"All in a lump--beaten up like eggs--parsley around the edges," began Gwendolen, gravely, when suddenly she tripped and fell against her own laughter. Her pretty shoulders quaked. She bent far over for control, and tried to hide the treacherous mirth.
But Dodge had seen enough for him. "By Jiminy! you"ve been jollying me all the time! And I swallowed it like a bloomin" oyster!" He came around to the front, drew up a stool, flung himself upon it, and looked up with grins that bespoke a renewed zest for life. "Now honest, Miss Todd, you owe me something for this. Didn"t you know who sent them? Didn"t you really find that card in the box?"
"No, I didn"t--honest--but--m-mother did!" confessed Gwendolen, now half-stifled with laughter.
"And you didn"t resent it? And you thought them pretty from the very first moment?" cried the youth, on a high note of satisfaction. He reached up now boldly, took the single flower from her hand, pinched off the end of a long fern-leaf to back it, and deliberately arranged himself a b.u.t.ton-hole.
Gwendolen wiped the tears of merriment from her bright eyes. "Pretty?"
she echoed. "It is too tame a word. I thought them a dream,--an inspiration,--a visual ecstasy!"
"Yes, I said they were like you," returned the impudent Dodge, as well as he could for the distorted countenance bent above the process of pinning in his flower. "There," he said, anent this finished operation, "it"s in. I think it becomes me. I didn"t run my finger to the bone but once. Now tell me what ma-_ma_ thought of the flowers and the card?"
In spite of her usual self-possession, the girl was stricken dumb. To add to her confusion, a deep embarra.s.sing blush rose relentlessly to her throat and face, and would not be banished.
"You won"t repeat it!" cried the terrible youth. "You don"t dare to,--but I will. Mama said,--lifting her lorgnettes (here he deliberately mimicked the air of a middle-aged grande dame),--"T.
Caraway Dodge! Who is T. Caraway Dodge? Oh, I see,--a snip of an attache!""
A look into the stupefied face above him showed that his bold guess had been true. Intoxicated by success, he ventured another toss.
"If you say the word, I come pretty near repeating your answer."
Behind the astonishment, then the consternation of the girl"s face, a harder something flashed. She was not accustomed to have the lead so rudely taken. This young person must be disposed of on the instant. His impudence would have given points to Jonah"s gourd. She now rose to her feet, held her chin unnecessarily high, and, with the air of a young Lady Macbeth, drawled out,--"I will spare you the trouble, Mr. T.
Caraway Dodge. Much as I dislike to be rude, the words I said were these--" She paused. Dodge rose too. The brown eyes and the hazel were nearly on a level. He was laughing. "Well?" he reminded at length.
His unconsciousness of offence gave the last flare to her indignation.
"I said to those present, "The sending of so costly a bouquet by Mr.
Dodge is a little--er--pushing, and the sender must be told so; but since, by accident,--the flowers just happen to suit my gown--""
"Nonsense!" laughed the rash Dodge, "you never talked that way in your life, unless you deliberately made it up. That"s your stunt now, of course. Any one could see it. What is more likely, you said--what I planned for you to say was,--"Oh, here are the flowers I have been waiting for! I think I"ll have to marry the person who sent me these!--There"s the music of the first waltz! It"s a peach! Come,--you haven"t promised it, have you? Everybody is waiting for the hostess to begin. Let us start the ball rolling!"
In sheer incapacity to resist, a weakness wrought of a benumbing conflict of anger, mirth, and amazement, Gwendolen leaned to him,--and her debutante ball opened with her, joyous, whirling in the arms of Mr.
T. Caraway Dodge.
After this initial favor, he was rigidly, even scornfully, ignored; but little cared Dodge for that. He had had his day. The impetus given could carry him smiling on through hours of cold neglect. He was determined to be the gayest of that circling round of joy, and succeeded. Stout matrons, lean old maids, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Peruvian, Pole,--just so it wore skirts and could move its feet, all were food for his new mill of ecstasy.
Gwendolen danced oftenest with Pierre. He was literally a perfect dancer, and to-night he said that the champagne all went to his heels.
