CHAPTER XXV
THE LOVE STORY OF THE AWKWARD MAN
(Written by the Story Girl)
Jasper Dale lived alone in the old homestead which he had named
Golden Milestone. In Carlisle this giving one's farm a name was
looked upon as a piece of affectation; but if a place must be
named why not give it a sensible name with some meaning to it? Why
Golden Milestone, when Pinewood or Hillslope or, if you wanted to
be very fanciful, Ivy Lodge, might be had for the taking?
He had lived alone at Golden Milestone since his mother's death;
he had been twenty then and he was close upon forty now, though he
did not look it. But neither could it be said that he looked
young; he had never at any time looked young with common youth;
there had always been something in his appearance that stamped him
as different from the ordinary run of men, and, apart from his
shyness, built up an intangible, invisible barrier between him and
his kind. He had lived all his life in Carlisle; and all the
Carlisle people knew of or about him--although they thought they
knew everything--was that he was painfully, abnormally shy. He
never went anywhere except to church; he never took part in
Carlisle's simple social life; even with most men he was distant
and reserved; as for women, he never spoke to or looked at them;
if one spoke to him, even if she were a matronly old mother in
Israel, he was at once in an agony of painful blushes. He had no
friends in the sense of companions; to all outward appearance his
life was solitary and devoid of any human interest.
He had no housekeeper; but his old house, furnished as it had been
in his mother's lifetime, was cleanly and daintily kept. The
quaint rooms were as free from dust and disorder as a woman could
have had them. This was known, because Jasper Dale occasionally
had his hired man's wife, Mrs. Griggs, in to scrub for him. On
the morning she was expected he betook himself to woods and
fields, returning only at night-fall. During his absence Mrs.
Griggs was frankly wont to explore the house from cellar to attic,
and her report of its condition was always the same--"neat as
wax." To be sure, there was one room that was always locked
against her, the west gable, looking out on the garden and the
hill of pines beyond. But Mrs. Griggs knew that in the lifetime
of Jasper Dale's mother it had been unfurnished. She supposed it
still remained so, and felt no especial curiosity concerning it,
though she always tried the door.
Jasper Dale had a good farm, well cultivated; he had a large
garden where he worked most of his spare time in summer; it was
supposed that he read a great deal, since the postmistress
declared that he was always getting books and magazines by mail.
He seemed well contented with his existence and people let him
alone, since that was the greatest kindness they could do him. It
was unsupposable that he would ever marry; nobody ever had
supposed it.
"Jasper Dale never so much as THOUGHT about a woman," Carlisle
oracles declared. Oracles, however, are not always to be trusted.
One day Mrs. Griggs went away from the Dale place with a very
curious story, which she diligently spread far and wide. It made
a good deal of talk, but people, although they listened eagerly,
and wondered and questioned, were rather incredulous about it.
They thought Mrs. Griggs must be drawing considerably upon her
imagination; there were not lacking those who declared that she
had invented the whole account, since her reputation for strict
veracity was not wholly unquestioned.
Mrs. Griggs's story was as follows:--
One day she found the door of the west gable unlocked. She went
in, expecting to see bare walls and a collection of odds and ends.
Instead she found herself in a finely furnished room. Delicate
lace curtains hung before the small, square, broad-silled windows.
The walls were adorned with pictures in much finer taste than Mrs.
Griggs could appreciate. There was a bookcase between the windows
filled with choicely bound books. Beside it stood a little table
with a very dainty work-basket on it. By the basket Mrs. Griggs
saw a pair of tiny scissors and a silver thimble. A wicker
rocker, comfortable with silk cushions, was near it. Above the
bookcase a woman's picture hung--a water-colour, if Mrs. Griggs
had but known it--representing a pale, very sweet face, with
large, dark eyes and a wistful expression under loose masses of
black, lustrous hair. Just beneath the picture, on the top shelf
of the bookcase, was a vaseful of flowers. Another vaseful stood
on the table beside the basket.
