My Lady Valentine

THE Luffkins’ twelve o’clock dinner left Whitman free to seek the bower the next day when the sun was still high in the zenith. He told himself that he went early in order to have a long afternoon to devote to the revised version of his book—and there were moments when he believed himself.

When he reached the Lowell place, he slackened his step and loitered by, letting his eyes roam boldly over such portions of the grounds as he could glimpse between the tall, untrimmed boughs of the hedge. He had approached by the rear so that he looked onto the comfortable kitchen porch, the vegetable garden, Nancy’s flowers and the clothes line where white fluttering garments proclaimed the family’s return. At the turnstile he paused to peer down the arbor’s leafy tunnel. Surely, a woman moved toward the gate.

“It’s Nancy,” he said, and waited.

In another moment he saw his mistake. Though erect as a poplar, the woman was no longer young. Her carriage, straight and unyielding, was that of a past generation.

“It’s Aunt Roxana,” Whitman decided, and he strolled on his way in some trepidation, just as the old lady turned the stile and walked down the road in the direction of the village, holding her gray skirts just high enough to reveal congress gaiters and white stockings.

“Well,” the young man sighed, “if the angel with flaming sword leaves Eden unguarded, I suppose no one can blame Adam for stealing back”; and a moment after, he found the break in the thicket he had used the day before as an exit, and made his way to the bower.

He had half hoped to find Nancy awaiting him; but the little retreat was empty. The sun played through the woodbine, making patterns on the rustic table and on the round seat where he and Nancy had sat such a short time since. In its rays gleamed a bit of folded paper, on the center of the table.

“A note,” said the young man; and his heart sank with foreboding even as his eager fingers reached for it.

“For the Man in the Garden,” the note was addressed. Unfolding it, he read:

Whitman’s laugh startled a curious sparrow. “Nancy Rose,” he said, “if you’d ever had any practice, I should say you were past mistress of the art of flirting. Did you really think any son of Adam would obey an order like that?” and he folded the little note into his pocket book. As he did so, he came upon the three letters, with the masculine signature, which had so whetted his curiosity less than a month past. Spreading them out before him, he now compared the penmanship with that of the note he had just found. Again he laughed and shook his head. For all the writer’s determined boldness on the pen’s downward stroke, the note and the letters were unmistakably by the same hand.

And then, while the minutes crawled toward the promised hour of three, he read all the letters again, trying to deduce the motive that had led the girl to borrow the captain’s honest name.

If Nancy had literary ambitions, he reasoned, she would have deluged the magazine with further contributions, once her little verses had been accepted. If she had masqueraded for mere love of adventure, she would have gained more by dropping the mask once her letter had been answered. If she had only wanted money for some girlish whim, why was such secrecy necessary?

He could not guess her motive, but whatever it was, he determined to respect the innocent incognito until Nancy herself should care to throw it aside. In the meantime he would become her friend, he decided; not a shadowy well wisher in the editorial office of Better Every Week, pretending to age, but a young friend such as he was sure she needed; such as with care he might hope to become even in the fortnight left him.

He turned to his book. He had worked on the new chapters all the evening before in the expectation that he would have something to show two bright eyes when they peeped through the trees.

At last she came. Her reproachful, “Oh! you stayed!” brought him back from the world of his dreams. She was standing in the door irresolutely, a little beaded reticule on her arm from which some needlework protruded.

“Is it three?” he said, with a poor feint of surprise.

“Yes, it is three.”

He pretended preoccupation. “I’m in a very important place in the novel; would you mind very much if I finished a paragraph, just a word or two describing the new heroine, before I go away?”

“N-o-o, not if you’ll make haste.”

She stood patiently by the door, her black head against the crimson vines. Whitman looked up.

“Oh, if you won’t sit down and sew,” he said, “just exactly as if I were not here, I shall feel too guilty to linger. And I have just a word more—then I’ll be off for good and all.”

She dropped onto the seat. After a moment’s hesitation he saw her fingers slide into the depths of the reticule and bring forth a tiny square of linen. A moment later bright cotton threads lay on her lap, her needle pricked the pattern and drew the gay strands through the cloth.

The man at the table wrote on, more silent than the afternoon.

“Is she pretty?” asked Nancy.

The writer pulled himself together, apparently from deep abstraction.

“Who?”

“Your heroine.”

“I don’t know. Ideas of beauty differ so radically.”

He bent again over the table. Nancy selected a long crimson thread.

“Does she live in my house?”

“Yes; you don’t mind?”

“No, not if she’s not that bold jumping woman you described yesterday.”

“She’s not.”

“I hate to disturb you; but naturally I feel interested—in a girl that lives here.”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind telling me what color her eyes are and what kind of hair she has, and if she’s tall?”

Whitman looked up and met the wistful eagerness of Nancy’s eyes.

“They’re gray,” he said, making a sudden decision, “hazel gray. Her hair is black, black as the black bird’s wing; and around her white neck and around her little white ears it looks blacker still.”

“I suppose she’s very tall,” ventured Nancy, threading her needle with a long orange thread.

“Not very. She’s small and piquant, quick in her motions like a bird. If she should peep into this summer house this minute you might easily take her for a wood pecker, with her bright eyes, black head and top knot of scarlet ribbon.”

“Does she wear a red ribbon?” Nancy’s hand strayed to her own dark hair. “These are berries, rowan berries from the tree across the road.”

