MY THEODOSIA (2 page)

She had tried to curtail the appalling table expenses, but Aaron had checked her. He ate sparingly himself, but his guests—there was never a meal without guests—must be fed lavishly.

Oh, well—they'd manage, as they always did. Besides, there was a great—a glorious probability!

Aaron seldom discussed his political ambitions with Theo—or indeed with anyone—thinking it sufficient that she preside gracefully over his table, amusing and charming without question whatever type of guest he might choose to entertain. 'Politics are not becoming to women,' he told her once. His full, flexible mouth curved into a teasing smile, one black eyebrow shot up. 'Moreover, my dear, you arc too young and tender for all the horrid ins and outs of the game.'

But now she, and many people throughout the sixteen States, knew that, in view of the New York
City
elections in May, her father's political prominence had increased a hundredfold, and that, with the presidential elections in the fall, Aaron stood a chance of succeeding President Adams.

'First Lady of the Land!' she thought, and her heart beat faster. Half-laughing at herself, she ran to the cherry-wood mirror above her dressing-table, slipping off her long muslin nightrobe. Clad only in her transparent cambric shift, she fastened the diamond necklace about her neck. Its lowest pendant reached almost to the swell of her small high breasts, and enhanced the luster of her skin, white as new milk, the shade Nature often allies to dark auburn hair.

With one hand she piled her loosened braids high on her head, with the other held out the shift. Her eyes black and shining as onyx, mocked her foolishness as she curtsied regally to the small figure in the glass. 'How do you do, my Lady President.'

Her room door was suddenly opened, and Theo turned at a
horrified cry behind her. 'Mon Dieu, ma chérie, tu es done folle ce matin!'

Natalie Delage, Theo's adopted sister, stood round-eyed on the threshold, her pert French face scandalized at this posturing before a mirror in a diamond necklace and very little else. Natalie, product of the ancien régime, and a refugee from the French Revolution, was a great stickler for 'les convenances.'

Theo laughed, snatching up a brocaded dressing-gown. 'I'm not mad, Natalie, but it's June, and my birthday, and see what Papa has given me. Isn't he the best and most generous of men?'

The French girl examined the necklace. 'Exquisite,' she agreed. 'A magnificent present. You will look ravishing at your party tonight.'

Theo began brushing her finespun web of hair. 'I hope so. I shall wear the white India muslin with gold embroidery that Papa likes so much; it will set off his gift. I do hope he will be pleased.'

Natalie made a tiny, impatient noise. She leaned against the wall watching the girl with exasperated affection. But she was a child yet—Theodosia!—in everything but her mind and intellectual attainments. These were formidable enough. Miss Burr was celebrated from Albany to Philadelphia for her accomplishments.

But her emotions, thought Natalie—by which she meant flirtation, love-making, the exciting business of eliciting pursuit—were still totally immature. Even her body, for all its petite femininity, was not fully developed according to the French taste. It lacked a lushness of curve, the hips were too narrow. Still, Theo in the last year had grown extremely pretty, with a vivacious sparkle that immediately attracted. Lately there had been several suitors, but there was something
strange about the girl's attitude. She scarcely seemed aware of her conquests.

Natalie sighed, settling down on the horsehair sofa. 'Listen, chérie, I must talk with you seriously. You are seventeen now, and a woman. It is not natural to think always, "Will Papa be pleased?" There should be someone younger than Papa to make your eyes shine like that. Your father is a wonderful, fascinating man, bien entendu, but you are no longer a little girl. You are beautiful and witty, you speak three languages, you play the harp, the pianoforte, you write letters and essays like a Montaigne, and all for what? So your father will be pleased! C'est inouï.'

Theo laid down her brush and shook her head ruefully; she had heard all this before. 'When I meet another man really worth pleasing, I shall do so'. She smiled her quick, lovely smile. 'Natalie, please ! Don't preach today, and don't look so somber. I have time yet to think of marriage—if, indeed, marry I must.'

'Ciel!' cried Natalie, shocked. 'Of course you must marry. Imagine remaining always a virgin, without position, without being rangée, simply the daughter of your father! You are heedless, ma chère, and you have no mother to tell you these things, so I must.'