All this was astonishing enough. But what puzzled Mrs. Griggs
completely was the fact that a woman's dress was hanging over a
chair before the mirror--a pale blue, silken affair. And on the
floor beside it were two little blue satin slippers!
Good Mrs. Griggs did not leave the room until she had thoroughly
explored it, even to shaking out the blue dress and discovering it
to be a tea-gown--wrapper, she called it. But she found nothing
to throw any light on the mystery. The fact that the simple name
"Alice" was written on the fly-leaves of all the books only
deepened it, for it was a name unknown in the Dale family. In
this puzzled state she was obliged to depart, nor did she ever
find the door unlocked again; and, discovering that people thought
she was romancing when she talked about the mysterious west gable
at Golden Milestone, she indignantly held her peace concerning the
whole affair.
But Mrs. Griggs had told no more than the simple truth. Jasper
Dale, under all his shyness and aloofness, possessed a nature full
of delicate romance and poesy, which, denied expression in the
common ways of life, bloomed out in the realm of fancy and
imagination. Left alone, just when the boy's nature was deepening
into the man's, he turned to this ideal kingdom for all he
believed the real world could never give him. Love--a strange,
almost mystical love--played its part here for him. He shadowed
forth to himself the vision of a woman, loving and beloved; he
cherished it until it became almost as real to him as his own
personality and he gave this dream woman the name he liked best--
Alice. In fancy he walked and talked with her, spoke words of love
to her, and heard words of love in return. When he came from work
at the close of day she met him at his threshold in the twilight--
a strange, fair, starry shape, as elusive and spiritual as a
blossom reflected in a pool by moonlight--with welcome on her lips
and in her eyes.
One day, when he was in Charlottetown on business, he had been
struck by a picture in the window of a store. It was strangely
like the woman of his dream love. He went in, awkward and
embarrassed, and bought it. When he took it home he did not know
where to put it. It was out of place among the dim old engravings
of bewigged portraits and conventional landscapes on the walls of
Golden Milestone. As he pondered the matter in his garden that
evening he had an inspiration. The sunset, flaming on the windows
of the west gable, kindled them into burning rose. Amid the
splendour he fancied Alice's fair face peeping archly down at him
from the room. The inspiration came then. It should be her room;
he would fit it up for her; and her picture should hang there.
He was all summer carrying out his plan. Nobody must know or
suspect, so he must go slowly and secretly. One by one the
furnishings were purchased and brought home under cover of
darkness. He arranged them with his own hands. He bought the
books he thought she would like best and wrote her name in them;
he got the little feminine knick-knacks of basket and thimble.
Finally he saw in a store a pale blue tea-gown and the satin
slippers. He had always fancied her as dressed in blue. He
bought them and took them home to her room. Thereafter it was
sacred to her; he always knocked on its door before he entered; he
kept it sweet with fresh flowers; he sat there in the purple
summer evenings and talked aloud to her or read his favourite
books to her. In his fancy she sat opposite to him in her rocker,
clad in the trailing blue gown, with her head leaning on one
slender hand, as white as a twilight star.
But Carlisle people knew nothing of this--would have thought him
tinged with mild lunacy if they had known. To them, he was just
the shy, simple farmer he appeared. They never knew or guessed at
the real Jasper Dale.
One spring Alice Reade came to teach music in Carlisle. Her
pupils worshipped her, but the grown people thought she was rather
too distant and reserved. They had been used to merry, jolly
girls who joined eagerly in the social life of the place. Alice
Reade held herself aloof from it--not disdainfully, but as one to
whom these things were of small importance. She was very fond of
books and solitary rambles; she was not at all shy but she was as
sensitive as a flower; and after a time Carlisle people were
content to let her live her own life and no longer resented her
unlikeness to themselves.
She boarded with the Armstrongs, who lived beyond Golden Milestone
around the hill of pines. Until the snow disappeared she went out
to the main road by the long Armstrong lane; but when spring came
she was wont to take a shorter way, down the pine hill, across the
brook, past Jasper Dale's garden, and out through his lane. And
one day, as she went by, Jasper Dale was working in his garden.
