She did not care for the older pupils, but she was devoted to the very little girls. She played wonderfully on the piano, and suffered from indigestion; her face was at times almost beautiful; she had a round, full chin, and a lovely red lower lip; her forehead was very white, with soft, dark hair rippling away from it. Certainly, she had moments of beauty. She talked very little; perhaps because she hadn't the chance to talk—living, as she did, with an aunt who monopolized the conversation. She had no close friends;—her shyness was so often mistaken for hauteur, that she did not inspire friendship in women of her own age, and Mrs. Newbolt's elderly acquaintances were merely condescending to her, and gave her good advice; so it was a negative sort of life. Indeed, her sky terrier, Bingo, and her laundress, Mrs. O'Brien, to whose crippled baby grandson she was endlessly kind, knew her better than any of the people among whom she lived. When Maurice Curtis, cramming in Mercer because Destiny had broken his tutor's leg there, and presenting (with the bored reluctance of a boy) a letter of introduction from his guardian to Mrs. Newbolt—when Maurice met Mrs. Newbolt's niece, something happened. Perhaps because he felt her starved longing for personal happiness, or perhaps her obvious pleasure in listening, silently, to his eager talk, touched his young vanity; whatever the reason was, the boy was fascinated by her. He had ("cussing," as he had expressed it to himself) accepted an invitation to dine with the "ancient dame" (again his phrase!)—and behold the reward of merit:—the niece!—a gentle, handsome woman, whose age never struck him, probably because her mind was as immature as his own. Before dinner was over Eleanor's silence—silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it hides?—and her deep, still eyes, lured him like a mystery. Then, after dinner ("a darned good dinner," Maurice had conceded to himself) the calm niece sang, and instantly he knew that it was Beauty which hid in silence—and he was in love with her! He had dined with her on Tuesday, called on Wednesday, proposed on Friday;—it was all quite like Solomon Grundy! except that, although she had fallen in love with him almost as instantly as he had fallen in love with her, she had, over and over again, refused him. During the period of her refusals the boy's love glowed like a furnace; it brought both power and maturity into his fresh, ardent, sensitive face. He threw every thought to the winds—except the thought of rescuing his princess from Mrs. Newbolt's imprisoning bric-a-bràc. As for his "cramming" the tutor into whose hands Mr. Houghton had committed his ward's very defective trigonometry and economics, Mr. Bradley, held in Mercer because of an annoying accident, said to himself that his intentions were honest, but if Curtis didn't turn up for three days running, he would utilize the time his pupil was paying for by writing a paper on "The Fourth Dimension."
Maurice was in some new dimension himself! Except "old Brad," he knew almost no one in Mercer, so he had no confidant; and because his passion was, perforce, inarticulate, his candid forehead gathered wrinkles of positive suffering, which made him look as old as Eleanor, who, dazed by the first very exciting thing that had ever happened to her—the experience of being adored (and adored by a boy, which is a heady thing to a woman of her age!)—Eleanor was saying to herself a dozen times a day: "I mustn't say 'yes'! Oh, what shall I do?" Then suddenly there came a day when the rush of his passion decided what she would do. …
Her aunt had announced that she was going to Europe. "I'm goin' to take you," Mrs. Newbolt said. "I don't know what would become of you if I left you alone! You are about as capable as a baby. That was a great phrase of your dear uncle Thomas's—'capable as a baby,' I'm perfectly sure the parlor ceilin' has got to be tinted this spring. When does your school close? We'll go the minute it closes. You can board Bingo with Mrs. O'Brien."
Eleanor, deeply hurt, was tempted to retort with the announcement that she needn't be "left alone"; she might get married! But she was silent; she never knew what to say when assailed by the older woman's tongue. She just wrote Maurice, helplessly, that she was going abroad.
He was panic-stricken. Going abroad? Uncle Henry's ancient dame was a she-devil, to carry her off! Then, in the midst of his anger, he recognized his opportunity: "The hell-cat has done me a good turn, I do believe! I'll get her! Bless the woman! I'll pay her passage myself, if she'll only go and never come back!"
It was on the heels of Mrs. Newbolt's candor about Eleanor's "capableness" that he swept her resistance away. "You've got to marry me," he told her; "that's all there is to it." He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a marriage license. "I'll call for you to-morrow at ten; we'll go to the mayor's office. I've got it all fixed up. So, you see there's no getting out of it."
"But," she protested, dazzled by the sheer, beautiful, impertinence of it, "Maurice, I can't—I won't—I—"
"You will," he said. "To-morrow's Saturday," he added, practically, "and there's no school, so you're free." He rose. … "Better leave a letter for your aunt. I'll be here at five minutes to ten. Be ready!" He paused and looked hard at her; caught her roughly in his arms, kissed her on her mouth, and walked out of the room.
The mere violence of it lifted her into the Great Adventure! When he commanded, "Be ready!" she, with a gasp, said, "Yes."
Well; they had gone to the mayor's office, and been married; then they had got on a car and ridden through Mercer's dingy outskirts to the end of the route in Medfield, where, beyond suburban uglinesses, there were glimpses of green fields.
Once as the car rushed along, screeching around curves and banging over switches, Eleanor said, "I've come out here four times a week for four years, to Fern Hill."
And Maurice said: "Well, that's over! No more school-teaching for you!"
She smiled, then sighed. "I'll miss my little people," she said.
But except for that they were silent. When they left the car, he led the way across a meadow to the bank of the river; there they sat down under the locust, and he kissed her, quietly; then, for a while, still dumb with the wonder of themselves, they watched the sky, and the sailing white clouds, and the river—flowing—flowing; and each other.
"Fifty-four minutes," he had said. …
So they sat there and planned for the endless future—the "fifty-four years."
"When we have our golden wedding," he said, "we shall come back here, and sit under this tree—" He paused; he would be—let's see: nineteen, plus fifty, makes sixty-nine. He did not go farther with his mental arithmetic, and say thirty-nine plus fifty; he was thinking only of himself, not of her. In fifty years he would be, he told himself, an old man.
And what would happen in all these fifty golden years? "You know, long before that time, perhaps it won't be—just us?" he said.
The color leaped to her face; she nodded, finding no words in which to expand that joyous "perhaps," which touched the quick in her. Instantly that sum in addition which he had not essayed in his own mind, became unimportant in hers. What difference did the twenty severing years make, after all? Her heart rose with a bound—she had a quick vision of a little head against her bosom! But she could not put it into words. She only challenged, him:
"I am not clever like you. Do you think you can love a stupid person for fifty years?"
"For a thousand years!—but you're not stupid."
She looked doubtful; then went on confessing: "Auntie says I'm a dummy, because I don't talk very much. And I'm awfully timid. And she says I'm jealous."
"You don't talk because you're always thinking; that's one of the most fascinating things about you, Eleanor—you keep me wondering what on earth you're thinking about. It's the mystery of you that gets me! And if you're 'timid'—well, so long as you're not afraid of me, the more scared you are, the better I like it. A man," said Maurice, "likes to feel that he protects his—his wife." He paused and repeated the glowing word … "his wife!" For a moment he could not go on with their careless talk; then he was practical again. That word "protect" was too robust for sentimentality. "As for being jealous, that, about me, is a joke! And if you were, it would only mean that you loved me—so I would be flattered. I hope you'll be jealous! Eleanor, promise me you'll be jealous?" They both laughed; then he said: "I've made up my mind to one thing. I won't go back to college."
"Oh, Maurice!"