_ CHAPTER XVII
Ross took Arethusa out to the Country Club for a round of golf the next afternoon, and as it was the first and only time she had ever spied a golf club, it is not at all difficult to imagine what sort of game she played. It deserved a name all of its own; and her method of holding her club would have brought tears to the eyes of any true devotee of the sport. But from the standpoint of pure enjoyment for the two most intimately concerned, the occasion was a great success.
"I don't believe I care very much for golf," she remarked decidedly, after she had almost dug a trench around her ball on the second tee, "and I believe you move that ball, Father, when I'm not looking with my stick up over my head."
Ross protested his innocence, and insisted that she try once more. So she did. But when she missed it this time also, she was firm in her resolve to quit.
"You do move it, Father!" she repeated. "I just know you do! To tease me! Because, why shouldn't my stick come down in the right place when I know exactly where it is when I start to hit it, if you don't push it away?"
"Because of one of the cardinal rules of the game, my dear, 'Keep your eye on the ball.' You are demonstrating its truth of that aphorism every time you take your eye off."
"But how can I?" retorted Arethusa. "I've only got two eyes. How can I watch my ball and my stick and where I'm going to knock it, and everything, when they won't look but one way at once? I'm not cross-eyed!"
Ross gave it up as beyond his powers of reasoning.
So Arethusa put her driver back in the bag and announced that she would do the caddying. But as conversation is one of the things most unnecessary to a caddy, she could hardly be said to approach perfection in this role, either, though as Ross, very fortunately, did not take his golf with any too much seriousness, they got along in fine shape. Arethusa was outspoken in her loyal admiration of each one of his shots, and when he made one drive of two hundred yards and over, her proud delight was manifest all over the course.
She had not even begun to exhaust the dinner-dance and the Wonderful Mr. Bennet as congenial topics of conversation, although the breakfast-table and the luncheon-table had heard much of both, so she continued to find a great deal to say about them as they walked,--especially about Mr. Bennet, upon which subject she enlarged to Ross's amusement. But Arethusa did not consider that his replies to her raptures were suitably enthusiastic.
"Now don't you really think he's good-looking, Father?"
"Undoubtedly so, my dear."
"I think," Arethusa's expression was dreamy, and her eyes were far away, apparently on the hazy skyline, "I think that he looks just like a Prince!"
It spoiled Ross's drive from the seventh tee completely. He sliced far over into the tall grass, and as she had not been watching as a caddy should, they had to go on without ever finding the ball.
While they were on the fourteenth fairway it began to rain in hard pelting drops, a fulfillment of the morning's promise of a heavy gray sky. Arethusa was in her element then, and as there was no Miss Eliza to drag her in by the power of her will, to all of Ross's entreaties that they seek shelter with more haste, she turned a deaf and unheeding ear. He was far more of a hot-house plant than his daughter, so he caught a violent cold from his drenching in the chilly fall rain, which made itself promptly known with much sneezing before he had gone to bed that night.
Arethusa was thoroughly conscience-stricken when he was unable to get up the next morning. She felt personally responsible for his aches and pains and his fever. It was her duty, she decided, as the contributing cause of it all, to nurse and amuse him. She refused to budge from his side for the next several days, indefatigable in her attentions. She read aloud to him, jumping up from her chair with almost every turning of a page to plump up his pillows with zeal, and to demand if he wanted anything. Arethusa was hardly a gentle nurse, even if a conscientious one. She fetched him veritable gallons of ice-water, and carried up his meals with her own fair hands. And while he dozed, at intervals through the days, she stayed near him, dreaming of Mr. Bennet. Ross accepted all of this solicitude with a lazy nonchalance, not in the least averse to being fussed over.
All of Sunday afternoon, Arethusa watched anxiously for Mr. Bennet. Had he not said that he was coming to call?
But he did not come, although Mr. Harrison and Billy Watts and several other acquaintances made at the Party did. She denied herself to all of these visitors. How could she leave her sick father for such as they?
By Wednesday afternoon, however, Ross was undeniably better. Even Arethusa could see that he was, in spite of the fact that he continued to complain. But it was such complaining as only too plainly indicated that he was loth to relinquish any of this delightful attention he was receiving. So when George announced a caller who had asked for "Miss Worthington," Elinor, who had just that moment come back from down-town with those two new and widely advertised detective stories for Ross's amusement which he had earlier in the day expressed a desire to see, said that she would begin the reading aloud in Arethusa's place, and that Arethusa must receive the visitor.
