A Young Man in a Hurry, and Other Short Stories

Instinctively she raised her hands to touch her disordered hair; she stood there naïvely twisting it into shape again, her eyes constantly reverting to the sun-tanned face before her.

“And I have the pleasure of knowing your guardian, Mr. Garcide, very slightly – in a business way,” he was saying, politely.

“Ophir Steel,” she said.

He laughed.

“Oh, we are making a great battle,” he said. “I’m only hoping we may come to an understanding with Mr. Garcide.”

“I thought you had already come to an understanding,” she observed, calmly.

“Have we? I hope so; I had not heard that,” he said, quickly. “How did you hear?”

Without warning she flushed scarlet to her neck; and she was as amazed as he at the surging color staining her white skin.

She could not endure that – she could not face him – so she bent her head a little in recognition of his presence and stepped past him, out along the river-bank.

He looked after her, wondering what he could have said.

She wondered, too, and her wonder grew that instead of self-pity, repugnance, and deep dread, she should feel such a divine relief from the terror that had possessed her.

Now at least she knew the worst. This was the man!

She strove to place him, to recall his face. She could not. All along she had pictured Crawford as an older man. And this broad-shouldered, tanned young fellow was Crawford, after all! Where could her eyes have been? How absurd that her indifference should have so utterly blinded her!

She stood a moment on the lawn, closing her eyes.

Oh, now she had no difficulty in recalling his face – in fact the difficulty was to shut it out, for it was before her eyes, open or shut – it was before her when she entered her bedroom and sank into a cushioned chair by the breezy window. And she took her burning cheeks in both hands and rested her elbows on her knees.

Truly terror had fled. It shamed her to find herself thanking God that her fate was to lie in the keeping of this young man. Yet it was natural, too, for the child had nigh died of horror, though the courage of the Castles had held her head high in the presence of the inevitable. And now suddenly into her gray and hopeless future, peopled by the phantoms of an old man, stepped a living, smiling young fellow, with gentle manners and honest speech, and a quick courtesy which there was no mistaking.

She had no mother – nobody to talk to – so she had long ago made a confidante of her own reflection in the looking-glass. And to the mirror she now went, meeting the reflected eyes shyly, yet smiling with friendly sympathy:

“Silly! to frighten yourself! It is all over now. He’s young and tall and sunburned. I don’t think he knows a great deal – but don’t be frightened, he is not a bit dreadful, … only … it is a pity, … but I suppose he was in love with me, … and, after all, it doesn’t matter, … only I am … sorry … for him… If he had only cared for a girl who could love him!.. I don’t suppose I could, … ever!.. But I will be very kind to him, … to make up.”

III

She saw him every day; she dined at the club table now.

Miss Garcide’s hay-fever increased with the ripening summer, and she lay in her room with all the windows closed, sneezing and reading Anthony Trollope.

When Miss Castle told her that Mr. Crawford was a guest at the club, Miss Garcide wept over her for an hour.

“I feel like weeping, too,” said Miss Castle, tremulously – “but not over myself.”

“Dot over hib?” inquired Miss Garcide.

“Yes, over him. He ought to marry a girl who could fall in love with him.”

Meanwhile Crawford was dining every evening with her at the great club table, telling her of the day’s sport, and how a black bear had come splashing across the shallows within a few rods of where he stood fishing, and how the deer had increased, and were even nibbling the succulent green stalks in the kitchen garden after nightfall.

During the day she found herself looking forward to his return and his jolly, spirited stories, always gay and humorous, and never tiresome, technical, nor conceited, although for three years he had held the club cup for the best fish taken on Sagamore water.

She took sun-baths in her hammock; she read novels; she spent hours in reverie, blue eyes skyward, arms under her head, swayed in her hammock by the delicious winds of a perfect June.

All her composure and common-sense had returned. She began to experience a certain feeling of responsibility for Crawford – a feeling almost maternal.

“He’s so amusingly shy about speaking,” she told Miss Garcide; “I suppose he’s anxious and bashful. I think I’ll tell him that it is all arranged. Besides, I promised Mr. Garcide to speak. I don’t see why I don’t; I’m not a bit embarrassed.”

But the days went shining by, and a new week dawned, and Miss Castle had not taken pity upon her tongue-tied lover.

“Oh, this is simply dreadful,” she argued with herself. “Besides, I want to know how soon the man expects to marry me. I’ve a few things to purchase, thank you, and if he thinks a trousseau is thrown together in a day, he’s a – a man!”

That evening she determined to fulfil her promise to Garcide as scrupulously as she kept all her promises.

She wore white at dinner, with a great bunch of wild iris that Crawford had brought her. Towards the end of the dinner she began to be frightened, but it was the instinct of the Castles to fight fear and overcome it.

“I’m going to walk down to the little foot-bridge,” she said, steadily, examining the coffee in her tiny cup; “and if you will stroll down with your pipe, I … I will tell you something.”

“That will be very jolly,” he said. “There’s a full moon; I mean to have a try at a thumping big fish in the pool above.”

She nodded, and he rose and attended her to the door.

Then he lighted a cigar and called for a telegram blank.

This is what he wrote:

“James J. Crawford, 318 New Broad Street, N.Y.:

“I am at the Sagamore. When do you want me to return?

    “James H. Crawford.”

The servant took the bit of yellow paper. Crawford lay back smoking and thinking of trout and forests and blue skies and blue eyes that he should miss very, very soon.

Meanwhile the possessor of the blue eyes was standing on the little foot-bridge that crossed the water below the lawn.

A faint freshness came upward to her from the water, cooling her face. She looked down into that sparkling dusk which hangs over woodland rivers, and she saw the ripples, all silvered, flowing under the moon, and the wild-cherry blossoms trembling and quivering with the gray wings of moths.

“Surely,” she said, aloud – “surely there is something in the world besides men. I love this – all of it! I do indeed. I could find happiness here; I do not think I was made for men.”

For a long while she stood, bending down towards the water, her whole body saturated with the perfume from the fringed milkweed. Then she raised her delicate nose a trifle, sniffing at the air, which suddenly became faintly spiced with tobacco smoke.

Where did the smoke come from? She turned instinctively. On a rock up-stream stood young Crawford, smoking peacefully, and casting a white fly into the dusky water. Swish! the silk line whistled out into the dusk.

After a few moments’ casting, she saw him step ashore and saunter towards the bridge, where she was standing; then his step jarred the structure and he came up, cap in one hand, rod in the other.

“I thought perhaps you might like to try a cast,” he said, pleasantly. “There’s a good-sized fish in the pool above; I raised him twice. He’ll scale close to five pounds, I fancy.”