MATCHED PEARLS (3 page)

Her face was down among the daffodils, pretending to be inhaling their delicate fragrance, her golden head among the golden flowers. The morning paper slid into the grass.

She heard his footsteps pass on the pavement and turn in at her father’s gate. Could it be possible that he would presume upon a mere church acquaintance? Would he dare? Her indignation grew. Now, she must say something to put him in his place. Yes, his steps were coming across the young spring grass, walking confidently and unafraid. What should she do? Freeze him? One would have thought that she had made it plain yesterday.

But now he paused above her, and his voice had again that soft, indescribable gentleness that strangely took away the idea of presumption in spite of her. Was it a touch of the South in his accent? She wasn’t sure. But there was a courtliness, a refinement about his voice that calmed her indignation and forced her attention.

“Good morning,” he said like a carefree boy. “I hardly hoped for such good luck as this. I’ve brought you something. I hope you don’t mind. You see you’re the only girl in town I know even a little, and this was too pretty to keep to myself.”

In amazement Constance straightened up and looked.

He was opening the white bundle that he carried like a cake, and now she saw it was his big clean handkerchief with the corners folded over, and it was full to the brim of the loveliest blue and white hepaticas, lying on a bed of delicate maidenhair fern. They were fresh with the dew upon them and they seemed as she looked to be the loveliest things that she had ever seen.

“Oh, the lovely things!” she exclaimed in wonder. “Wild-flowers! What are they? Where did you find them?”

“Aren’t they lovely?” he answered with eagerness. “Why, they are just hepaticas. I found them in the woods just over on that hill beyond the golf links. I’ve been out taking a little tramp and I came upon them. Isn’t our Lord wonderful to trouble to make such beautiful little things, and each one so perfect!”

Constance looked up at the young man and stared in wonder. She had no words to answer such a remark as this.

“I couldn’t help picking them,” he went on earnestly. “It seemed to me I must show them to someone else. I’m glad I found you. It seemed somehow as if they sort of belonged to you. They reminded me of you when I saw them.”

Constance did not know what to make of such homage as this. If he had said, “They’re not so bad, are they, old girl?” as some of her college acquaintances might have spoken freshly, she would have thought nothing of it, but this old-time courtesy and homage she did not understand. She wondered how he came to be that way and what she ought to do about it. She felt almost uncomfortable under such open yet reverent admiration.

“But you didn’t mean these for me,” she said, as if he were offering her priceless jewels that of course she could not be permitted to accept.

“If you’ll take them,” he said humbly. “I wouldn’t have any way of looking out for them myself now. I’m on my way to the office to get acquainted with my new job before things start off tomorrow. I’d hate to see the brave little things droop.”

Constance was filled with sudden pity for the flowers as if they had been lovely little children uncared for. His tone had invested them with personality.

“Oh, I’d love to have them,” she said quite simply now. He had been so humble she must put him at his ease. He had not meant to be presumptuous. He was just counting on that mystic bond of religion, that church stuff, probably. Strange a young man in these days could be so childlike. But he was probably brought up in the country. He would get over it.

“I don’t believe I ever saw them before,” she went on to cover her own embarrassment.

“I wish you could see them growing,” he said, watching her with unveiled admiration. “They’re like a little sea of blue, blowing and nodding in the grass, with these maidenhair ferns in a little huddle behind them like a miniature forest on the bank.”

“I’d like to see them,” she said frankly. “They must be a wonderful sight.”

“You couldn’t spare the time to go?” he asked wistfully. “I’d enjoy showing you just where they are.”

Constance glanced at her watch and shook her head.

“I have an appointment at the country club at nine.”

“Oh, not now,” he smiled. “I couldn’t go today at all. I thought perhaps tomorrow morning—early.
Could
you?”

“It would certainly have to be early,” laughed Constance and wondered why she dallied with this handsome, ingenuous boy. She had lost all sense of his being presumptuous now.

“I’m quite respectable, you know,” he said wistfully and flashed her a smile. “I could get Mr. Howarth to introduce us rightly. I’m with Howarth, Well and Company, you see—”

Constance flashed him a smile herself now. The Howarths were all right people. He must be respectable, she felt sure. Yet he was unusual, different from her other men friends. She wondered why she was interested.

