In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 4

  When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age andcontemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quartersolder, and she--her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I wasstill only at the beginning of a man's long adolescence.

  In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of herquick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme ofaction. She treated me with that neat perfection of understandinga 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-fashionedhour of five). Every one would be SO surprised to see me. Fancywalking! Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeenmiles. When COULD I have started!

  All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch ofher hand.

  "But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you?"

  "My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides--aren't wetalking?"

  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 fewdiscrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation thanher words.

  When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little inher urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches tothe garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlisheyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but nowI know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glancedover 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 brightbrown hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tailtied with a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into anintricacy of pretty curves above her little ear and cheek, and thesoft long lines of her neck; her white dress had descended to herfeet; her slender waist, which had once been a mere geographicalexpression, an imaginary line like the equator, was now a thingof flexible beauty. A year ago she had been a pretty girl's facesticking out from a little unimportant frock that was carried uponan extremely active and efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs.Now there was coming a strange new body that flowed beneath herclothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement, and particularlythe novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirts shegathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had cometo her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine scarf--I suppose youwould call it a scarf--of green gossamer, that some new wakenedinstinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung now closelyto the young undulations of her body, and now streamed flutteringout for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy independenttentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary contact withmy arm.

  She caught it back and reproved it.

  We went through the green gate in the high garden wall. I held itopen for her to pass through, for this was one of my restrictedstock of stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was neartouching me. So we came to the trim array of flower-beds near thehead gardener's cottage and the vistas of "glass" on our left. Wewalked between the box edgings and beds of begonias and into theshadow of a yew hedge within twenty yards of that very pond withthe gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so wecame to the wistaria-smothered porch.

  The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. "Guess whohas come to see us!" she cried.

  Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chaircreaked. 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 fromClayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.

  "You'd better sit down, Willie," said her father; "now you have gothere. How's your mother?"

  He looked at me curiously as he spoke.

  He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, butthe waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers.He was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind thebright effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from hischeek to flow down into his beard. He was short but strongly built,and his beard and mustache were the biggest things about him. Shehad taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, his clearskin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certainquickness she got from her mother. Her mother I remember asa sharp-eyed woman of great activity; she seems to me now to havebeen perpetually bringing in or taking out meals or doing somesuch service, and to me--for my mother's sake and my own--she wasalways welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster of fourteen perhaps,of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like her mother's, arethe chief traces on my memory. All these people were very kind tome, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes veryagreeably finding expression, that I was--"clever." They all stoodabout 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 mysudden apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettiedid 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'scome to her."

  It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long timeto me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in againshe was out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casuallythat I had given up my place at Rawdon's. "I can do better thanthat," I said.

  "I left my book in the dell," she said, panting. "Is teaready?" and that was her apology. . .

  We didn't shake down into comfort even with the coming of thetea-things. Tea at the gardener's cottage was a serious meal, witha big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spreadupon a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied,perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected inNettie, saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and allthe eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-fourhours, miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie'sfather tried to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of readyspeech, for his own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased andastonished him to hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over thereI was, I think, even more talkative than with Parload, though tothe world at large I was a shy young lout. "You ought to write itout for the newspapers," he used to say. "That's what you ought todo. 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 anyother stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but eventhat did not engage me.