He was on his knees in a corner, setting out a bunch of roots--an
unsightly little tangle of rainbow possibilities. It was a still
spring morning; the world was green with young leaves; a little
wind blew down from the pines and lost itself willingly among the
budding delights of the garden. The grass opened eyes of blue
violets. The sky was high and cloudless, turquoise-blue, shading
off into milkiness on the far horizons. Birds were singing along
the brook valley. Rollicking robins were whistling joyously in
the pines. Jasper Dale's heart was filled to over-flowing with a
realization of all the virgin loveliness around him; the feeling
in his soul had the sacredness of a prayer. At this moment he
looked up and saw Alice Reade.
She was standing outside the garden fence, in the shadow of a
great pine tree, looking not at him, for she was unaware of his
presence, but at the virginal bloom of the plum trees in a far
corner, with all her delight in it outblossoming freely in her
face. For a moment Jasper Dale believed that his dream love had
taken visible form before him. She was like--so like; not in
feature, perhaps, but in grace and colouring--the grace of a
slender, lissome form and the colouring of cloudy hair and
wistful, dark gray eyes, and curving red mouth; and more than all,
she was like her in expression--in the subtle revelation of
personality exhaling from her like perfume from a flower. It was
as if his own had come to him at last and his whole soul suddenly
leaped out to meet and welcome her.
Then her eyes fell upon him and the spell was broken. Jasper
remained kneeling mutely there, shy man once more, crimson with
blushes, a strange, almost pitiful creature in his abject
confusion. A little smile flickered about the delicate corners of
her mouth, but she turned and walked swiftly away down the lane.
Jasper looked after her with a new, painful sense of loss and
loveliness. It had been agony to feel her conscious eyes upon
him, but he realized now that there had been a strange sweetness
in it, too. It was still greater pain to watch her going from
him.
He thought she must be the new music teacher but he did not even
know her name. She had been dressed in blue, too--a pale, dainty
blue; but that was of course; he had known she must wear it; and
he was sure her name must be Alice. When, later on, he discovered
that it was, he felt no surprise.
He carried some mayflowers up to the west gable and put them under
the picture. But the charm had gone out of the tribute; and
looking at the picture, he thought how scant was the justice it
did her. Her face was so much sweeter, her eyes so much softer,
her hair so much more lustrous. The soul of his love had gone
from the room and from the picture and from his dreams. When he
tried to think of the Alice he loved he saw, not the shadowy
spirit occupant of the west gable, but the young girl who had
stood under the pine, beautiful with the beauty of moonlight, of
starshine on still water, of white, wind-swayed flowers growing in
silent, shadowy places. He did not then realize what this meant:
had he realized it he would have suffered bitterly; as it was he
felt only a vague discomfort--a curious sense of loss and gain
commingled.
He saw her again that afternoon on her way home. She did not
pause by the garden but walked swiftly past. Thereafter, every
day for a week he watched unseen to see her pass his home. Once a
little child was with her, clinging to her hand. No child had
ever before had any part in the shy man's dream life. But that
night in the twilight the vision of the rocking-chair was a girl
in a blue print dress, with a little, golden-haired shape at her
knee--a shape that lisped and prattled and called her "mother;"
and both of them were his.
It was the next day that he failed for the first time to put
flowers in the west gable. Instead, he cut a loose handful of
daffodils and, looking furtively about him as if committing a
crime, he laid them across the footpath under the pine. She must
pass that way; her feet would crush them if she failed to see
them. Then he slipped back into his garden, half exultant, half
repentant. From a safe retreat he saw her pass by and stoop to
lift his flowers. Thereafter he put some in the same place every
day.
