Section 4
When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age and
contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters
older, and she--her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was
still only at the beginning of a man's long adolescence.
In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of her
quick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of
action. She treated me with that neat perfection of understanding
a young woman has for a boy.
"But how did you come?" she asked.
I told her I had walked.
"Walked!" In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens.
I MUST be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down.
Indeed it was near tea-time (the Stuarts had tea at the old-fashioned
hour of five). Every one would be SO surprised to see me. Fancy
walking! Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen
miles. When COULD I have started!
All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of
her hand.
"But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you?"
"My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides--aren't we
talking?"
The "dear boy" was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.
She quickened her pace a little.
"I wanted to explain--" I began.
Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than
her words.
When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in
her urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to
the garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish
eyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now
I know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glanced
over me and behind me towards the shrubbery. And all the while,
behind her quick breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.
Her dress marked the end of her transition.
Can I recall it?
Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright
brown hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail
tied with a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an
intricacy of pretty curves above her little ear and cheek, and the
soft long lines of her neck; her white dress had descended to her
feet; her slender waist, which had once been a mere geographical
expression, an imaginary line like the equator, was now a thing
of flexible beauty. A year ago she had been a pretty girl's face
sticking out from a little unimportant frock that was carried upon
an extremely active and efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs.
Now there was coming a strange new body that flowed beneath her
clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement, and particularly
the novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirts she
gathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had come
to her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine scarf--I suppose you
would call it a scarf--of green gossamer, that some new wakened
instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung now closely
to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed fluttering
out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy independent
tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary contact with
my arm.
She caught it back and reproved it.
We went through the green gate in the high garden wall. I held it
open for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted
stock of stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near
touching me. So we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the
head gardener's cottage and the vistas of "glass" on our left. We
walked between the box edgings and beds of begonias and into the
shadow of a yew hedge within twenty yards of that very pond with
the gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so we
came to the wistaria-smothered porch.
The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. "Guess who
has come to see us!" she cried.
Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair
creaked. I judged he was disturbed in his nap.
"Mother!" she called in her clear young voice. "Puss!"
Puss was her sister.
She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from
Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.
"You'd better sit down, Willie," said her father; "now you hae got
here. How's your mother?"
He looked at me curiously as he spoke.
He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but
the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers.
He was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the
bright effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his
cheek to flow down into his beard. He was short but strongly built,
and his beard and mustache were the biggest things about him. She
had taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear
skin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain
quickness she got from her mother. Her mother I remember as
a sharp-eyed woman of great activity; she seems to me now to have
been perpetually bringing in or taking out meals or doing some
such service, and to me--for my mother's sake and my own--she was
always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster of fourteen perhaps,
of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like her mother's, are
the chief traces on my memory. All these people were very kind to
me, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes very
agreeably finding expression, that I was--"clever." They all stood
about me as if they were a little at a loss.
"Sit down!" said her father. "Give him a chair, Puss."
We talked a little stiffly--they were evidently surprised by my
sudden apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie
did not remain to keep the conversation going.
"There!" she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed. "I declare!"
and she darted out of the room.
"Lord! what a girl it is!" said Mrs. Stuart. "I don't know what's
come to her."
It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long time
to me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again
she was out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casually
that I had given up my place at Rawdon's. "I can do better than
that," I said.
"I left my book in the dell," she said, panting. "Is tea
ready?" and that was her apology. . .
We didn't shake down into comfort even with the coming of the
tea-things. Tea at the gardener's cottage was a serious meal, with
a big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread
upon a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied,
perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in
Nettie, saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all
the eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four
hours, miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie's
father tried to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready
speech, for his own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and
astonished him to hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there
I was, I think, even more talkative than with Parload, though to
the world at large I was a shy young lout. "You ought to write it
out for the newspapers," he used to say. "That's what you ought to
do. I never heard such nonsense."
Or, "You've got the gift of the gab, young man. We ought to ha'
made a lawyer of you."
But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn't shine. Failing any
other stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even
that did not engage me.
