_ CHAPTER VII
"That was such a pretty girl that just went past us, Ross."
Elinor Worthington's smiling glance followed the girl far down the deck.
For the creature was so deliciously young, everything about her; her slenderness; the joyful way she swung when she walked; even the cut of her clothes spelled youth. And she was undeniably pretty, with eyes like bits of blue sky and quantities of silky, corn-colored hair. Her mouth was almost too large, but even that could not spoil the essential prettiness of her. She was laughing at her escort, with glowing upturned face, as they swept past Elinor and Ross in their quiet corner, and her laugh displayed an unusually straight row of the whitest teeth imaginable.
"Was she?" Ross seemed most indifferent. "I didn't notice her. I never look at other women when you're around, my dear."
Elinor laughed. "You goose!" But 'way deep down in her heart she couldn't help feeling a bit flattered.
It was just past tea-time on the big home-coming liner, and it might seem as if all of its voyagers were taking an afternoon stroll. There was only one more day--to-morrow--left of the voyage before Boston Harbor, and everyone was full of the repressed excitement and restlessness of getting home. The decks were alive with couples and single folk, passing and repassing in both directions; some very briskly in real constitutionals, and some much more leisurely as though merely for the occupation of movement.
But Ross felt very lazy. He had buried himself deep in his steamer-chair and refused to budge an inch when Elinor had suggested that they might join that strolling throng.
"I'm a married man now," he said, "and I don't have to worry about exercising to keep my figure. Besides, I had much rather sit here in the corner and hold your hand under the rug."
So Elinor had humored him about the sitting still, and arranged a fat pillow under his head the way he liked it best; but she had no intention of permitting that even so newly married a couple as themselves should be seen holding hands in broad daylight on a crowded deck. Whereat, Ross pretended to sulk; he tilted his cap far down over his eyes; thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and sprawled full-length in his chair. Though instead of conveying to the passers-by any idea of displeasure, with anything or anybody, his attitude only succeeded in picturing lazy comfort.
Arethusa would hardly have known this Ross Worthington reclining so easefully in the steamer-chair as the original of her beloved photograph. She might have recognized the eyes, keen and bright in their glance as ever, and with the same debonair smiling; but the wavy dark hair was clipped as closely as the hair of any other male biped and had greyed a trifle just at the temples. He was less like a novelist's creation, and more like the men Arethusa had known in the flesh, in his appearance, certainly. For this older Ross Worthington had discarded Italian military capes and Byronic collars and flowing ties for more conventional attire. He was as commonplace and ordinary as to clothing, in every respect, as any other man on that huge steamship.
But Elinor Worthington would have attracted attention almost anywhere, and more than one of the pedestrians had given her a second glance of surreptitious admiration as they passed her. She was rather a wonderful looking person. Ross's raptures had not been altogether exaggeration. She had a world of soft white hair, pure white it was, worn simply coiled around a beautifully shaped head; its elderly color in strange and attractive contrast to the smooth youthfulness of her lovely skin. Her eyes were brown, a warm, dark brown, under long dark lashes and slightly arched dark eyebrows; and the tiny gleam of unmistakable fun that lurked in their quiet depths was again a contrast to the almost classical severity of finely cut features, straight nose, and delicately chiseled mouth, and cleanly rounded chin. And she was as graceful in her slender tallness as the girl she had admired--this woman of forty or more. It was small wonder that Ross had declared he loved to look at her.
Here in this corner with her husband, Elinor Worthington was all herself. She glowed like a rose, with none of the little stiffness in her manner she so often unfortunately showed to strangers and which only the discerning few correctly named as shyness. To the majority of people she was likely to seem cold, almost distant.
"What are you thinking about? You look so serious and far away," Ross remarked after an interval of silence.
He believed in the power of the spoken word. It was not given him to remain quiet for long. He might have managed it with the communion of a hand-clasp; but without, it was impossible.
Just then the pretty girl and her escort passed by them again. Elinor's brown eyes watched the pair this second time until they had turned the corner of the deck.
"That girl," she said, half wistfully, "she is so delicious and young. I can't help wishing she were mine. There is something too utterly adorable about a young girl."
"She seems merely silly to me," Ross replied. "I don't see anything particularly interesting or unusual about her that should make you want to own her, or any other callow young thing her age. However, if you say she is adorable, I suppose she is.... Merciful Heavens!!"