"And you'll like Candace Warren, I think. She's rather a dear girl. I suppose she came to see you because I know her mother so well. It was very kind of her." To Elinor's rose-colored view of youth, all young girls were attractive because of what they were.
"I think it was perfectly lovely!" chanted Arethusa happily.
She would certainly see Miss Warren, come to call on a stranger in her city, just because of her mother's friendship for Elinor! There was a warm little glow in her heart at the thought of the kindness shown her by so many people for the sake of Ross and Elinor; the Chestnuts, and Mr. Watts, innumerable others at the dinner-dance, and now Miss Warren!
"I'll send George in with tea a little later on," said Elinor, "if you would like to have it."
Then Arethusa's face clouded somewhat, "But I wanted to have supper up here again!"
"Not supper, Arethusa, it's just afternoon tea. I thought perhaps it might help you to get acquainted."
That was very different. It might be great fun to have afternoon tea. She had read about it, and it had always sounded most delightful in the reading.
"But Aunt 'Liza says I can't pour anything," she added doubtfully. "She never lets me at home. She says my fingers are all thumbs."
George could pour it for her, if she wished.
And so with these trifling details arranged, and the tea a settled prospect, Arethusa went in search of Miss Warren.
She ran gaily down the wide front steps, humming a little tune, and skipped into the small reception room at the side of the hall, both hands cordially outstretched.
"I think it was
perfectly dear of you to come to see me!" she exclaimed.
Miss Warren rose politely from the spindle-legged sofa where she had been sitting, and touched one of the outstretched hands with rather extraordinary limpness. She murmured something altogether indistinguishable.
Arethusa's cordiality felt somewhat thrown back upon herself. She sat down abruptly in the nearest chair. Miss Warren resumed her place on the sofa. There was a long silence, while the visitor covertly studied her hostess, and the hostess openly observed the details of her visitor's appearance with the frankest interest.
Arethusa thought Miss Warren was very pretty. She had coal black hair, although very little of it showed from under her hat, bright black eyes, and a wonderfully white skin with a great deal of color in her lips and cheeks.
But it was her clothes that really most intensely interested the clothes-loving Arethusa.
For Miss Warren was exceedingly well-dressed in garments that could but excite admiration. She wore silky furs as black as her hair, soft and long and smoothly shining. Arethusa had a childish longing to stroke them. Miss Warren's suit was made of a marvelous sort of stuff unlike any material Arethusa had ever seen, dark wine in color, and it spelled "Paris" in every well-cut line. The blouse she wore was a superlative affair of lace and delicacy and tracings of fine embroidery. It could never have been called a "shirtwaist," as Arethusa's plain garments of the same shape with their simple rows of tucking were named. From one daintily gloved hand she dangled a gold purse, and several other small articles of the same metal of an unknown variety.
Arethusa's glance traveled downward, still admiring, and there it paused. For it was hard in the first glimpse to determine just where Miss Warren's feet could be, in those long narrow shoes, with the ends just like pointed pencils. It did not seem possible that human toes, of the number of five, could fit into one of those shoes. Arethusa looked suddenly at her own feet, and as Miss Warren's eyes were at that moment upon them also, they seemed to Arethusa to appear very large, and very awkward to have as feet, in her comfortable house slippers with the broad, round toes. She tucked them as far under her chair as she could, and felt a little hot. Miss Eliza had selected those slippers, as a special privilege of an extra pair of shoes for the Visit. But they were a half-size larger than Arethusa ordinarily wore, because they had been the only pair obtainable at Tobin's, in Blue Spring. She had never minded this fact before, but by contrast with Miss Warren's so slim foot-covering they looked really dreadful.
Arethusa found it quite impossible to admire Miss Warren's hat, although liking everything else she wore so much. It was much too small to conform to Arethusa's ideas of beauty in a hat, and it came so close down over the visitor's delicate eyebrows, that it seemed impossible that she could have much of that black hair tucked underneath it. Arethusa began to feel a trifle better, minding the difference in feet and the house-slippers a little less, as she remembered her own glorious mop of redness; which, although so undesirable in color, could never have been squeezed into so small a space as that hat represented.
"I think it was perfectly dear of you to come to see me," said Arethusa for the second time.
But the words elicited very little more response than they had when first spoken.
Miss Warren seemed to be glad that Arethusa should feel as she did about her coming to call, but there was no real animation in her gladness.
The hostess cast around for sentiments, which if uttered, might loosen her visitor's tongue, but the visitor fortunately loosened it of her own accord.
"Do you like Lewisburg, Miss Worthington? Is this your first visit here?"
