At the Age of Eve Part 10

She deliberately lingered at the steps, and we heard pleasant sounds coming from the dining-room.

"Eunice and I fancied that Mr. Chalmers looked at you--er, rather attentively the other day," she ventured timidly, as if to try to draw me out, yet dreading a little the answer I might make.

"That might have been imagination," I parried.

"But--we also imagined that _you_ looked at him."

"Well," I answered with a laugh which I hoped would sound light, "haven't you just said that I am a _star_-gazer?"

With this admission I ran away up-stairs.

Yes, I had looked at him. And since then it seemed that there had been nothing for my eyes to rest upon that did not bear the impress of his face.

He had stayed through that long, perfect day, and had left when the cool, white night was at the zenith of its beauty. The cool, white night which, alas, had to be followed by a morning after! I had never, until then, felt this way about the morning, for it has always been my favorite time of day, my only thought upon arising being an eager craving for the suns.h.i.+ne. But then, I had never known until that time just what an exquisite thing night could be.

There is a little sepia copy of the Sistine Madonna hanging across the room from my bed where I can see it the first thing when I awake every morning; and, on bright days there is a golden bar of sunlight which comes traveling in and across the ceiling until it falls upon the picture. I lie still and watch it until it has reached the Virgin's heart, then I get up and open all the windows to the light. It serves me in place of a clock, and much better, for it is true as to time, and it has no unpleasant way of striking a sudden and disenchanting note which breaks in upon my dreams.

My warning little ray of suns.h.i.+ne was casting a spot of intense light directly upon the Mother's heart as I turned and glanced toward it for the first time on the morning after Richard Chalmers' visit, but I was so tired that I lay still until it had traversed the entire length of the wall and settled for a moment upon the floor. I was not enjoying that stretching, smiling, lazy luxuriance which I sometimes indulge in after a too brief sleep. That is a pleasant sort of lingering upon the threshold of the day, but this other feeling of mine was the deadening reaction which comes after a period of over-tension.

"You are a nervous freak," I said disgustedly as I finally jumped out of bed after a soft suggestion from Dilsey that I should find my bath prepared if I could only be induced to get up and go seek it. I crossed the convent-like little apartment which it has pleased my fancy to fix up as a sleeping-chamber and made for a mirror in the adjoining room, for there is "some little luxury there"--flowered curtains and Battenburg table-covers and punched score-cards. I wished to see if there were outward and visible signs of the change which was causing such inward tumult.

"You are a freak," I repeated as I looked in the mirror and noticed that my eyes appeared heavy and tired; and my tongue felt as thick as a Sunday morning newspaper. "It's a pity you can't keep your emotions stopped up in a vial and portion them out with a medicine-dropper--instead of _soaking_ yourself in them!"

Dilsey had left the water running, as she has learned to do on mornings when I am unusually lazy, for no woman who has a domestic heart in her bosom can lie abed and run the risk of the tub overflowing and making a mess of the bath-room floor. I slipped my feet into some flip-flop Turkish slippers--if Turkish women have to wear such footgear as this I don't blame them for sitting still most of the time; but then they have the comfort of trousers, poor dears!--and went to turn off the water.

"Of course he thinks you are an absurd young person who openly tried to make eyes at him," I mused, as I gave a savage twist that stopped that provoking sound of water wasting.

When I had imagined, upon first seeing him, that Richard Chalmers had warring elements in his character I was only saying about him the things I knew to be true of myself. "He does bad things sometimes, but he never enjoys doing them, because he has a conscience that will not let him." This is my own disposition, and I fancied that it might be his, because his eyes bear a dissatisfied look, as if he did not come up to his own ideal of himself.

Alfred Morgan is entirely different. I do not believe that he ever had a morbid regret in his life. In his work he is fanatically conscientious, doing the best he can and knowing that his best is as good as any other man's, for he does not attempt anything unless he is sure of his qualifications. This does not imply any lack of grief and worry when a patient "goes to the bad." He _does_ grieve, sitting with his head between his hands, while his black hair is ruffled up like a shoe-brush straight across his forehead. Sometimes he softly repeats, "Well, I'll swear! Well, I'll _swear_!"--in a baffled, helpless sort of way, but you know that he has not been helpless where any other man would have been potent. And he never has the soul-eating remorse which follows the knowledge that one might have done better.

As to Alfred's _life_, I imagine that it is kept in the same condition of fitness that his body is--clean and wholesome, yet full-blooded and entirely normal. If he should meet red-robed Folly on a pleasant highway he would undoubtedly linger a while, taking off his hat politely and addressing her as Human Nature. He would shake hands good-temperedly as he left her and promise to come again some time when his business engagements would permit. But he would never give the matter another thought probably.

Richard Chalmers' cold face proclaims an asceticism that would call the prettily dressed little Folly "Sin," yet I fancy that he would linger--much longer than Alfred, no doubt--and leave the gay fairy with a frown on his face, which would remain until the next morning, when he would throw his bootjack at his valet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I had just turned the water off! It's a good thing I did, too, before this digression, or the house would have been flooded.

