XI
WHEN HALF-GODS GO
There was a silence, for if the dazzled young man could have spoken
at all, The could have found nothing to say; and, perhaps, the lady
would not trust her own voice just then. His eyes had fallen again;
he was too dazed, and, in truth, too panic-stricken, now, to look
at her, though if he had been quite sure that she was part of a
wonderful dream he might have dared. She was seated beside him,
and had handed him her parasol in a little way which seemed to imply
that of course he had reached for it, so that it was to be seen
how used she was to have all tiny things done for her, though this
was not then of his tremulous observing. He did perceive, however,
that he was to furl the dainty thing; he pressed the catch, and
let down the top timidly, as if fearing to break or tear it; and,
as it closed, held near his face, he caught a very faint, sweet,
spicy emanation from it like wild roses and cinnamon.
He did not know her; but his timidity and a strange little choke
in his throat, the sudden fright which had seized upon him, were
not caused by embarrassment. He had no thought that she was one
he had known but could not, for the moment, recall; there was nothing
of the awkwardness of that; no, he was overpowered by the miracle
of this meeting. And yet, white with marvelling, he felt it to be
so much more touchingly a great happiness than he had ever known
that at first it was inexpressibly sad.
At last he heard her voice again, shaking a little, as she said:
"I am glad you remembered."
"Remembered what?" he faltered.
"Then you don't?" she cried. "And yet you came."
"Came here, do you mean?"
"Yes--now, at noon."
"Ah!" he half whispered, unable to speak aloud. "Was
it you who said--who said, `Remember! Across--across--"'
"`Across Main Street bridge at noon!' " she finished for
him, gently. "Yes."
He took a deep breath in the wonder of it. "Where was it you
said that?" he asked, slowly. "Was it last night?"
"Don't you even know that you came to meet me?"
"_I_--came to--to meet--you!"
She gave a little pitying cry, very near a sob, seeing his utter
bewilderment.
"It was like the strangest dream in the world," she said.
"You were at the station when I came, last night. You don't
remember at all?"
His eyes downcast, his face burning hotly, he could only shake his
head.
"Yes," she continued. "I thought no one would be
there, for I had not written to say what train I should take, but
when I stepped down from the platform, you were standing there;
though you didn't see me at first, not until I had called your name
and ran to you. You said, `I've come to meet you,' but you said
it queerly, I thought. And then you called a carriage for me; but
you seemed so strange you couldn't tell how you knew that I was
coming, and--and then I--I understood you weren't yourself. You
were very quiet, but I knew, I knew! So I made you get into the
carriage--and--and--"
She faltered to a stop, and with that, shame itself brought him
courage; he turned and faced her. She had lifted her handkerchief
to her eyes, but at his movement she dropped it, and it was not
so much the delicate loveliness of her face that he saw then as
the tears upon her cheeks.
"Ah, poor boy!" she cried. "I knew! I knew!"
"You--you took me home?"
"You told me where you lived," she answered. "Yes,
I took you home."
"I don't understand," he stammered, huskily. "I don't
understand!"
She leaned toward him slightly, looking at him with great intentness.
"You didn't know me last night," she said. "Do you
know me now?"
For answer he could only stare at her, dumfounded. He lifted an
unsteady hand toward her appealingly. But the manner of the lady,
as she saw the truth, underwent an April change. She drew back lightly;
he was favored with the most delicious, low laugh he had ever heard,
and, by some magic whisk which she accomplished, there was no sign
of tears about her.
"Ah! I'm glad you're the same, Joe!" she said. "You
never would or could pretend very well. I'm glad you're the same,
and I'm glad I've changed, though that isn't why you have forgotten
me. You've forgotten me because you never thought of me. Perhaps
I should not have known you if you had changed a great deal--as
I have!"
He started, leaning back from her. "Ah!" she laughed.
"That's it! That funny little twist of the head you always
had, like a-- like a--well, you know I must have told you a thousand
times that it was like a nice friendly puppy; so why shouldn't I
say so now? And your eyebrows! When you look like that, nobody could
ever forget you, Joe!"
He rose from the log, and the mongrel leaped upon him uproariously,
thinking they were to go home, belike to food.
The lady laughed again. "Don't let him spoil my parasol. And
I must warn you now: Never, never TREAD ON MY SKIRT! I'm very irritable
about such things!"