When Alice Reade saw the flowers she knew at once who had put them
there, and divined that they were for her. She lifted them
tenderly in much surprise and pleasure. She had heard all about
Jasper Dale and his shyness; but before she had heard about him
she had seen him in church and liked him. She thought his face
and his dark blue eyes beautiful; she even liked the long brown
hair that Carlisle people laughed at. That he was quite different
from other people she had understood at once, but she thought the
difference in his favour. Perhaps her sensitive nature divined
and responded to the beauty in his. At least, in her eyes Jasper
Dale was never a ridiculous figure.
When she heard the story of the west gable, which most people
disbelieved, she believed it, although she did not understand it.
It invested the shy man with interest and romance. She felt that
she would have liked, out of no impertinent curiosity, to solve
the mystery; she believed that it contained the key to his
character.
Thereafter, every day she found flowers under the pine tree; she
wished to see Jasper to thank him, unaware that he watched her
daily from the screen of shrubbery in his garden; but it was some
time before she found the opportunity. One evening she passed
when he, not expecting her, was leaning against his garden fence
with a book in his hand. She stopped under the pine.
"Mr. Dale," she said softly, "I want to thank you for your
flowers."
Jasper, startled, wished that he might sink into the ground. His
anguish of embarrassment made her smile a little. He could not
speak, so she went on gently.
"It has been so good of you. They have given me so much pleasure--
I wish you could know how much."
"It was nothing--nothing," stammered Jasper. His book had fallen
on the ground at her feet, and she picked it up and held it out to
him.
"So you like Ruskin," she said. "I do, too. But I haven't read
this."
"If you--would care--to read it--you may have it," Jasper
contrived to say.
She carried the book away with her. He did not again hide when
she passed, and when she brought the book back they talked a
little about it over the fence. He lent her others, and got some
from her in return; they fell into the habit of discussing them.
Jasper did not find it hard to talk to her now; it seemed as if he
were talking to his dream Alice, and it came strangely natural to
him. He did not talk volubly, but Alice thought what he did say
was worth while. His words lingered in her memory and made music.
She always found his flowers under the pine, and she always wore
some of them, but she did not know if he noticed this or not.
One evening Jasper walked shyly with her from his gate up the pine
hill. After that he always walked that far with her. She would
have missed him much if he had failed to do so; yet it did not
occur to her that she was learning to love him. She would have
laughed with girlish scorn at the idea. She liked him very much;
she thought his nature beautiful in its simplicity and purity; in
spite of his shyness she felt more delightfully at home in his
society than in that of any other person she had ever met. He was
one of those rare souls whose friendship is at once a pleasure and
a benediction, showering light from their own crystal clearness
into all the dark corners in the souls of others, until, for the
time being at least, they reflected his own nobility. But she
never thought of love. Like other girls she had her dreams of a
possible Prince Charming, young and handsome and debonair. It
never occurred to her that he might be found in the shy, dreamy
recluse of Golden Milestone.
In August came a day of gold and blue. Alice Reade, coming
through the trees, with the wind blowing her little dark love-
locks tricksily about under her wide blue hat, found a fragrant
heap of mignonette under the pine. She lifted it and buried her
face in it, drinking in the wholesome, modest perfume.
She had hoped Jasper would be in his garden, since she wished to
ask him for a book she greatly desired to read. But she saw him
sitting on the rustic seat at the further side. His back was
towards her, and he was partially screened by a copse of lilacs.
Alice, blushing slightly, unlatched the garden gate, and went down
the path. She had never been in the garden before, and she found
her heart beating in a strange fashion.
He did not hear her footsteps, and she was close behind him when
she heard his voice, and realized that he was talking to himself,
in a low, dreamy tone. As the meaning of his words dawned on her
consciousness she started and grew crimson. She could not move or
speak; as one in a dream she stood and listened to the shy man's
reverie, guiltless of any thought of eavesdropping.
"How much I love you, Alice," Jasper Dale was saying, unafraid,
with no shyness in voice or manner. "I wonder what you would say
if you knew. You would laugh at me--sweet as you are, you would
laugh in mockery. I can never tell you. I can only dream of
telling you. In my dream you are standing here by me, dear. I
can see you very plainly, my sweet lady, so tall and gracious,
with your dark hair and your maiden eyes. I can dream that I tell
you my love; that--maddest, sweetest dream of all--that you love
me in return. Everything is possible in dreams, you know, dear.
