Amazing Grace Part 11

"And Guilford Blake standing by, waiting like a gentleman for this fever of emanc.i.p.ation to pa.s.s by and desquamation to take place?"

This interested me.

"What's 'desquamation?'" I asked. "I haven't time to get my dictionary now."

"You couldn't find it in any save a medical dictionary, likely," he explained, with a pretense at patience. "Anyway, it's the peeling off process which follows a high fever--especially such fevers as you girls of this restless, modern temperament so often experience!"

I s.h.i.+vered.

"Ugh! It doesn't sound pretty!" I commented.

"Nor is it pretty," he a.s.sured me, "but it's very wholesome. Once you've caught the fever, lived through it, peeled off and got a s.h.i.+ny new skin you're forever immune against its return. This, of course, is what Guilford is waiting so patiently for. He is one of the most estimable young fellows I know, Grace, and--"

I looked wounded.

"Don't you suppose I know that?" I asked. Then glancing quickly at the watch bracelet on my wrist, and seeing with a gasp of relief that the hands were pointing toward the dangerous hour of three, I turned toward the door.

"I must hurry!" I plead. "You've really no idea what an interesting occasion a Flag Day celebration is, Captain Macauley!"

"No?" he smiled, understanding my sudden determination to leave.

"Indeed, no! Why, for three hundred and sixty-four days in the year you may have a gentle Platonic affection for General Was.h.i.+ngton, Paul Revere and the rest, but on the other day--Flag Day--your flame is rekindled into a burning zeal! You can't afford to be late! You must hurry!--Especially if you have to go there on the street-car!"

"It's a deuced pity you can't get up a zeal for a devoted _living_ man," he called after me in a severe voice as I reached the door.

"It's a pity you can't see the idiocy of this determination of yours--before that publis.h.i.+ng company revokes its offer."

"Well, who knows?" I answered, waving him a gay good-by. "I hate street-cars above everything, and I'm sorry my coupe isn't waiting at the door right now!"

CHAPTER VI

FLAG DAY

Now, according to my ethics, there are two kinds of men who go to daylight parties--idiots and those that are dragged there by their wives.

I had scarcely crossed the lawn of Seven Oaks and found for myself a modest place beside the speaker's stand--which was garlanded with as many different kinds of flags as there were rats in Hamelin Town--when I observed that this present congregation held a fair sprinkling of each kind.

But these held my attention for only a moment--because of the house in the background, and the trees overhead. (To be candid, Mrs. Hiram Walker's country place is not exactly a soothing retreat to visit when temptation is barking at your heels like a little hungry dog--and the desire of your heart begins with H.)

"House that's a Home" might have been written on the sign-board of the car-station much more truthfully than "Seven Oaks"--for only the immense patriarchal ones were included in the "Seven" there being hordes of lesser ones which were no more mentioned than children are when they're getting big enough to be paying railroad fare. The grove was well cared for, but not made artificial, and even the luxuriousness of the house itself could not hurt the charm, for the Hiram Walkers were human beings before they were society column acrobats.

Our families had always been friends, so I happened to know that years and years ago, when Mr. Walker was a clerk in an insurance office--with a horse and buggy for business through the week and joy unconfined on Sunday--they had been in the habit of haunting this spot, he and his slim young wife--bringing a basket full of supper and thrusting the baby's milk bottle down into the ice-cream freezer.

Then, there were more years, of longing and saving; they bought the hill, patiently enduring a period of blue-prints and architectural advice before the house was built. By this time Mrs. Walker's slimness was gone, and Mr. Walker had found out the vanity of hair tonics--but the house was theirs at last. It was big and very beautiful--roomy, rather than mushroomy--and thoughtful, rambling, old-timey, spreading out a great deal of portico to the kiss of the sun. Brown-hooded monks and clanking beads ought, by rights, to have gone with that portico.

Then, the June suns.h.i.+ne was doing such wonders with the oaks, great and small, along the hillsides!