He had taken three or four uncertain backward steps from her. She
sat before him, radiant with laughter, the loveliest creature he
had ever seen; but between him and this charming vision there swept,
through the warm, scented June air, a veil of snow like a driven
fog, and, half obscured in the heart of it, a young girl stood,
knee-deep in a drift piled against an old picket gate, her black
water- proof and shabby skirt flapping in the blizzard like torn
sails, one of her hands out-stretched toward him, her startled eyes
fixed on his.
"And, oh, how like you," said the lady; "how like
you and nobody else in the world, Joe, to have a yellow dog!"
"ARIEL TABOR!"
His lips formed the words without sound.
"Isn't it about time?" she said. "Are strange ladies
in the HABIT of descending from trains to take you home?"
Once, upon a white morning long ago, the sensational progress of
a certain youth up Main Street had stirred Canaan. But that day
was as nothing to this. Mr. Bantry had left temporary paralysis
in his wake; but in the case of the two young people who passed
slowly along the street to-day it was petrifaction, which seemingly
threatened in several instances (most notably that of Mr. Arp) to
become permanent.
The lower portion of the street, lined with three and four story
buildings of brick and stone, rather grim and hot facades under
the mid-day sun, afforded little shade to the church-comers, who
were working homeward in processional little groups and clumps,
none walking fast, though none with the appearance of great leisure,
since neither rate of progress would have been esteemed befitting
the day. The growth of Canaan, steady, though never startling, had
left almost all of the churches down-town, and Main Street the principal
avenue of communication between them and the "residence section."
So, to-day, the intermittent procession stretched along the new
cement side- walks from a little below the Square to Upper Main
Street, where maples lined the thoroughfare and the mansions of
the affluent stood among pleasant lawns and shrubberies. It was
late; for this had been a communion Sunday, and those far in advance,
who had already reached the pretty and shady part of the street,
were members of the churches where services had been shortest; though
few in the long parade looked as if they had been attending anything
very short, and many heads of families were crisp in their replies
to the theological inquiries of their offspring. The men imparted
largely a gloom to the itinerant concourse, most of them wearing
hot, long black coats and having wilted their collars; the ladies
relieving this gloom somewhat by the lighter tints of their garments;
the spick-and-span little girls relieving it greatly by their white
dresses and their faces, the latter bright with the hope of Sunday
ice-cream; while the boys, experiencing some solace in that they
were finally out where a person could at least scratch himself if
he had to, yet oppressed by the decorous necessities of the day,
marched along, furtively planning, behind imperturbably secretive
countenances, various means for the later dispersal of an odious
monotony.
Usually the conversation of this long string of the homeward-bound
was not too frivolous or worldly; nay, it properly inclined to discussion
of the sermon; that is, praise of the sermon, with here and there
a mild "I-didn't-like-his-saying" or so; and its lighter
aspects were apt to concern the next "Social," or various
pleasurable schemes for the raising of funds to help the heathen,
the quite worthy poor, or the church.
This was the serious and seemly parade, the propriety of whose behavior
was to-day almost disintegrated when the lady of the bridge walked
up the street in the shadow of a lacy, lavender parasol carried
by Joseph Louden. The congregation of the church across the Square,
that to which Joe's step-aunt had been late, was just debouching,
almost in mass, upon Main Street, when these two went by. It is
not quite the truth to say that all except the children came to
a dead halt, but it is not very far from it. The air was thick with
subdued exclamations and whisperings.
Here is no mystery. Joe was probably the only person of respectable
derivation in Canaan who had not known for weeks that Ariel Tabor
was on her way home. And the news that she had arrived the night
before had been widely disseminated on the way to church, entering
church, IN church (even so!), and coming out of church. An account
of her house in the Avenue Henri Martin, and of her portrait in
the Salon--a mysterious business to many, and not lacking in grandeur
for that!--had occupied two columns in the Tocsin, on a day, some
months before, when Joe had found himself inimically head- lined
on the first page, and had dropped the paper without reading further.
Ariel's name had been in the mouth of Canaan for a long time; unfortunately
for Joe, however, not in the mouth of that Canaan which held converse
with him.
Joe had not known her. The women recognized her, infallibly, at
first glance; even those who had quite forgotten her. And the women
told their men. Hence the un-Sunday-like demeanor of the procession,
for few towns hold it more unseemly to stand and stare at passers-by,
especially on the Sabbath.--BUT Ariel Tabor returned--and walking
with--WITH JOE LOUDEN! . . .
A low but increasing murmur followed the two as they proceeded.
It ran up the street ahead of them; people turned to look back and
paused, so that they had to walk round one or two groups. They had,
also, to walk round Norbert Flitcroft, which was very like walking
round a group. He was one of the few (he was waddling home alone)
who did not identify Miss Tabor, and her effect upon him was extraordinary.