Theo looked at her affectionately. Good Natalie. For all her scant twenty years she was as anxiously maternal as a broody hen. She never forgot the generosity which the Burr family had shown her when Aaron had opened his home to a penniless little émigrée, five years ago.

Theo turned back to the dressing-table. 'Will you ring, Natalie? I need Dinah for my hair.'

The other girl's hand rose to the embroidered bell-pull, but fell back before touching it. 'I'll do your hair for you, petite. Dinah is busy in the kitchen with the others. Là, là!
Such a to-do down there getting ready for your banquet this evening.'

'I suppose Father has breakfasted already?'

Natalie, pulling and patting the chestnut tendrils, laughed. 'Long ago. He could scarcely wait for Selim to be saddled, then he was off to the city like a whirlwind. To Brom Martling's Tavern, I suppose, as usual.'

'Oh, yes—those Tammany men,' said Theo vaguely. 'He has much business with them ... Tell me, if I piled my hair higher just here, should I look older and taller, do you think?'

They discussed this point animatedly until Theo, opening her great lavender-scented clothes-press, reached for her riding-habit.

Natalie frowned. 'You are riding again this morning, in the heat?'

'The heat doesn't matter. A gallop on Minerva will cool me off. Besides——' She paused, one eyebrow shot up in unconscious imitation of her father when he was bent on devilry, her eyes widened with mischief. 'You are so anxious to have me feel romantic—well, here is something for you'. She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper: 'I am going to meet a young man, very handsome, in the woods across the island!'

'Theo!' Natalie stared; then, with a laugh, 'You are impossible. What young man? Who introduced you? Tell me at once.'

Theo gave a little trill of mirth, a spontaneous and infectious gurgle peculiar to her. Before she answered, she adjusted the wide skirts of her gray silk habit and pulled her plumed felt hat to its most dashing angle.

'No one introduced us,' she said airily. 'We just met. And I'm not sure who he is, but I think he's that Doctor
Peter Irving's young brother, Washington. You see, we don't know each other well enough yet to exchange names.'

With which piece of effrontery she made the thunderstruck Natalie a low curtsy, shutting her ears to the shattering explosion of outraged French which pursued her down the stairs.

She slipped out at a side door, noticing even in her haste the dear beauties of this place that she loved: the splendid oaks and cedars that shaded the house, the soft green lawns with their gentle slopes, even the silly sheep that cropped the grass. There was a pond, too, gracefully marged with ornamental shrubs, and teeming with swans and yellow-billed ducks. Aaron had recently enlarged it to a more respectable size, in keeping with one of the most impressive estates on Manhattan Island. But no amount of enlarging could give it much significance. It was forever dwarfed by the effortless magnificence of the river beyond it.

The Hudson. Theo greeted it now with an uprushing of the heart, as she always did. She adored it with a half-mystical fervor that she could have explained to no one—not even Aaron. She had been born within sound of it, in Albany. Her childhood had been spent near it. Many times it had comforted her with its mighty music.

The clouded May night six years ago when her mother died after months of torturing illness, she had stumbled wildly from the house that held that motionless, sheeted figure, alien now and horrible. Her father was away—the end had been unexpected—and she had no one.

She had flung herself headlong on the shaly shore, sobbing with desperate terror, until, at last, the river had brought peace: the peace of inexorable laws. Dimly she felt its message, translating it through her bewildered child's brain. 'No matter what happens to me, it goes on and on and on.
It doesn't care, because it's too big to care. It just is. Like God.'—But God never seemed very real or helpful.

The servants had found her there hours later, asleep beside the river.

But today it was gay and gentle, gracefully balancing its scores of dipping boats. Even the awesome rise of black cliffs on the opposite Jersey shore looked merely picturesque.

Theo stopped at the dairy for a mug of milk, warm and foaming, fresh from the source; and at the stables she found Minerva ready saddled and whinnying her impatience to be off. The gray mare nuzzled her mistress affectionately, and Theo responded with a quick kiss on the satiny nose.

Dick, the Irish stable boy, laced his grimy hands for her to step on in mounting. 'Sure, and you look pretty as a peach, this morning, Miss Theo; your seventeenth birthday will be agreeing with you'. He spoke with the easy familiarity of all white servants in the first years of the Republic.