Yuki, in her decorous j.a.panese draperies, wound about by stiff brocades, did not attempt foreign dancing.
Hagane and the older members of the suite left early. Hirai, the secretary, remained, evidently charmed by the long eyes of his young countrywoman. During the time she was not talking to him or Pierre, Yuki remained near Mrs. Todd, delighting the soberer friends who came to speak with them by her beauty and intelligence. In the pleasure of seeing this enjoyment of her Oriental protege, Mrs. Todd forgot to scold about the affair of the Russian minister, and made only one remark about Yuki"s undignified and un-American "kow-tow" to the prince.
"I was just pushed down, Mrs. Todd," protested Yuki, earnestly. "Some hand from my own land pressed me before I knew. So was I taught to greet our feudal daimyo when I was the very little girl; so all in Nippon, of old customs, greet him now. I will try never again to do such a thing in America."
"Well, well, that"s all right!" said the matron, patting her slim shoulder. "You are a good little girl, if you did kow-tow. There"s Gwendolen with Pierre again! Doesn"t she look well to-night?"
"Well!" echoed Yuki, as her eyes followed the flying shapes.
""Well" is so faint a little word. To me Gwendolen looks beautiful,--beautiful--like the Sun G.o.ddess in our land. She is like a bush of yama-buki in the wind! I never saw n.o.body at all so beautiful as our Gwendolen!"
"And to think she must give up this brilliant social success, and go to a heathen country for four years!" mused Mrs. Todd, gloomily. She had, of course, been told the great news.
If Yuki heard the muttered words, she did not show resentment. The smile of intense affection had not left her face as she said aloud: "Anywhere that Gwendolen goes, I think she will find happiness. She has in her eyes the light of a happy karma. Evil and sorrow cannot stay with her long."
"Well, and what of you, my little j.a.panese daughter?" asked Mrs. Todd, touched by the unselfish words.
"Oh, me!" said Yuki, becoming instantly grave. "I do not think about my karma,--each person cannot see his own, or know of it; it clings about him too close. But if I should think--No, I cannot! I am afraid! Ah, here comes back the sunshine. It is Gwendolen, fanning! Ah, so hot a little sunshine is Gwendolen! Sit here, and let me make the fan go fast for you, Gwendolen,--your wrists--your throat--that will make coolness quicker than just your face!"
Both girls laughed now, and talked together; Pierre joined them; Dodge ventured near; the senator came up. It was a sparkling group, with the centre always Gwendolen; yet even to Mrs. Todd"s unimaginative eyes, the loneliness of the little gray figure, the strange blue-black hair, and pointed, faintly tinted face, struck a note of mystery,--of something very near to sadness.
CHAPTER THREE
Mr. Cyrus Carton Todd, born in the farming district of Pennsylvania, of English and Scotch ancestry, had, as a mere boy, gone to seek his fortune in the West. This was not, of course, an original thing to do.
Young men and old, families and whole communities were, at this time, streaming, like banners, out toward the alluring, unknown lands. Cyrus chose a broad, lonely stretch of moor in the very heart of a state spa.r.s.ely settled, but not too far from the fertile Mississippi basin.
Agriculture, rather than stock-raising, had from the first been his design. The small, h.o.a.rded patrimony went into fences, a horse, a plough, and a great lethargic sack of seed. Quick to recognize the advantages of new methods and new machinery, he became, before the age of thirty, one of the successful "large farmers" of his adopted state.
He loved, with a pa.s.sionate, personal love, his broad black fields. He knew, before they ventured one slim, verdant herald to the air, the stirring of immortal essence in his buried grain. He thrilled, sometimes with the stinging of quick tears, when first the green prophecy ran, like an answering cry, from furrow to swart furrow. He moved, at harvest-time, among the hung, encrusted stalks with the deep joy of a creator who sees his work well done. Every process was vital,--the sowing, reaping, storing, and, last of all, the hissing of the great gold torrents as they plunged headlong into caverns of waiting cars. His acreage was wide, but not too wide for his heart. His great working force of men was organized and controlled with the tact and ease of a leader. Mrs. Todd, the daughter of an Illinois farmer, (of late she was successfully forgetting the fact), came into his life when, as a girl of eighteen, she had "visited" a neighbor"s home. Todd was then thirty-one.