It touched up, with a tinge of glory, even the s.h.i.+ning motor-cars in the driveway. There were dozens of them--limousines, touring cars, lady-like coupes--with their lazy, half-asleep attendants, and the regularity of their unbroken files, their dignity, their quietness, and the glitter of the sun against their metal gave them something of a martial aspect. The silver sheen of the lamps and levers was brought out in a manner to suggest a line of marching men, silent, but very potent--and enjoying more than a little what they offered to view, the dazzle of helmet, sword and coat-of-mail.

The beauty of it all--the softened glory of the shade in which I sat making me feel that I was a spectator at a tournament--cast a spell over me, for I never find it very hard to fall spellbound. Isn't it funny that when you're possessed of an intelligence which has fits of St. Vitus' dance they call it Imagination?--That's the kind mine is--jerky and unreliable. It is the kind of imagination which can take a dried-up acorn and draw forth a medieval forest; or gaze upon a rusty old spur and live over again the time when knights were bold.

But to get back to "those present."

First of all, I noted Oldburgh's best-known remittance man. I noted him mentally, mind you, not paragraphically, for they never made me do the real drudgery of the society page. He was sitting beside his mama, swinging her gauze fan annoyingly against her lorgnette chain. His divorce the year before had come near uniting Church and State, since it's a fact that nothing so cements conflicting bodies like the uprising of a new common foe; and he had sinned against both impartially. After him came two or three financial graybeards; three or four yearling bridegrooms, not broken yet to taking the bit between their teeth and staying rebelliously at the office; a habitual "welcomer to our city"--Major Harvey Coleman, a high officer in the Sons of the American Revolution, and the piece de resistence of this occasion--then--then--!

Well, certainly the impa.s.sive being next him was the most unsocial-looking man I had ever had my eyes droop beneath the gaze of!

He was sitting in the place of honor--in the last chair of the first row--but despite this, he so clearly did not belong at that party, and he so clearly wished himself away that I--well, I instantly began searching through the crowds to find a woman with handcuffs! I felt sure that, whoever she might be--she hadn't got him there any other way!

And yet--and yet--(my thoughts were coming in little das.h.i.+ng jerks like that) he _was_ rather too big for any one woman to have handled him!

I decided this after another look and another droop of my own eyes, for he was still looking--and that was what I decided about him first--that he was very _big_! Then misbehaving brown hair came next into my consciousness. It came to top off a picture which for a moment caused me to wonder whether he was really a flesh-and-blood man at Mrs. Walker's reception, or the spirit of some woodsman--come again, after many years, to haunt the grove of the Seven Oaks.

His New York clothes didn't make a bit of difference--except to spoil the illusion a little. They were all light gray, except for a glimpse of blue silk hose, and their perfection only served to remind you that it was a pity for a man who looked like _that_ to dress like _that_!

Modern man has but one artistic garment--a bathrobe; yet it wouldn't have relieved my feelings any if this man had been dressed in one. For he wasn't artistic--and certainly he wasn't modern!

Still, I felt the pity of it all, for he ought to have had better perceptions. He ought to have had his clothes and cosmic consciousness match! He ought to have been dressed in a coat of goatskin--and his knees ought to have been bare--and the rawhide thongs of his moccasins ought to have been strong and firm!

I had just reached this point in my plans for the change in his wardrobe, when our hostess bustled up and shooed me out of my quiet corner.

"Grace," she whispered, "move out a bit, will you, and let me crowd a man in over there--"

"In here?"

She nodded.

"Where he can't _escape_!" she explained.

I gathered up my opened sheet of copy paper and moved obediently into the next chair, which she had indicated.

"That's right--thank you! I've found out by experience that if you let certain suspicious characters linger on the ragged edges of a crowd like this they're sure to disappear."

Then she turned and beckoned to my Fifth-Avenue-looking backwoodsman--with a smile of triumph.

"_Him?_" I asked in surprise.

She was looking in his direction, so failed to see the expression of my face.

"It's no more than he deserves--having this American Revolution rubbed in on him," she observed absently. "I have never worked so hard in my life over any one man as I have over this identical Maitland Tait!"

I saw him rise and come toward her--then I began having trouble with my throat. I couldn't breathe very easily.

"Maitland Tait!" I gasped.

"Yes--_the_ Maitland Tait!"