Again, what I have said of Richard Chalmers is also true of myself. I had lingered on the pleasant highways with a delightful Folly all day yesterday, which seemed to me in the cold light of day this morning a sort of Sin. A sin against good sense, I concluded, or against good taste, _especially_ if he noticed.

"A horrid _young_ idiot! Of course that's what he considered you were." I kept torturing myself with these thoughts until others more agonizing still came to torment me. Suppose he had not thought of me at all!

The dash of the cold water restored me to something much more nearly like my normal self, and by the time I had combed the tangles out of my hair and spoken to a pair of redbirds which live in a tree right by my window I was feeling poetry again. A shower of scattered cigar ashes, which Dilsey had not yet swept off the front porch, with two or three red-and-gold bands which I had noticed on his cigars, set me singing.

"You're not an idiot at all, Ann," I commented, as I looked about to make sure that no one was near, then grabbed up one of these red-and-gold bands. "No _wonder_ you have lost your head over him, for he is perfectly beautiful, and you always did get intoxicated on beautiful things.--And if _he_ wasn't impressed too, his eyes were lying! No, they could not lie, because they are too lovely!"

I knew that the family would all be talking about him at the breakfast-table, which I found to be true, and they were so absorbed in their talk that they all, except mother, gave me a perfunctory greeting as I came in. Strange to say, they were not talking about his good looks.

"Well, he's had occasion to study the question in all its phases,"

Rufe kept on with the subject at hand as I slid into my chair and gave myself up to the charms of a breakfast food. "He's studied it in nearly every land. He spent a part of last year in--"

"I think one of the delights of wide travel is to be able to p.r.o.nounce names of obscure places in such a way that stay-at-homes won't know what you're talking about," Cousin Eunice said, looking toward mother and me. She had not intended interrupting the masculine conversation, but Rufe stopped and listened to what she had to say, which proves that he is a model husband, I think--"Did you notice how he called Peru 'Payrhu' last night? Of course he's been there."

"I noticed the new-fangled way he had with several of his words,"

father said, a bit drily. "He differentiated between 'egoist' and 'egotist.' He seems to have been _there_, too."

"Surely," Rufe coincided so willingly that I was amazed. "But the quality of egotism possessed by this fellow is not the cheap, objectionable kind. He simply has unlimited faith in himself, and an unlimited ability of making other people do what he wants them to do."

"A tyrant, then?" father inquired with a half-smile at Rufe's enthusiasm.

"Not at all--a governor."

"Well, who is he and where did he come from?" mother asked, coming into the discussion in an abstracted sort of fas.h.i.+on. "I never heard of him until the last few months."

Then followed a long discourse concerning Richard Chalmers' past life, and his qualifications for the office which he might be called upon to fill--all of which fell like diamonds and rubies from their lips, for it was all creditable to him.

The look of strength, which had told its own story the first time I had ever seen him, and which had since then held me in the spell of a fascinated memory--it was all true, then! As I listened to the story of how the man had, by sheer strength and personality, raised himself from being simply a well-thought-of young lawyer, with a good deal of inherited wealth, to his present position in the minds of the state's best politicians, I felt that he must possess that steel-clad, relentless, yet necessary attribute--power.

Now, I revere power, whether in man, or beast, or automobile.

"Next to marrying it, the worst way on earth for a man to get money is to inherit it," father said, apropos of the story we had just heard.

"It's bad for the man, and it's bad for the money."

We all laughed a little and agreed with father, then Rufe became aware of my presence for the first time.

"And Mistress Ann has not had a word to say upon this interesting subject," he said chaffingly, looking around as if he had not seen me before, which in truth he had not, for he had been so absorbed when I came in that he merely nodded a "good morning" without detaching his mind from his discussion. "He was so visibly impressed, too."

"Shut up, Rufe--teasing her," Cousin Eunice commanded after she had looked at my face.

"I swear I wasn't teasing," he insisted more soberly. "I don't believe Chalmers looks at a woman once a year--he hasn't time for them, and besides, he's a cold-blooded devil--but he looked at Ann many times throughout the course of the day, to say naught of 'toting' home a mud-turtle for her dear sake. Then when he was leaving last night he asked me again whether the Fieldings were related to me or to my wife."

"Did you tell him the truth or did you take the credit to yourself?" I inquired sarcastically.

"No, I confessed that the beauteous blossom springs from the same tree that produced that perfect flower, Mrs. Clayborne. But I told him that the fact of my having 'raised' you invested you with a 'dearness not your due'--from blood ties alone."

"Well, she will have the honor of being looked at by him a great many times this fall, when she goes home with us," Cousin Eunice said, then turning to mother she added: "And she will need a _bushel_ of pretty clothes, Aunt Mary."

"I want one black dress, with a spangled yoke," I hastily put in, but was interrupted by little shrieks of disapproval from the two.

"I--thought I'd have to look kind of _old_," I wound up, as they regarded me with amused surprise.

After breakfast was over Cousin Eunice gathered up her tablet and pencil and nodded for me to come with her.

"I want to look at your face as I write," she explained with a sympathetic smile, "for I am hopelessly stupid and commonplace. I can't even think of a surname for my hero that isn't already the name of an automobile."

CHAPTER VII