The difference in age seemed great to him, but apparently not to Susan.
She arrived in mid-autumn, at the height of a golden yield. Cyrus loved the whole world then, and it was not difficult for the rosy girl to secure for herself a special niche.
They were married in the following spring, when the planting was over, and Cyrus"s fields ran with an emerald fire. The farmer turned, perforce, to contemplation of his house. Bare walls and rough pine floors were well enough for him, but better should be found for Susan.
She a.s.sisted him in selecting the new furnishings, and then, with the self-possession known only to a woman and a hen, entered upon her kingdom.
Her presence, for a long while after, affected Todd as something in the nature of a miracle. Women had borne little part in his life. The dainty touches of ornament which his wife"s quick fingers gave the little home, the good, unheard-of things she cooked for him, the demonstrative affection she was ever ready to bestow (for indeed she loved him dearly), kept him in a sort of daze of unbelieving bliss. He felt that he and life were even. Now he began to learn what money, hitherto a neglected factor in his success, had the power to grant.
The plain cottage grew into an attractive, vine-held home. Going to his fields each morning, after a perfect breakfast, he argued aloud to himself, and frequently pinched his own arm to prove the brightness true. Everything prospered. The men liked him, the dogs fawned upon him, the horses whinnied at his voice. And then, just as he told himself he couldn"t possibly make room for another joy,--came Gwendolen.
Cyrus, when his eyes had cleared of the golden blur, drew a chair to the bed, put his two elbows on the rim, set his face upon his hands, and deliberately made acquaintance with his daughter. The miracle of his wife"s love, the immortality of springing seed, the awe left over from his boyish dreams of heaven, all hid themselves in that small, pink frame, and looked out upon him through its feeble gaze.
He wished to name her "Susan," after his wife, and, as it happened, after his mother also. Mrs. Todd would not consider it. She desired her child to have a "pretty" name, something high-sounding, even sentimental, that would look well in a novel. Her thought whirred like a distracted magnet between three euphonious points,--"Gwendolen,"
"Guinevere," and "Theodora." At Guinevere Cyrus at once took an obstinate stand. It suggested to him guinea-hens.
"Then "Theodora," Cy. What is the matter with "Theodora"?"
"It sounds like the tin tail to a fancy windmill. I can just see it spin!" declared the anxious father.
"But the sentiment! It means "gift of G.o.d,"" pleaded Mrs. Todd, in the voice she usually kept for church.
"Shucks! She don"t need a label, "made in heaven,"" said Cy. "n.o.body "d take her as coming up from the other place. Why, if she dropped there now, she"d put out flames like a hand extinguisher,--the blessed cheraphim!"
"Well, "Gwendolen," then. Surely you can"t find any such ridiculous objections to "Gwendolen."" The young wife now was plainly on the verge of tears.
"It"s fancy and high-falutin" for my taste," said honest Cyrus, "but it"s not so bad as those others. If you want it, have it! I can"t stand out against you, darling. I can call her "daughter" when I"m tired."
So Gwendolen she was christened, and in time Cyrus became not only reconciled, but actually proud of the pretty name, saying that it sounded yellow, like her hair.
In earlier years of struggle,--pleasant stress it had always been--Cyrus Todd, in the wide, lonely life of the prairie, had become a reader of books. His pious English mother had not died before transmitting to her boy her veneration for the great souls of the past. Among his very few possessions, brought originally from Pennsylvania, were three books;--Shakespeare, the Bible, and, strangely enough, a copy of Marco Polo. During the days of poverty these three formed his sole, incessant reading. Afterward he bought more books, generally bound garbage-heaps of literature, perpetrated in rich boards, and disseminated by strenuous agents who urged to purchase with a glibness unknown to any since Beelzebub. A few good books came to him, generally by a fortuitous mischance. Imitating his neighbors, he sent in subscriptions to the "Western Farmer"s Evangel" and "The Horn of Plenty." He read everything, bad or good, keeping new words and phrases strictly out of his daily vocabulary. His time had not yet come for mental segregation.