"Yes, and I just love it!" declared Arethusa, "Everybody is perfectly darling to me! I went to a dinner-dance the other night and had the Most Heavenly Time! Mrs. Chestnut's it was, at the Hotel. Were you there?"
Miss Warren had not been invited, she was sorry to say. She volunteered the information that she was a second-year girl, and that she believed that very few of them had been asked.
While her information as to the cause of it shed very little light, Arethusa was exceedingly regretful that her visitor had missed such a Wonderful Party. She described it in detail for the one so unfortunately deprived of first-hand enjoyment of the Heavenly Affair, bringing Mr. Bennet into the narrative.
Did Miss Warren, by any chance, know Mr. Bennet?
Miss Warren did.
Arethusa waxed more eloquent upon so moving a theme.
But Miss Warren had not added that Mr. Bennet had recently been devoting quite a little of his valuable time and attention to herself, and that there was very little of Mr. Bennet's charm that Arethusa could mention which she did not already know. One of the reasons she had called so promptly when her mother suggested a visit to Mr. Worthington's daughter was because she had been informed that Mr. Bennet had "rushed" the visiting lady at the Chestnut's dinner-dance, and so a very natural curiosity as to the personality of the visiting lady craved gratification as soon as possible.
Mr. Bennet as a subject was exhausted before very long, for Miss Warren was so very unresponsive that it was hard to continue the discussion of him in just the way it had started. Arethusa felt a shyness descending upon her at the cold reception of her enthusiasm for the Wonderful Being who had so recently come into her life. Rhapsodies are well-nigh impossible unless the mood of the listener answers in some small degree.
So the conversation languished once more.
Miss Warren languidly dangled her gold purse and stared through the lace curtains of the window nearest her. It was gloriously autumnal as to weather this afternoon, and the world was gay to the vision. The trees were bright with their rapidly turning Joseph's coat of foliage, and the sunlight streamed like liquid gold. Overhead, the sky was the very clearest of bright blues. Lenox Avenue was unusually full of those who had been tempted out to revel in it; babies and nurses strolled past on the sidewalk, and loaded automobiles sped by in a sort of procession in the street.
Arethusa's regard was largely for the outside also. It was such a day as she adored. Then, feeling it was quite beyond her power to sit so unsociably so close to anyone in the same room, when it was so glorious a world they were both viewing, she turned back to Miss Warren with a friendly little smile.
"It's a perfectly beautiful day, isn't it?"
Miss Warren seemed to thaw a trifle. "It's just gorgeous outside!"
"I like fall better than spring, always," replied Arethusa, "and especially when it's like this."
"Yes," agreed Miss Warren.
The silence descended once more, to be first broken by Miss Warren with the polite inquiry, "Do you play bridge, Miss Worthington?"
Arethusa's surprised gray eyes were removed from the window to which they had returned with the silence, to be fixed on Miss Warren.
"Do I what?" she exclaimed.
"Play bridge."
Miss Warren made this contribution to conversation for no other reason than that it had a strong personal appeal. And from her point of view, it had more possibilities as a theme for development than had the weather; the silence had grown almost oppressive.
Arethusa laughed gaily. She had played a game called "London Bridge" when she was quite small, she and Timothy and the little darkies from the washer-woman's cabin, and they had all liked it very much as a game; but they had never thought of calling it just "bridge."
"I used to play London Bridge when I was little, but of course I don't now."
"I meant cards," explained the visitor with a well-bred smile. "I'm perfectly mad about it. Though some people do like auction better, I never have."
Her smile had nettled her hostess. It had a calm superiority about it that was rather trying. "No," she replied, shortly. "No, I don't know anything about it, or that other thing either. Aunt 'Liza says playing cards are wicked."
The delicate black eyebrows of the visitor lifted a little.
"It's too bad if you don't play. There're so many bridge parties given here. And," she added, "Mr. Bennet plays a beautiful game."
Arethusa decided that Miss Warren was not nearly so pretty as she had at first considered her.
At this critical juncture, George made his entrance with the tea-tray. Arethusa remembered she was a hostess and had a guest. She enquired if the guest would care for some tea.
The guest would be delighted to have some tea. She was famished, she added.
But Arethusa made no reply to this sally. She had not yet forgiven that last remark about Mr. Bennet's ability as a bridge-player.
While the tea and its attendant sandwiches were consumed almost in silence, Arethusa did some thinking. When in Rome do as the Romans do is an excellent old saw, and although Miss Eliza's views on the subject of games played with a deck of cards were firm and had been expressed so as not to be mistaken, Arethusa was meditating open defiance. If the Wonderful Mr. Bennet played bridge, then she, Arethusa, would learn the game, Miss Eliza or no Miss Eliza.