His mouth opened and he gazed stodgily, his widening eyes like sun-dogs
coming out of a fog. He did not recognize her escort; did not see
him at all until they had passed, after which Mr. Flitcroft experienced
a few moments of trance; came out of it stricken through and through;
felt nervously of his tie; resolutely fell in behind the heeling
mongrel and followed, at a distance of some forty paces, determined
to learn what household this heavenly visitor honored, and thrilling
with the intention to please that same household with his own presence
as soon and as often as possible.
Ariel flushed a little when she perceived the extent of their conspicuousness;
but it was not the blush that Joe remembered had reddened the tanned
skin of old; for her brownness had gone long ago, though it had
not left her merely pink and white. This was a delicate rosiness
rising from her cheeks to her temples as the earliest dawn rises.
If there had been many words left in Joe, he would have called it
a divine blush; it fascinated him, and if anything could have deepened
the glamour about her, it would have been this blush. He did not
understand it, but when he saw it he stumbled.
Those who gaped and stared were for him only blurs in the background;
truly, he saw "men as trees walking"; and when it became
necessary to step out to the curb in passing some clump of people,
it was to him as if Ariel and he, enchantedly alone, were working
their way through underbrush in the woods.
He kept trying to realize that this lady of wonder was Ariel Tabor,
but he could not; he could not connect the shabby Ariel, whom he
had treated as one boy treats another, with this young woman of
the world. He had always been embarrassed, himself, and ashamed
of her, when anything she did made him remember that, after all,
she was a girl; as, on the day he ran away, when she kissed a lock
of his hair escaping from the bandage. With that recollection, even
his ears grew red: it did not seem probable that it would ever happen
again! The next instant he heard himself calling her "Miss
Tabor."
At this she seemed amused. "You ought to have called me that,
years ago," she said, "for all you knew me!"
"I did know her--YOU, I mean!" he answered. "I used
to know nearly everything you were going to say before you said
it. It seems strange now--"
"Yes," she interrupted. "It does seem strange now!"
"Somehow," he went on, "I doubt if now I'd know."
"Somehow," she echoed, with fine gravity, "I doubt
it, too."
Although he had so dim a perception of the staring and whispering
which greeted and followed them, Ariel, of course, was thoroughly
aware of it, though the only sign she gave was the slight blush,
which very soon disappeared. That people turned to look at her may
have been not altogether a novelty: a girl who had learned to appear
unconscious of the Continental stare, the following gaze of the
boulevards, the frank glasses of the Costanza in Rome, was not ill
equipped to face Main Street, Canaan, even as it was to-day.
Under the sycamores, before they started, they had not talked a
great deal; there had been long silences: almost all her questions
concerning the period of his runaway absence; she appeared to know
and to understand everything which had happened since his return
to the town. He had not, in his turn, reached the point where he
would begin to question her; he was too breathless in his consciousness
of the marvellous present hour. She had told him of the death of
Roger Tabor, the year before. "Poor man," she said, gently,
"he lived to see `how the other fellows did it' at last, and
everybody liked him. He was very happy over there."
After a little while she had said that it was growing close upon
lunch-time; she must be going back.
"Then--then--good-bye," he replied, ruefully.
"Why?"
"I'm afraid you don't understand. It wouldn't do for you to
be seen with me. Perhaps, though, you do understand. Wasn't that
why you asked me to meet you out here beyond the bridge?"
In answer she looked at him full and straight for three seconds,
then threw back her head and closed her eyes tight with laughter.
Without a word she took the parasol from him, opened it herself,
placed the smooth white coral handle of it in his hand, and lightly
took his arm. There was no further demur on the part of the young
man. He did not know where she was going; he did not ask.
Soon after Norbert turned to follow them, they came to the shady
part of the street, where the town in summer was like a grove. Detachments
from the procession had already, here and there, turned in at the
various gates. Nobody, however, appeared to have gone in-doors,
except for fans, armed with which immediately to return to rockers
upon the shaded verandas. As Miss Tabor and Joe went by, the rocking-chairs
stopped; the fans poised, motionless; and perspiring old gentlemen,
wiping their necks, paused in arrested attitudes.
Once Ariel smiled politely, not at Mr. Louden, and inclined her
head twice, with the result that the latter, after thinking for
a time of how gracefully she did it and how pretty the top of her
hat was, became gradually conscious of a meaning in her action:
that she had bowed to some one across the street. He lifted his
hat, about four minutes late, and discovered Mamie Pike and Eugene,
upon the opposite pavement, walking home from church together. Joe
changed color.
