes and you can see it come up, from there. Could we wait for it?--I suppose Miss Wollaston..."

"No, she'll be all right," Mary said. "Now that she thinks we're looking for them."

As she moved up the slope she added, "I've a sort of interest in the moon, myself, to-night."

"Perhaps if you'll take my hand--" he said stiffly. "It is dark here under the trees."

Her single-minded intention had been to make him a little happier. She liked him better to-night than ever, and that was saying a lot. But this elaborate covering up of what he really wanted under the pretended need of guiding her, tried her patience. The pretense was for himself, too, as much as for her. He was holding her off at arm's length behind him as if they were scaling an Alp!

In the spirit of mischief, half irritated, half amused, she crowded up to his side and turned her hand so that their palms lay together. And she said in a voice evenly matter-of-fact, "That's nicer, isn't it?"

He didn't succeed in producing anything audible in answer to that, but he began presently, and rather at random, to talk. As if--she reflected, mutinously,--some fact that must on no account be looked at would emerge, un-escapable, the moment he stopped.

But the bewitching loveliness of the place he led her to made amends, sponged away her irritation, brought back the Arcadian mood of the day. A recently fallen apple tree just on the crest of the hill, offered in its crotched arms a seat for both of them. With an ease which thrilled her he lifted her in his hands to her place and vaulted up beside her. His arm (excusably, again, for the hand was seeking a hold to steady him), crept around behind her.

Once more he began to talk,--of nature, of the farm, of how it was the real way to live, as we were meant to. One couldn't, of course, cut off the city altogether. There were concerts and things. And the companionship of old friends. Even at that it would be lonely. They had felt it already. That was why it was such a marvelous thing to have her here. She made a different world of it. Just as she had made what seemed like a home out of that old apple house. No one could do that but a woman, of course ...

She was no longer irritated by this. She barely listened, beyond noting his circuitous but certain approach to the point of asking her, once more, to marry him.

Her body seemed drugged with the loveliness of the night, with fatigue, with him, with the immediacy of him,--but her mind was racing as it does in dreams.

Nature was not, of course, the gentle sentimentalist Graham was talking about, but one did get something out of close communion with her. A sense of fundamentals. She was a--simplifier of ideas. Plain and straightforward even in her enchantments. That moon they were waiting for.... Already she was looking down upon a pair of lovers, somewhere,--a thousand pairs!--with her bland unseeing face. And later to-night, long after she had risen on them, upon a thousand more.

Of lovers? Well perhaps not. Not if one insisted upon the poets' descriptions. But good enough for nature's simple purposes. Answering to a desire, faint or imperious, that would lead them to put on her harness. Take on her work.

Anthony March had never put on a harness. A rebel. And for the price of his rebellion never had heard his music, except in his head. Clear torment they could be, he had told her, those unheard melodies. Somehow she could understand that. There was an unheard music in her. An unfulfilled destiny, at all events, which was growing clamorous as the echo of the boy's passion-if it were but an echo-pulsed in her throat, drew her body down by insensible relaxations closer upon his.

The moon came up and they watched it, silent. The air grew heavy. The call of a screech-owl made all the sound there was. She shivered and he drew her, unresisting, tighter still. Then he bent down and kissed her.

He said, presently, in a strained voice, "You know what I have been asking. Does that mean yes?"

She did not speak. The moon was up above the trees, yellow now. She remembered a great broad voice, singing:

"Low hangs the moon. It rose late. It is lagging-O I think it is heavy with love, with love"

With a passion that had broken away at last, the boy's hands took possession of her. He kissed her mouth, hotly, and then again; drew back gasping and stared into her small pale face with burning eyes. Her head turned a little away from him.

"... Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me My mate back again if you only would, For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look. O rising stars!..."

The languor was gone. She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an agony of apprehension. She looked slowly round at him.

"You haven't answered!" His voice broke over that into a sob. "Will you marry me, Mary?"

"I don't know," she said dully, like one struggling out of a dream. "I will if I can. I meant to for a while, I think. But ..."

He leaped to the ground and stood facing her with clenched hands. "I ought to be shot," he said. "I'm not