"Ross Worthington!"
"And I never thought of her, I'll swear, until this very moment!" he muttered.
"Thought of who?"
"The child."
"What child? Ross, will you kindly make one remark that is intelligible? What on earth are you talking about? Or who?"
"My child." He turned his face to hers, ruefully smiling. "Heaven knows what you'll think of me! But.... But, Elinor, I'll swear I never thought of her until this very moment!"
His wife very nearly went over backwards.
She had thought she was getting used to Ross, and had been sure she was quite prepared for anything he might do or say that smacked of the unusual, which seemed to be one of his peculiar gifts; but this far surpassed anything yet. She had known him very well for nearly three years and while he had once, long ago, told her of a previous marriage, he had never mentioned the existence of a child; or intimated in any way that there were any ties to have drawn him to America.
But that gleam of fun was not in her brown eyes for nothing, and so she laughed. And it was such a merry peal of unrestrained mirth that Ross rose, deeply offended.
"There is nothing at all ludicrous in this, I assure you, Elinor. It's quite serious!"
"I am quite ready to believe it is. But, Ross, I.... Please think for just a moment. I can't help laughing. It
is rather funny!"
Then he smiled himself. One of his greatest charms was the ability to view his own performances, as it were, from a detached perspective.
"You're quite right there, I'll have to admit. To leave you in ignorance of any family, and suddenly, after months and years of such ignorance, produce a daughter!"
"You say a daughter? Are there," Elinor's eyes danced mischievously, "are there any sons you have concealed at home, in case I should admire a passing small boy? Are you going to spend the rest of your life thus immediately granting my idle wishes?"
"No, I'm afraid I've done my very best. I'm no genie of the lamp, although it does look a bit like it."
"Then sit down and tell me all about her," she patted his empty chair invitingly. "Begin at the very beginning and tell me everything you can about your daughter."
Ross obediently draped himself once more in the steamer-chair. But he buried his chin deep in his hands and sat staring long without speaking, across the slowly rising and falling rail, at the sea.
His own disclosure had been, as much, if not more, of a shock to himself as it had been to Elinor. He had not thought very definitely of Arethusa in weeks, or even months; and now, suddenly with the chance passing of another young female creature, and his wife's admiration of her, his daughter's personality had intruded itself as one which must be reckoned with, and taken somewhat into his calculations. For the first time he realized that he had not been considering his child at all, in any plans he had made for the future; and the thought was a bit disturbing.
"What is her name?" prompted Elinor.
"Arethusa."
"Arethusa!"
"Yes. I know it's a most awful mouthful. But her mother named her," his voice softened, "her own name was Matilda; and she had always disliked it so." How long the time had been since he had thought of the mother, either! Once more he stared across the rail, out at the sunlit sea.
Elinor laid her hand gently on his arm for just a moment; a fleeting caress of sympathy for his sobered mood.
"Ross, dear," her speaking voice was unusually beautiful, as soft and clear as a bell, but it had never sounded more like low music than just now. "Ross, would you tell me something about her? Arethusa's mother, I mean. But if you'd rather not.... I've no sort of wish to arouse any memories which might hurt; but I can't help feeling, dear, that I would like to know something about her. I've never asked you before, because it seemed impertinent; but I really do not mean it at all in that sense."
"I know," he answered slowly. "But it was all so long ago, Elinor, there is nothing left to hurt. It seems sometimes now as if I had dreamed every bit of it. She was a slip of a thing; just a girl."
It had not been very long, his first cycle of love.
It was just a little more than two years from the summer day he had first met her, with her cornflower eyes as blue as the ribbons on the muslin dress she wore, and her dainty tininess, until that summer day when he had turned away from a low mound in the country cemetery, with hot rebellion in his heart that the one had been taken and the other left.
He had not wanted to go to that country party. With all a city boy's superiority he had yawned at the suggestion; then decided to go just to watch "the rubes"; and there he had found her, and his visit to the distant cousin had assumed a new significance. After they were married, he had wanted to take her away with him, but she had clung to her own home; and so he had stayed with her on the Redfield Farm, making lazy efforts to learn a trade that had no sort of attraction for him, just because she wished it.