There, just over the way, was she who had been, in his first youth,
the fairy child, the little princess playing in the palace yard,
and always afterward his lady of dreams, his fair unreachable moon!
And Joe, seeing her to-day, changed color; that was all! He had
passed Mamie in the street only a week before, and she had seemed
all that she had always seemed; to-day an incomprehensible and subtle
change had befallen her--a change so mystifying to him that for
a moment he almost doubted that she was Mamie Pike. It came to him
with a breath- taking shock that her face lacked a certain vivacity
of meaning; that its sweetness was perhaps too placid; that there
would have been a deeper goodness in it had there been any hint
of daring. Astonishing questions assailed him, startled him: could
it be true that, after all, there might be some day too much of
her? Was her amber hair a little too--FLUFFY? Was something the
matter with her dress? Everything she wore had always seemed so
beautiful. Where had the exquisiteness of it gone? For there was
surely no exquisiteness about it now! It was incredible that any
one could so greatly alter in the few days elapsed since he had
seen her.
Strange matters! Mamie had never looked prettier.
At the sound of Ariel's voice he emerged from the profundities of
his psychic enigma with a leap.
"She is lovelier than ever, isn't she?"
"Yes, indeed," he answered, blankly.
"Would you still risk--" she began, smiling, but, apparently
thinking better of it, changed her question: "What is the name
of your dog, Mr. Louden? You haven't told me."
"Oh, he's just a yellow dog," he evaded, unskilfully.
"YOUNG MAN!" she said, sharply.
"Well," he admitted, reluctantly, "I call him Speck
for short."
"And what for long? I want to know his real name."
"It's mighty inappropriate, because we're fond of each other,"
said Joe, "but when I picked him up he was so yellow, and so
thin, and so creeping, and so scared that I christened him `Respectability.'
"
She broke into light laughter, stopped short in the midst of it,
and became grave. "Ah, you've grown bitter," she said,
gently.
"No, no," he protested. "I told you I liked him."
She did not answer.
They were now opposite the Pike Mansion, and to his surprise she
turned, indicating the way by a touch upon his sleeve, and crossed
the street toward the gate, which Mamie and Eugene had entered.
Mamie, after exchanging a word with Eugene upon the steps, was already
hurrying into the house.
Ariel paused at the gate, as if waiting for Joe to open it.
He cocked his head, his higher eyebrow rose, and the distorted smile
appeared. "I don't believe we'd better stop here," he
said. "The last time I tried it I was expunged from the face
of the universe."
"Don't you know?" she cried. "I'm staying here. Judge
Pike has charge of all my property; he was the administrator, or
something." Then seeing him chopfallen and aghast, she went
on: "Of course you don't know! You don't know anything about
me. You haven't even asked!"
"You're going to live HERE?" he gasped.
"Will you come to see me?" she laughed. "Will you
come this afternoon?"
He grew white. "You know I can't," he said.
"You came here once. You risked a good deal then, just to see
Mamie dance by a window. Don't you dare a little for an old friend?"
"All right," he gulped. "I'll try."
Mr. Bantry had come down to the gate and was holding it open, his
eyes fixed upon Ariel, within them a rising glow. An impression
came to Joe afterward that his step-brother had looked very handsome.
"Possibly you remember me, Miss Tabor?" said Eugene, in
a deep and impressive voice, lifting his hat. "We were neighbors,
I believe, in the old days."
She gave him her hand in a fashion somewhat mannerly, favoring him
with a bright, negligent smile. "Oh, quite," she answered,
turning again to Joe as she entered the gate. "Then I shall
expect you?"
"I'll try," said Joe. "I'll try."
He stumbled away; Respectability and he, together, interfering alarmingly
with the comfort of Mr. Flitcroft, who had stopped in the middle
of the pavement to stare glassily at Ariel. Eugene accompanied the
latter into the house, and Joe, looking back, understood: Mamie
had sent his step- brother to bring Ariel in--and to keep him from
following.
"This afternoon!" The thought took away his breath, and
he became paler.
The Pike brougham rolled by him, and Sam Warden, from the box, favored
his old friend upon the pavement with a liberal display of the whites
of his eyes. The Judge, evidently, had been detained after services--without
doubt a meeting of the church officials. Mrs. Pike, blinking and
frightened, sat at her husband's side, agreeing feebly with the
bull-bass which rumbled out of the open window of the brougham:
"I want orthodox preaching in MY church, and, by God, madam,
I'll have it! That fellow has got to go!" Joe took off his
hat and wiped his brow.