My Lady Valentine

THREE days passed. Each afternoon Caleb Whitman put his manuscript under his arm and sought the garden. He skirted the curious village in a wide circle, and came upon the red walls of the mansion by the little used road that ran past the rear of its grounds.

The place was still deserted. He was free to drink from the open well, to pick the grapes which were ripening slowly on the untrimmed vines that covered the long arbor stretching from the kitchen door to the stile. Above all he was free to make use of the woodland bower hidden securely in the far corner. Here he spread his papers broadcast and worked on his novel, heavily, laboriously, hour after hour. Sometimes he paused to sigh, sometimes—to listen.

A bird chirped contentedly in a bush. A woodpecker drummed on a tree. Insects whirred faintly in the grass. The wind rustled in the woodbine that covered the bower. Far in the distance a cock sent forth his triumphant cry. And that was all—no other sound of life—for three long summer afternoons.

It was natural, therefore, that Whitman should be startled as he approached the house on the fourth day, to see a huckster’s wagon standing near the stile. As he hesitated whether to turn back, the huckster came toward him down the arbor. “Know when the folks are expected back?” he called, as he caught sight of Whitman.

“I do not,” answered Whitman; “I’m a stranger here.” Then he put the question that he had hesitated to put to the captain. “Who lives in this beautiful old place?”

“Old Miss Lowell.”

“Old Miss—”

“Yes, a maiden lady, Miss Roxana Lowell. She’s our aristocracy about here. Brought up proud, you might say. Been here pretty near as long as the house—and that’s some time, I can tell you.... You can’t use no huckleberries, I suppose, if you are a stranger here?”

“No,” Whitman smiled; and he waited to enter the garden until the huckster had rattled down the road and disappeared.

“Miss Roxana Lowell,” he murmured, seating himself at the table in the retreat. “That’s one on both Rad and me.” And he began to write, impulsively.

Then he pushed the paper away. “Old Miss Lowell,” he repeated ironically, and lost himself in reverie. Quite suddenly the garden seemed to him the loneliest spot in the world. The bower where he sat ceased to be a snug retreat; it became simply a summer house, with unpainted, rotting latticed walls, damp and a little cold.

He took up a fresh sheet of paper and began—

Something snapped. He raised his head to listen. Only silence, except for the whir of a thrush in the woods, and the distant plaintive cry of a gull. Again he bent over the paper.

And then the branches of the low hanging trees parted like a screen, the bows snapped back into place, and a girl stood in the archway of the bower.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my summer house?”

The voice was clear and sweet. Caleb Whitman raised his head and looked into gray eyes with long dark lashes, eyes that did not fall nor quiver, though the color that flooded the girl’s cheeks and the quick breathing that stirred her quaint muslin gown, attested suppressed excitement. There was something birdlike in the quick startled glance of her eyes, in the poise of her vibrant little figure as she hovered at the door ready for instant flight. Whitman sprang to his feet.

“Is this Miss Roxana Lowell?”

“No, I’m just Nancy, her niece.”

She waited for him to continue, a hand on either side of the doorway barring all retreat.

“I’m a summer visitor,” he hastened to explain. “I am staying in the village. I found your house deserted—I supposed for the summer—and I have been making bold to bring my papers out here and make use of your bower for a study. I’m going to make bolder, and ask you—if it would be possible for me to continue to come? Your garden is so large—I’ve become so attached to it”—

“Oh, I’m so sorry. For you see—you must go—this instant, never to come back.”

“Are you in earnest? Couldn’t we make some arrangement? I can get letters, you know, to prove I’m a respectable person—that sort of thing.”

“You couldn’t get letters proving you weren’t a man,” said Nancy, “and above all things a man is what Aunt Roxana most abhors. She won’t have one about the premises. She won’t let even a very little boy come to weed the garden. She hires a woman to cut the grass.”

“And are men equally distasteful to you?”

“I’ve never known any, except the village people; and they’re quite old. But Aunt Roxana says that men, especially young men, are the cause of all the trouble in the world.... And they certainly have been the cause of her trouble.”

“We haven’t always made a good record for ourselves,” Whitman confessed, smiling into the earnest little face across the table. “But if one man would promise, very solemnly, to try to the best of his ability”—

“It wouldn’t do any good. She wouldn’t believe you,” the girl sighed.

“Wouldn’t it melt her heart, ever so little, if I went in and told her”—

Nancy’s hands tightened on the arched doorway.

“No,” she said fearfully, looking over her shoulder in the direction of the house. “No, you mustn’t ask her anything. If she knew you were here, you would have to go—at once.”

A smile quivered on Whitman’s lips.

“Then I don’t have to go—at once?”