Over her last sandwich, she eyed Miss Warren.
"Is it very hard to learn?"
"What?"
"That.... That card game you called 'bridge'?"
Miss Warren laughed with softness. Arethusa was really rather amusing.
"Why, not at all, I think, for some people. Would you care to learn? I'd be delighted to teach you myself, sometime. Mr. Bennet says I play a very good game."
Arethusa choked on her sandwich.
"I don't think I shall bother
you," she said, pointedly; "Mr. Bennet would show me, if I asked him, I reckon."
Once more Miss Warren's well-bred and superior smile shone forth to arouse resentment. "I think if I were you, Miss Worthington, that I would ask some one else first, because," very kindly, "Gridley Bennet is a perfect old maid about his game. It bores him almost to tears to play with a poor player or a beginner. I've heard him say so more than once. And men just simply hate that sort of thing when they do hate it, you know."
The air with which Miss Warren called the Wonderful Mr. Bennet by his Christian name was galling. It bespoke a degree of intimacy with his charming self from which Arethusa felt herself far removed. And her manner of stating his likes and dislikes was that of one who knew. Arethusa boiled over.
"I didn't ask your advice!" she exploded. "And when I want any of it, I'll let you know!"
Miss Warren looked surprised.
"Why, I...." she began, and then she decided that it was time to leave. She could not quarrel with Arethusa, and Arethusa looked very ready to quarrel.
As Miss Warren made her way gracefully homeward along the avenue, she decided that she really had nothing to fear from Mr. Bennet's casual attentions to the visiting lady at parties. She was countrified and queer, and her clothes were awful. Miss Warren knew Mr. Bennet to be a gentleman of taste. Yet she was glad she had made the call, for she had rather enjoyed it. It would be fun to tell Gladys, friend nearest her heart, all about it.
Arethusa went up the stairs about three at a time, and burst into Ross's room like a small whirlwind, cheeks glowing and hands still clenched in righteous anger at Miss Warren.
"Well, well," exclaimed Ross, "what has happened? Did not the fair Candace come up to expectations?"
"I thought you said she was a dear girl!" Arethusa looked accusingly at Elinor.
"And isn't she?" asked Ross mischievously.
"She's ... she's a cat!" said Arethusa with emphasis. "She said perfectly awful things to me, and she was as nasty as could be to me about Mr. Bennet!"
"So that is where the shoe pinches! Elinor, dearest, methinks there is one of your friends' daughters who has no sort of attraction for our daughter. But Arethusa, my child, I told you, when you first mentioned his name, that he was in a class apart. I told you that he was no lonely floweret wasting his sweetness on the desert air, and that the competition where you would compete was keen. I told you...."
"Ross, for heaven's sake!" laughed Elinor.
"Arethusa is only finding out the truth of my words," replied Ross seriously. "She will learn to depend on her father with one or two more experiences of this kind."
Arethusa perched herself on the arm of Ross's big chair, and Ross tweaked at her ear affectionately. "Is that not so, mine own daughter?"
Arethusa disregarded this question, and asked one of her own.
"Could I learn bridge, do you reckon?"
Ross jumped. "Shades of Miss Eliza!"
"But could I?" recklessly; "Miss Warren said Mr. Bennet played a beautiful game and she said it was cards and that he was fond of it."
"I see. I've heard that he did. Well, something will have to be done about this. Myself, being the sort of player from whom the bridge world runs as one man cannot help you much. But Elinor might. She is said to be somewhat proficient at it. We'll give Arethusa a bridge-party, how about it, Belovedest?"
Elinor agreed, and so Ross suggested a lesson right away.
And Arethusa was just starting off to fetch some cards and have George bring what Elinor spoke of a "card-table," when George himself knocked at the door to announce that Miss Arethusa was wanted on the telephone.
"Mr. Bennet wishes to speak to her."
Bridge lessons were forgotten as if they had never been heard of. Every vestige of color left Arethusa's face. Her hands clasped tightly over her suddenly tumultuous heart.
"To.... To me, George? To me," she stammered; "are you real sure he said to
me?"
George nodded, smiling. "He said, '
Miss Worthington,' very plain, Miss Arethusa."
Then the deepest of red flamed back into her checks and she scuttled off down the hall so fast that she upset every single rug in her path.
Mr. Bennett was Waiting at the telephone! _