The author courageously faced his mistake. “This girl wears a red ribbon,” he said.

He did not pretend to resume his writing; but, his arms locked on the table before him, he leaned forward watching Nancy sew.

“Would you mind,” she said, after another pause, “telling me a little about the hero? I feel interested on account of the girl living in my house, you see.”

“My hero is a little shadowy,” he confessed; “I can’t seem to see him myself. I may sketch from life—though I don’t allow myself to do that very often—and give the heroine the best man I know.”

“Who’s that?” she asked, looking up from her work.

“My chum, Jim Radding,” he said, with a reluctance he could not quite fathom for making Radding the hero.

“What color hair has he?”

Whitman laughed. “Rad isn’t much on hair. It’s, let me see, brown, a little thin, but he brushes it over the bald spots.”

“Not bright like yours, then?”

Again the young man laughed. “No, fortunately for his own peace, he’s not cursed with a head like a bon-fire.”

“I think red hair is cheerful,” Nancy said judicially. “I always notice that when any one with red hair appears, interesting things begin to happen.”

“Do you?” he glowed. “Well, interesting things begin to happen when Rad comes, too, for he’s the best fellow in the world. You might not think so to look at him; his eyes are sad and his mouth droops at the corners a little when he’s quiet, but it turns up into the funniest, driest kind of smile when he begins to talk. You’d like Rad, there’s no doubt about it.”

“Umph, umph,” she said dubiously. “Umph, umph, but I never did like a drooping mouth; they’re like flags on a still day.”

The young man’s own lips curved into a smile at this announcement, so gay, so joyous that she might well have likened it to a flag in the wind.

“I’ll tell you,” he bargained, “as long as I’ve put your house into my story, I don’t know why you shouldn’t order a hero to suit yourself. What kind of man do you prefer?”

She considered his offer gravely, her eyes drifting from her work to the face across the table. Then she asked:

“Could you make a hero who would take the lonesomeness out of the world?”

“Yes, I can make that kind of man,” was the eager promise.

“Out of everything?” Her voice was wistful, as if warning him he might be promising more than he would find it easy to perform.

“Out of everything—for the girl who loved him.”

“Out of moonlight nights in this great empty garden?”

“Yes, even out of moonlight nights in Venice.”

“Out of Sunday afternoons, when all the world is asleep and the lake shines blue for miles and miles?”

“Yes, and out of long city streets, when the rain comes down, and the lights of the boulevard shine through the mist.”

“Even out of frosty nights, when one looks out of the long window up, up into the sky full of stars, and then back into a great long room, with nobody there but just Aunt, asleep by the Franklin stove?”

“Yes,” said Whitman boldly, “for the man would be there beside her, looking up into the stars, too, and they’d stand close to the window so that the curtain would fall behind them, and his arm would go round her waist, and her head would find its place on his shoulder, and they’d discover that the whole wide universe isn’t lonely to lovers—”

“Lovers!” exclaimed Nancy. “Is your hero going to fall in love after all?”

“Yes,” the author affirmed positively. “Yes, he is. I’m not sure but he is going to fall madly in love.”

“What’s it like to be madly in love?” asked Nancy with frank curiosity. “How does it differ from friendship?”

“There’s as much difference between love and friendship,” began the young man, without hesitation, “as there is between the waters of a fountain, sparkling, leaping, breaking in the air, and rain water standing in a barrel.”

“That’s a very vivid contrast,” Nancy decided after a moment’s consideration. “Could you tell me anything more about love? You see, Aunt Roxana holding the views she does, it is the only chance I’m ever likely to have to learn.... Is there any more to it?”

“Yes,” Whitman asserted, losing himself in thought for a few minutes before speaking, as if to gather his material. “There’s a good deal more to it. It’s funny, love is; it upsets all the accepted standards.”

“How?”

“Well, it upsets all one ever learned about space, at least as I see it.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, a mile isn’t always the same length.”

“Really?”

“No. When it stands between a man and the girl he loves, it’s much longer than when it lies between the man and even his very best friend.”

“That’s very curious,” mused Nancy.

“Love does funnier things than that to Time,” moralized the instructor, in a kind of growing surprise at the discoveries he was making.

“What does Love do to Time?”

“The very same thing it does to space—it overthrows all the old gauges. Sixty minutes spent with even the best of friends is about ten times longer than sixty minutes spent with the girl one’s been longing to see since day break.”

“How do you know all these things?” asked Nancy suddenly.

“How do I know them? Why, why”—the young man flushed and hesitated. “Why, I don’t know how I know them. I just dug them out of my inner consciousness somewhere, I suppose. I didn’t know I had such knowledge myself—an hour ago.”

“An hour ago!” cried Nancy; and she rose to her feet in alarm. “Aunt Roxana was to be back from sewing circle at four. She will be looking for me. It must be four now.” She peeped up at the sky, through the trees that screened them from the house.

Whitman looked at his watch. “By Jove!” he cried. “It’s five!”

“Five!” gasped Nancy, gathering up her needlework. “Five! are you sure, Mr.—”

“Caleb Whitman,” he supplied.

“Five!” she said again; and then she laughed in surprise. “Well, then, Mr. Caleb Whitman, it’s not only with lovers that time runs fast, is it? for these hours have run fast just for us.”