“Could you go as early as half past five, or would six perhaps be better?” He fixed his brown eyes on her face now and gave her another of those radiant smiles, and suddenly she knew she was going to see those flowers tomorrow morning.

“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “If you are going anyway and happen to be passing by here about that time I might come along. I can’t really promise. Something might make it impossible.”

“Thank you,” he said with another of those grave smiles. “I’ll just be hoping. It’s very pleasant to have found a Christian friend right at the start in a strange place. I’m praising God for that. Now, I’ll bid you good morning. I must hurry to the office.”

Constance stood with the bundle of flowers in her hands and watched him walk away in wonder. What a strange, unusual young man he was. She had never seen anyone like him before. Heavens! How very good-looking he was. It seemed too good to be true, such looks on a man!

At the gate he turned and lifted his hat in a princely fashion. Constance stood still, smilingly nodded a friendly good-bye, and then wondered at herself.

It was not until he was out of sight that she realized that she was still holding his snowy handkerchief in her hands with its mound of ferns and flowers. Then suddenly her cheeks grew hot. Why had she been so very friendly as to let him give her flowers and promise to take a walk with him tomorrow morning when she had resolved before he came in to put him in a stranger’s place? Well, there was one thing, she didn’t have to go and take that walk. She wouldn’t, of course. She had left herself a loophole. She had not
promised
.

Then, with her cheeks still hot, she hurried into the house. She must get those flowers out of that handkerchief and the handkerchief out of sight before the family saw it.

She tipped the flowers into a large plate and stuffed the handkerchief quickly into her sleeve out of sight just as her brother, Frank, amazingly appeared in the dining room door.

“Who’s your comely giant, Connie?” he asked with a twinkle. “You certainly like ’em tall, don’t you?”

Constance looked up with a smile that was meant to be natural, but her cheeks were still hot and needed no rouge, and she knew that the watchful eyes of her brother would not let that little item pass.

“Oh, he’s just a man I met in church yesterday,” said Constance indifferently. “Fill that glass bowl with water for me, Frankie, that’s a dear.”

“Hmmm!” murmured Frank wisely as he returned from the butler’s pantry with the big crystal fruit bowl filled with water. “You only met him yesterday, and yet he gets up at all hours to pick doodads out of the woods for you! You certainly fetch ’em quick, don’t you, Sister?”

The color flew into Constance’s cheeks again to her great annoyance.

“Oh, for sweet mercy’s sake, won’t you stop being ridiculous? He happened to be passing and I admired them. Of course he had to give them to me.”

“Oh, was that the way it was?” mocked the imp of a brother. “I thought you were stooping down with your back to the street smelling daffodils when he went by and he had to come away around through the gate in the hedge and walk across the grass. But I must have been mistaken. Probably you called out to know what on earth he had done up in that handkerchief and he had to come in to show you. However, I should say in any case he was getting on fast.”

“Oh, shut up, will you?” said Constance, quite vexed and devoting herself to placing the airy stems in the fern-fringed bowl. The entrance of the rest of the family created a diversion, and Constance’s mother exclaimed over the beauty of the centerpiece.

“Wherever did you find them, dear?” she asked.

“Just an offering from one of her throng of admirers,” answered Frank quickly with an eloquent look. “They begin quite early in the morning, you perceive. I must wonder what it’s going to be like around here this summer if they come as thick as this in the spring.”

“Frank!” said his mother in a reproving tone. “You promised me last night you wouldn’t tease your sister anymore.”

Frank opened his eyes wide in wonder.

“Why, Muth dear, I wasn’t teasing. I was just admiring her tactics. She certainly has acquired good technique while she was at college.”

But Constance, with a murmur about washing her hands, hurried upstairs, and when she returned with coolly powdered cheeks and a placid exterior, her brother had somehow been subdued until only a pair of dancing eyes reminded her that he had not forgotten.

They sat down to breakfast, bowed their heads for the formal mumbling of a grace by the head of the house, the same old mumbled blessing he had used since Constance was a baby and his wife had told him it was not seemly to bring up children at a table without some sort of grace being said.