But after she was gone, the farming had lost its excuse for being, and the tiny baby daughter, who cried when he picked her up, and who only wanted to eat and sleep, had no real power to hold him where she was. He wandered restlessly about the country-side, trying to find some place where the mother's personality had never been; and then one day he had announced to Miss Eliza that he was going abroad, to work at something congenial where no memories made it hard for him to stay. He had not intended to remain very long, a year or two perhaps. But Ross followed the line of least resistance nearly always, and the friends he had made and the life he had lived had proved attractive; little by little the ties that had bound him to the Farm had slackened, until he hardly felt them at all.
Time had done what his first hot, youthful grief would never have admitted that it could do, and had faded the glowing colors in the pictures of that chapter in his life; and it was now, as he had said, almost like something dreamed.
"Then she died just after Arethusa was born?"
Ross nodded.
"That was an odd name to give her, dear; 'Arethusa'! Was she named for anyone?"
"No, just because her mother liked it. I was a great goose in those days, with large ideas of the necessity for the revival of Grecian 'pure beauty,' as I called it. Heaven knows where I got the phrase! I had just graduated from college that June before I met her and I had a lot of stuff I had taken to the country with me. Then I sent for more. I used to devour volumes about vase paintings, and classical ideals, and I read worlds of it aloud to her. Miss Eliza used to think it was atheistic, I'm quite sure. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't let me read my mythology in the house at least, aloud. Matilda and I had to go down to the Branch, so we wouldn't be heard. It was from Bulfinch, I believe, she got the story of the fountain nymph that seemed to appeal to her so strangely. And I was quite willing to saddle my daughter with it; it was like taking a firm stand for my ideas. They were hardly ideals." He sighed.
"You poor babies!" said Elinor softly, to herself.
"What did you do with the little girl, Ross?"
"Her great-aunts kept her. The same women, Miss Eliza and Miss Letitia Redfield, that had raised her mother. Matilda's mother was their sister. Miss Asenath, the third aunt, is a cripple. You must know her some day, Elinor. She is 'pure beauty' and pure everything else. And what a friend she was to me when I needed her!"
"How old would she be?"
"Who, Miss Asenath? About seventy."
"No, of course not, dear goose! Arethusa."
"Oh, I don't know. Eighteen, I suppose. Yes, just about."
Elinor looked for a moment as if she did not believe what she had heard him say.
"Ross Worthington!"
"I'm all attention."
"Am I to understand that you actually haven't seen that child for eighteen whole years!"
"You are."
"Why, Ross!"
"Well, I told you why I didn't go back home just at first, Elinor. A scrap of an infant who seemed to thoroughly dislike the sound of my voice, for as I remember it, she howled vociferously every time I went near her, was not much attraction. And then I just put off going back and kept putting it off, year after year. Now do you still wonder"--suddenly whimsical--"that I could forget all about her?"
"I never wonder at anything you do, Ross," replied his wife. Her tone was grave. "I gave that up a long time ago. But I would call your behaviour, in this instance, heartless; if I didn't know you well enough to know you wouldn't really be consciously harsh to a fly."
"Heartless!" he echoed.
"Yes, heartless!" she repeated firmly. "Your own child! And eighteen whole years! Oh, Ross!"
"But she's been well taken care of," he protested, though somewhat feebly.
"Very probably she has. But you're her father. I verily believe, Ross Worthington," she added suddenly, "that you haven't even told her you were going to be married!"
The pendulum of Ross's moods swung very rapidly, as rapidly as ever that of his daughter. The little softness aroused by the thought of Arethusa's mother had passed, and now his eyes were full of unmistakable fun.
"No," he replied, "I will have to confess that I haven't. I didn't think she would be very much interested. And 'Where ignorance is bliss,' you know."
"Ross!"
"Oh, come now, Elinor, do make some allowances! You ought to be feeling flattered, instead of getting all up in the air about it. It shows such a complete absorption in you, I think. But I did mean to write, if it will make you feel any less convinced that I'm a hardened wretch with no natural affections. I've really never seen her, in a sense, and writing to a person you've never seen is.... Don't look so stern, Woman, I do write her often. I'll have you to know my daughter and I are very good friends."
"How often?" pursued Elinor, remorselessly.
"Once or twice, or maybe three times a year. I never make a point of counting letters with anyone. It seems so terribly small!"