'Likely you'll be choosing yourself a fine young husband from the elegant throng that's coming to the mansion today'. His little eyes leered at her.

'Likely I won't,' she replied tartly, flicking Minerva, who darted gladly away down the sandy road that wound through the Lispenard Meadows to the East River.

Marrying and husbands! Everyone acted as though she were at least twenty-one and likely to be an old maid. Besides, there was only one person who had the right to bring up these subjects. And her father would never think of such things. They were too happy together, the two of them.

She loped Minerva easily across the island until she neared the other river, when color flushed suddenly over her cheeks and she raised a hand to tidy her blown hair. The rendezvous was near. Perhaps it was foolish and unladylike, meeting a strange man again like this. Her assent to his suggestion
had been a mingling partly of bravado, partly of a sense of adventure, and mostly of a genuine attraction to this charmingly sensitive young man whose mind seemed so attuned to her own.

She had met him by chance three days ago. Minerva had caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and stumbled badly just as he appeared. He had been off his mount in a second, offering assistance. Together they anxiously examined the quivering marc, and were relieved to find no serious damage.

As she thanked him, Theo was conscious of his appraising stare. They looked at each other frankly.

He was young, she judged not more than twenty, and though he topped her by several inches, he was not tall: about the height of her father. That gave her obscure reassurance. His dress was careless : his brown pantaloons were wrinkled above mud-spattered Hessian boots; his neckcloth lay askew and seemed none too fresh. He wore no queue or hat, and his sandy hair, cut short to car length, was well tousled by the wind.

For all that, she knew he was a gentleman, and he attracted her. It might have been the magnetism of his hazel eyes—changeable, vital, and at the moment devouring her with pleased surprise; or the freshness of his skin which blushed as quickly as a girl's; or indeed his mellow young voice which now proclaimed with a flourish, 'Don Quixote is always at the service of the fair Dulcinea.'

'Oh!' she cried impulsively, 'I love that tale!' And they had drifted into talk of many books, both eager and flushed.

'Do you know this?' and 'Oh, yes, but have you read that?' She confessed to several works that no respectable young lady should have read, Molière, Sheridan, and
Tristram Shandy
but he did not seem shocked. They talked that morning almost as though they had been two young men—almost.

Then yesterday she had ridden that way again, and he had been there waiting at the turn of the road. It seemed natural to rest their horses and chat.

It was strange how well she felt she knew him, and yet they had touched on nothing personal. They had made a little game of the mystery. He called her 'Dulcinea,' and she called him nothing at all beyond the formal 'sir.'

He was now waiting for her, sitting easily on his big roan, and with his sandy head—much neater today—turned toward Deadman's Rock and the wooded prettiness of Blackwell's Island, which lay like a splinter of green in the East River.

At the sound of Minerva's trot, he jumped off his horse and rushed toward her. 'I was in a rare pother, worrying for fear you weren't coming,' he greeted her, tethering her mare to a pine stump. He held out his arms to help her down. Her skirt caught on the side pommels and he, perforce, caught her against him to save her from falling. The clasp of his arms, the momentary pressure of his hard young chest, stirred her. Tingling excitement crept over her body, followed by fear. She heard his quick indrawn breath, and was oppressed with a feeling of embarrassment.

There had been nothing like this before in her experience. Natalie's horror at her escapade, which had been so amusing, now seemed to her justified. She was cheapening herself—he must think her vulgar and ill-bred to meet him this way.

She jerked away from him with unnecessary violence, saying stiffly: 'Good day to you, sir. I came only because I had promised. I cannot stay a minute.'

'But why?' he protested. 'We have so much to talk about, and I—I have brought something to read to you. It would amuse you, I think,' he added.

Theo hesitated, her round cheeks stained bright with color.

'This is all most unconventional,' she said at last. 'We don't even know who we arc—I mean who the other is'. 'Heaven's mercy!' He gave a shout of laughter. 'Is that all? And soon remedied. I am Washington Irving, brother to Doctor Peter Irving. I live on William Street, and I am reading law, but I find it excruciatingly dull. I much prefer poetry and romances, and dreams of far countries'. He grinned at her. 'And I much prefer literary conversations with beautiful young ladies. Now it's your turn, Dulcinea.'