My dreams are all I have, so I go far in them, even to dreaming
that you are my wife. I dream how I shall fix up my dull old
house for you. One room will need nothing more--it is your room,
dear, and has been ready for you a long time--long before that day
I saw you under the pine. Your books and your chair and your
picture are there, dear--only the picture is not half lovely
enough. But the other rooms of the house must be made to bloom
out freshly for you. What a delight it is thus to dream of what I
would do for you! Then I would bring you home, dear, and lead you
through my garden and into my house as its mistress. I would see
you standing beside me in the old mirror at the end of the hall--a
bride, in your pale blue dress, with a blush on your face. I
would lead you through all the rooms made ready for your coming,
and then to your own. I would see you sitting in your own chair
and all my dreams would find rich fulfilment in that royal moment.
Oh, Alice, we would have a beautiful life together! It's sweet to
make believe about it. You will sing to me in the twilight, and
we will gather early flowers together in the spring days. When I
come home from work, tired, you will put your arms about me and
lay your head on my shoulder. I will stroke it--so--that bonny,
glossy head of yours. Alice, my Alice--all mine in my dream--
never to be mine in real life--how I love you!"
The Alice behind him could bear no more. She gave a little
choking cry that betrayed her presence. Jasper Dale sprang up and
gazed upon her. He saw her standing there, amid the languorous
shadows of August, pale with feeling, wide-eyed, trembling.
For a moment shyness wrung him. Then every trace of it was
banished by a sudden, strange, fierce anger that swept over him.
He felt outraged and hurt to the death; he felt as if he had been
cheated out of something incalculably precious--as if sacrilege
had been done to his most holy sanctuary of emotion. White, tense
with his anger, he looked at her and spoke, his lips as pale as if
his fiery words scathed them.
"How dare you? You have spied on me--you have crept in and
listened! How dare you? Do you know what you have done, girl? You
have destroyed all that made life worth while to me. My dream is
dead. It could not live when it was betrayed. And it was all I
had. Oh, laugh at me--mock me! I know that I am ridiculous! What
of it? It never could have hurt you! Why must you creep in like
this to hear me and put me to shame? Oh, I love you--I will say
it, laugh as you will. Is it such a strange thing that I should
have a heart like other men? This will make sport for you! I, who
love you better than my life, better than any other man in the
world can love you, will be a jest to you all your life. I love
you--and yet I think I could hate you--you have destroyed my
dream--you have done me deadly wrong."
"Jasper! Jasper!" cried Alice, finding her voice. His anger hurt
her with a pain she could not endure. It was unbearable that
Jasper should be angry with her. In that moment she realized that
she loved him--that the words he had spoken when unconscious of
her presence were the sweetest she had ever heard, or ever could
hear. Nothing mattered at all, save that he loved her and was
angry with her.
"Don't say such dreadful things to me," she stammered, "I did not
mean to listen. I could not help it. I shall never laugh at you.
Oh, Jasper"--she looked bravely at him and the fine soul of her
shone through the flesh like an illuminating lamp--"I am glad that
you love me! and I am glad I chanced to overhear you, since you
would never have had the courage to tell me otherwise. Glad--
glad! Do you understand, Jasper?"
Jasper looked at her with the eyes of one who, looking through
pain, sees rapture beyond.
"Is it possible?" he said, wonderingly. "Alice--I am so much
older than you--and they call me the Awkward Man--they say I am
unlike other people"--
"You ARE unlike other people," she said softly, "and that is why I
love you. I know now that I must have loved you ever since I saw
you."
"I loved you long before I saw you," said Jasper.
He came close to her and drew her into his arms, tenderly and
reverently, all his shyness and awkwardness swallowed up in the
grace of his great happiness. In the old garden he kissed her
lips and Alice entered into her own.