Elinor shook her head helplessly. "Oh, Ross, Ross," she sighed. "Thank heaven, there's only one of you!"
"Yes," he answered, very placidly. "Thank heaven! I was never in the least ambitious to be a twin!"
And now it was the wife's turn to stare out at the sea and think of Arethusa.
She was even more vexed with Ross for this dreadful neglect of his daughter than she had shown him. Elinor had a very high ideal of parenthood. Her own happy childhood, with a father and mother who had included her as the third in all their pleasures and even in every day commonplaces, as naturally as they had included themselves, had given her no hazy picture of what a very beautiful thing such a relation could be. She could not understand how Ross could take the idea of his fatherhood so very indifferently. Surely he must love his child!
When Elinor loved, she gave royally of herself. If she spoiled the objects of her affection a bit, along with this giving, it was not a sort of spoiling that hurt. So now her heart went straight across the miles that still separated them and found Arethusa. That she was Ross's daughter was reason enough by itself, thought Ross's wife, to love her, had not the story of that blue-eyed girl who had died so long ago, also drawn Elinor's heart to the motherless baby the girl had left. And the motherless baby was grown!
Elinor could not help wondering how Arethusa would feel about her father's re-marriage; she was bound to have some ideas on such a subject. It was cruel of Ross to leave her so long in ignorance. He had been married over a month; six whole weeks in fact. He should have written to the Farm as soon as his marriage was a settled fact. But he would not have been Ross if he had. A slight smile flitted across Elinor's face at this thought of the consistency of the whole performance.
She felt as if it had devolved upon her to make all of this neglect up to Arethusa, and to love down the resentment, if there was any at all. And so she could not know the girl a moment too soon.
"Ross, what were you going to do about Arethusa? Did you think of going down to see her when we got home?"
"I haven't had time to think very much about any of it yet. I had left her out of things altogether until just this afternoon, by forgetting about her. Why?"
"Well, then," Elinor's voice trembled slightly, "please let me write and ask her to come and see us, in Lewisburg. Away from the aunts. So we can get acquainted by ourselves. And.... And then.... Ross ... if she likes us, we can keep her with us and make three in the family."
"Does any one wonder," he murmured, apparently to the world at large, "that I love this woman as much as I do? Elinor, dearest, it is very plain to me that I am going to be very jealous of my own daughter."
"Do be serious, Ross."
"I am, never was more so in my life."
"You mean.... I may write her to come? You ought to write to her too," she was as eager as any girl. "And I shall send her the money for the trip. It will be my first gift to my new daughter."
"No," said Ross, very decidedly, to the end of this speech, "I can't let you do that."
And all the eagerness died out of Elinor's face.
"Oh, Ross, now please don't spoil it all by being a mule," she pleaded. "We have so many of these disagreeable arguments about money, and it is so very foolish! Why can't I send Arethusa a little check without your behaving so!"
"Because I won't have you, that's why. Arethusa isn't your incumbrance, in any way. She's
my daughter, and I'm not such a pauper that I can't manage to support her, for I most certainly did not marry you to have you caring for my various relatives. You write your letter, and I'll enclose the check."
"You haven't been treating her very much as if she were your daughter." The gentle Elinor could not help saying this and saying it quite sharply.
She so rarely let her temper slip for even the fraction of a moment, but Ross was always so horrid and obstinate about this question of money. He never seemed to realize her side of it; that one of the greatest joys of its possession was what she could do for him and others that she loved by means of it. To say that she should not have the very simple pleasure of sending a trifle of her abundance to Arethusa, was almost too much! The little thought had caused such a glow when it had come.
"I shall do just what I please with my own money," she continued, "and send every bit of it to Arethusa if I wish. You have no earthly right to forbid me any natural use of it."
But this money of his wife's was a thing about which Ross Worthington was almost foolishly sensitive. The fact that Elinor's monetary possession far exceeded his had kept him a great many months from asking her to marry him, when the most casual observer might have read his secret with the greatest ease. So enormous was the discrepancy between their quotas of this world's good that more than one spiteful minded person had intimated it had had something to do with his choice. He knew this only too well, and the thought rankled. Elinor had so much; she could do so much; she could do so much more for herself than he could ever do for her that it was a great sore spot. They were to live in Elinor's house; ride about in Elinor's expensive automobile; be waited upon like royalty, as he phrased it, by Elinor's servants; they were even now, after a lengthy argument about it, traveling home with Elinor's wealth in a far more luxurious manner than he had ever been able to travel on his own money.