During the grapefruit and oatmeal, the passing of cream and sugar and hot rolls, the serving of eggs and bacon, there was pleasant conversation. Grandmother was not present. She took her breakfast in bed. They could speak about her freely.

“She was so pleased, Constance,” said Mary Courtland. “She’s been all strained up over this ever since she heard you were coming home at Easter and the girls in your class were all joining the church.”

“Well, I suppose it was an easy way to please her,” laughed the girl. “Of course I wasted the whole morning, but then it was worth it. Mother, it’s to be simply great having those pearls right now before college closes.”

“You forget, Connie,” put in Frank, “the comely giant. You wouldn’t have met him, remember, if you hadn’t gone to church. Pearls and a giant all in one morning. I’ll say the time wasn’t wasted even if poor Ruddy Van did have to cool his heels at the country club with Mildred Allison.”

But nobody was listening to Frank. His father was reading the morning paper, his sister acted as if he didn’t exist, and his mother went right on talking, deeming it the best way to get rid of the pest to just ignore him.

“You’ll have to be very careful about those pearls, you know, dear,” her mother warned Constance. “They are valuable, of course. Your grandmother will probably tell you before you leave just how valuable they are. You’d better arrange to keep them in the college safe. And be sure you don’t tell people indiscriminately that they are real. For really they are very valuable.”

“Yes, and Connie,” chimed Frank again in his nicest tone, “you better be careful about that good-looking giant, too.
He
might turn out to be valuable, you know. You never can tell when you have the real thing in a man right under your thumb, you know.”

Something in Constance’s mind clicked at that, but she went right on ignoring her brother, even though she did register a wonder whether he might not happen to be right concerning this particular young man.

Then Ruddy Van Arden slid up to the door in his new gray roadster, and Constance, with a breath of relief, hurried off after her racket and presently was gone into a great bright day of her own world. A world that had nothing to do with odd strangers who made odd remarks and gave lovely gifts of sweet wildflowers done up in fine linen handkerchiefs that smelled of lavender and had a hand-embroidered initial
G
in the corner.

All day long Constance enjoyed herself, playing tennis with Ruddy Van Arden in the morning, taking lunch at the country club with a party of young people, golf in the afternoon with Sam Acker from Harvard, then another eighteen holes with Ruddy to make up for Sunday morning, a hurried dinner at home with her stately little grandmother in black taffeta watching her across the table in her new rose evening frock and the pearls, a rush to the theater with a Mr. Montgomery whom she had met at luncheon and with whom she attended a play then late supper at a roof garden, and home long after midnight. Constance really had very little time to think of hepaticas and handsome, presumptuous strangers. The little hepaticas in their crystal bowl on the dining room table were all curled shut into sweet buds against the lacy green of the maidenhair when she stopped in the dining room for a drink of water before going up to her room. Little sleepy buds. Probably they would be dead in the morning. Flowers of a day. Like the handsome stranger-acquaintance of a morning.

As she tumbled into bed Constance remembered the half appointment for the morning. Half past five! Well, she never would make it now even if she wanted to, and of course she hadn’t meant to any of the time.

And then she fell asleep.

But strangely enough, a young early robin—or was it a starling or some other bird with a heavenly voice?—flew down on a twig beside her open window and trilled out a bit of celestial song just at a quarter past five. The clear sound dipped deep into her sleep and brought Constance back to earth and day again. She tried to turn over and go to sleep again, tried to tell herself that of course it was absurd to think of getting up at that hour and tramping off to the woods with an utter stranger who said and did odd things. But all the time that fussy little bird by the windowsill trilled out a love song of blue hepaticas growing on a hillside against a tiny forest of maidenhair blowing in the breeze, dew pearled and lovely with the rising sun upon them.

The morning breeze blew the curtain in at the window, blew sweet breath of flower-laden zephyrs into her face, reviving her, and suddenly she wanted to see that flowery hillside very much and to see if that young stranger was really as interesting as he had seemed the day before. She opened one eye, stole a glance at her clock, and then she was wide awake. She found the little nymph-green knitted dress that fit an early trip to the woods and the soft brown suede tramping shoes, gave a hasty rumpling to the big gold waves of her hair, and was ready.