Nancy sank provisionally onto the round seat that circled the latticed house, and Caleb, after a moment, seated himself also, on the far end.

“You may stay—just long enough—to tell me what you were doing here when I came.”

“I was writing a novel.”

“A novel”—

“Yes, and I’ve been so bold as to put your house and your garden in my story.”

“Oh, if Aunt Roxana knew that!”

“Would—it please her? It’s such a beautiful old place, I really couldn’t help it.”

“Please her! She dislikes novels almost as much as men. If she knew there was a man in her garden, writing a novel”—

Nancy did not try to complete her sentence, leaving it to Whitman to imagine the state of Aunt Roxana’s mind under the double provocation. She lightly touched one of the pages—

“Perhaps, though, this is not a love story? It’s love stories she dislikes most.”

“This isn’t much of a love story,” the young man explained eagerly, hoping to gain favor. He moved a very little nearer, and took up the pages as if to outline the plot. “You see, this novel endeavors to deal truthfully with life,” he began.

“Yes; that’s what Aunt Roxana thinks they fail to do.”

“My hero is a sane hero”—

“A sane hero?” questioned Nancy. She had propped her elbow on the table and supported her chin in the cup of one pink palm. Her eyes, soft and trusting, were fixed intently on the young man’s face.

“Yes,” continued Whitman, his mind wandering from his hero to the way Nancy’s black, silky hair grew about her white brow and waved over her little ears. “A sensible chap,” he went on automatically, “who doesn’t fall in love”—

“Never—in his whole life?”

Whitman stopped short. “I didn’t mean to have him do so,” he said, doubtfully. “You see he picked out his intended wife with his head”—

“Like Aunt Roxana does her dresses,” mused Nancy.

“He didn’t think she was the most beautiful woman in the world”—

“Was she?”

“No,” the author said gayly, with joyful recognition of the fact.

“What was she like?”

“She was a great raw boned creature, that could walk ten miles at a stretch and leap higher than any girl in the gymnasium.”

“That wasn’t quite genteel, was it?” Nancy smiled, as if they must be of one accord on that point.

“It wasn’t very attractive—someway.”

“Were her clothes—pretty?”

The gray eyes dropped to the skirt of her muslin dress, the white hands played with a tiny brooch of pearls at her throat.

“She wore mostly a short skirt and a jumper, and large loose shoes.”

“Didn’t they make her feet look very large?”

Whitman caught a glimpse of a small foot in a black slipper with a peep of white stocking.

“Yes,” he smiled, “they looked exactly like flat boats.”

“Was her hair pretty?” A delicate hand smoothed back one soft lock at the nape of her neck.

“No, she wore it short—to save time for more important things.”

“What kind of things?”

“I hadn’t gotten that far.”

Whitman paused, in doubt. But the eager questions continued.

“What did your lovers call each other?”

“What do you mean?”

“What names? Aunt Roxana always crossed out the love names, with a black pencil, in my stories.”

“He called her ‘Mary.’ She called him ‘John,’” he admitted. Then he asked eagerly, “Do you like—love names?”

Nancy’s answer was indirect. “In the Song of Songs,” she murmured dreamily, “the lovers called each other ‘beloved’ and ‘he whom my soul loves;’ and they said—but maybe you aren’t interested? I don’t think King Solomon was a very sensible lover”—

“Yes, yes, I am interested. What did they call each other?”

The girl’s lashes veiled her bright eyes, the roses sprang to her cheeks as she repeated the ardent words softly, for the ear so near her own. “Solomon said to the Shulamite, ‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’”—

“Yes,” murmured Whitman, his eyes on Nancy’s face, and his heart, he did not pretend to explain why, giving an extra beat.

“And the Shulamite said of Solomon”—the girl raised her lashes and spoke clearly, looking straight ahead, “‘As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons of men.’ And I’ve always thought,” said Nancy, “that unless a man felt that way about a girl, and a girl felt that way about a man, it wasn’t love.”

“Nor is it,” cried Whitman, with conviction. He drew a long breath; then he deliberately took up his papers and tore them straight through the middle.

“Oh,” said Nancy, “why did you do that?”

“To mark the end,” said he, “once for all, of that sane love story.”

“Will you write another?”

“Yes, if I may come here again to-morrow.”

She hesitated as she rose. “I don’t know—”

“Just once—for luck,” he urged.

“Well—just once more.”

“And you will come, too?”

“If I do,” said Nancy, moving towards the door, and looking back irresolutely over one shoulder, “it will be just to tell you to go.”

“Of course,” Whitman agreed. And then, as she disappeared, he picked up the scattered papers and stuffed them in his pocket.

“There’s no doubt about it,” he whispered softly as he left the garden; “I’ve found you, my little Lady Valentine.”