The most foolish sort of false pride considered this offer to send a check to Arethusa a sort of finishing straw. He would keep all expenditure for his daughter strictly for himself.
"I wish you would! I wish you would send it all to somebody! I wish to goodness you didn't have a cent of the money!" He rose, his jaw set savagely, and turned away. "I didn't marry you for it, though from the way you spend it on me I'm not at all surprised that a great many people say I did!"
And he was off down the deck in an almost blind rage. Arethusa's temper came not so much from the fact that her hair was red, as right straight from her father.
Elinor stared after him, too hurt to want to follow him, or to try to call him back. They had had many a heated discussion as to which portion of the expense she was to bear and what was to be left for him, but none had gone so far; never degenerated into as real a quarrel as this.
But Ross was too tempestuously moody to remain angry long. It needed only one turn of the deck for him to be back at her feet, ready to humble himself in the dirt in the abjectness of his apology.
The outcome of it was that Ross himself wrote a letter to enclose Elinor's check, that letter Arethusa had kissed under the hollow tree. It required much persuasion on the part of his wife to keep him from describing the whole affair in detail, how abominably he had acted about the check, and how badly he had made her feel. It would make his abasement more complete and lasting in effect, he said, if some one else were to know about it. Ross, like Arethusa, did nothing by halves.
Yet Miss Eliza unwittingly disappointed Elinor's eagerness to see Arethusa, by announcing that Arethusa could not come until the fall. It was far more of a disappointment to his wife than it was to Ross. Ross was very happy with things just as they were.
Elinor made a room ready for the girl to be her very own, when doing over the rest of her house; and she put into it all the love and little personal touches that Arethusa's own mother might have given it.
"She might not be," she said, thoughtfully considering when selecting the wall-paper, "a pink or blue person at all. Ross doesn't know the color of her eyes or hair or anything that he ought to. He's been woefully remiss as a parent. White might perhaps be safest."
Which choice was surely most fortunate.
So white with a silky, silvery stripe was chosen for the walls of the big, sunny room with its rows of windows on two sides which had been set aside as Arethusa's. It was a white ground with garlands of flowers in soft pastel shades near the ceiling. And green, a soft, dull green, was chosen for the side curtains of those sunny windows, and for the sofa cushions and the upholstery on the window seats and the "squshy" chairs. The largest pieces of furniture were of a satiny brown walnut combined with cane. There was a green rug, the color of the moss in Arethusa's own beloved woods and so soft and thick that her feet would sink deep into it, for the floor. Then Elinor put a long, soft sofa at the foot of the bed, and Arethusa's room was ready for her coming.
The bath-room adjoining, which was also to belong to the daughter of the house, was white, shiny tile from floor to ceiling, and it contained every conceivable device known to the mind of a modern plumber that makes for comfort in a bath-room. Could Elinor have but glimpsed the high-backed tin tub in which Arethusa had bathed all of her life at the Farm!
"You've done too much," was Ross's comment, when Elinor showed him this nest, "and spent a fortune besides, on my child. When...."
"Our child," interrupted Elinor gently, "I thought we had settled that once for all. Please, Ross, don't be eternally dragging in the cost of things.... I didn't bring you up here for that.... But tell me if you think Arethusa will like it."
"Like it! Ye gods! Think of the Farm! And the woman asks if Arethusa will like it!"
But Arethusa's actual coming was postponed by Miss Eliza for various reasons several times. The correspondence on this subject was all between her and Elinor, for Miss Eliza wrote a stilted, old-fashioned hand, not easy to read, which Ross's impatience refused to take the time to decipher.
First, it was hard finding suitable company for Arethusa,--no date could be fixed until that was settled; and then Miss Letitia had a little spell of illness and the making of the clothes was interrupted; and so on. But the last postponement, until late October, was the Worthingtons' own fault. It was far too hot in Lewisburg that September, so off they scurried to the seashore before Arethusa was nearly ready to join them.
"Just like Ross Worthington," said Miss Eliza, grimly, when the letter telling of this move reached the Farm. "He just can't stay put. I reckon the Lord didn't make the place where he'd be happy long at a time." _