The Strange Proposal (16 page)

“I shouldn’t say so, miss. I’ve tinkered with anything that was out of the way myself. But you can see when you look around.”

So Mary Elizabeth entered the large, old rooms shrouded in memories of a bygone generation.

Big, wide rooms with fine white matting on the floors and many comfortable willow chairs, and couches with cushions of faded but fine texture. Quaint old pictures on the walls, some of them very fine, done by artists of renown. Long sheer curtains at the windows, floating in the breeze. Mary Elizabeth looked at them in wonder.

“Are these the old curtains? I would have thought they would have dropped to pieces.”

“Yes, they are the original curtains that were up when we came here to take care o’ the place. But Susan, she took care o’ them. She kept them washed and folded away where they wouldn’t mold nor rot, and now and again she’s done them up to have them ready in case some o’ the family came back. She wanted it to look like home for them.”

“And now we’ve come,” said Mary Elizabeth. “I’m glad! And it looks so nice. It seems just as it was when I was a child.”

“Well, we figured you might like it,” said the man with a pleased grin. “We didn’t get all the curtains hung yet, of course, but we went to work as soon as the wire came this morning, and we got all downstairs and two bedrooms done. I’m glad you like it. Now, I’ll call Susan.”

Susan came in a clean blue gingham dress, with her hands wrapped embarrassedly in her white apron and her face shining with welcome.

“It’s wonderful, Susan,” said Mary Elizabeth. “I came down here expecting to find things all run down and needing a lot of repairs before we could be comfortable here, but it seems everything is perfectly all right and doesn’t need a thing done to it.”

“I’m glad yer pleased!” said Susan, her face shining with pleasure. “I been hoping ye’d come some summer. It seems such a nice, pretty old house.”

“It is!” said the girl, looking around with loving eyes. “I love it here! I don’t know why we never came before. But we’re staying here this summer. My father will be down weekends sometimes, and as often between as he can spare the time.”

They went over the house eagerly, Sam as interested as anybody.

“Say, this is a swell joint!” he said.

But Sam didn’t waste much time in the house. He took possession of the room allotted to him, hung up the things he had brought with him, jammed himself into his bathing suit, and was off down to the beach.

Mary Elizabeth went about in a daze of bliss. It seemed somehow, as she trod the old halls and went into the rooms that had once been dear and familiar, as if her own mother had left the impress of her sweet spirit there, and by and by when Susan left to prepare the evening meal, Mary Elizabeth took out the letter from her stranger-beloved and went to her mother’s own room to read it over again. It gave her a sense of confiding in her mother, reading it there where she could remember sitting on a little footstool beside her mother, playing with her dolls.

Somehow the letter took on new sanctity, read there. She could fancy telling her mother all about it, what the stranger-best-man had said going down that aisle, what had happened all the evening, and his farewell at the station. It seemed, read in the light of a mother’s eyes, as if John Saxon would bear the scrutiny and have a loving mother’s approval.

Sometime she would tell her father all about him, but not yet. Not just yet!

The summons to dinner came while she was still sitting in her mother’s big chair by the window, looking out between the pines to the sea, dreaming.

She had seen Sam come dripping up from the sea and vanish into the house, and now she could hear him clattering down the stairs, hungry from his swim. So she tucked her letter away into safety and went down. Tomorrow, or perhaps the next day, she must answer that letter. She hadn’t yet felt ready to answer a letter like that. There were so many things to be considered about it. But soon she must answer it. She must not wait too long! It was as if the content and wonder into which his letter had led her were a spell too precious to be broken, a dream from which she was not ready yet to wake. And she felt instinctively that to answer that letter was to make more definite one way or the other this marvelous thing that had come so unexpectedly into her life. For the time, she was so lifted out of the conventions of life that she feared to get back into them by the formalities of correspondence, lest she might lose some part of the wonder that had touched her soul. Afraid, lest facing facts, Wisdom might step in and forbid the joy that was welling up inside her.

So she put it off, the writing of that letter, from day to day for three days more, going about as in a lovely dream, allowing her mind to frame tender phrases that hovered on her lips in a smile and made her so lovely that even Sam looked at her and wondered.

The second morning there came a letter for Sam, forwarded from home. And there were also letters from her father and uncle for Mary Elizabeth, her father giving directions for certain modern improvements in the way of plumbing to be installed in the house, for renovation of the old stable into a garage, and for several minor repairs and changes to be made in the house before he came down.

From her uncle came a brief note telling Mary Elizabeth that her Aunt Clarice had gone to the mountains with a friend and that therefore Sam was at her service as long as she wanted him, but that she was to return him to his home whenever she grew tired of his company. Sam could be in the office with him a good deal and would get along well enough if he grew troublesome to her, or she was bored with having a child about.

She looked up from these letters to find Sam at her feet sprawled on the upper step of the piazza, absorbed in a letter of his own. She watched him for a moment, for there was an eagerness in his quietness that interested her.

“Did you get a letter from your mother?” she asked, wondering if the matter of camp were still hovering in the offing.

“Gosh, no!” he said. “It’s from Mr. Saxon! He’s sent the new Bible lesson for this week! Gee! I gotta get ta work!”

“Oh,” said Mary Elizabeth with a heightened color in her cheeks, “is he—back at home—again—yet?”

“Oh, sure!” said Sam. “He’s back. He’d been working in the orange grove all day the night he wrote this. Wantta read it?” And Sam handed up the letter into her hungry hand.

It was just a brief, simple letter, as if an older brother were writing to a beloved younger one, yet the girl’s eyes lingered on every pleasant word.

What a friend for a boy to have! What a tie to claim, “in Christ”! Mary Elizabeth felt a passing pang at the sure, strong bond that bound them and gave a half-envious smile at the boy as she handed it back. There was no disturbing separation between those two; it was all settled. It was a friendship, a fellowship, that nothing could break. There were no disturbing questions to settle.

“This looks like a corker!” said the boy, lifting his eyes from the other paper he held. “Wantta see it?”

Mary Elizabeth accepted the other sheet and ran her eyes down at the startling questions, the strange symbolic abbreviations, and her eyes grew large with earnestness.

“It looks,” said Mary Elizabeth searching for the right word, “it looks rather startling! I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how to go to work to answer those questions.”

“Aw, the references’ll answer those,” said Sam easily, “only sometimes ya havta use yer head. How’d it be if I get my Bible and show ya?”

“I’d love it,” said Mary Elizabeth fervently. “But have you a Bible with you? I don’t know whether there would be such a thing about this house or not.”

“Oh, sure! That’s part of it. We fellas always carry our Bibles wherever we go. We all got small ones that don’t take up much room fer traveling!”

Sam tore up the stairs three steps at a time and returned with a small, limp Bible of surprisingly supple and diminutive proportions, and sat himself down on the upper step again.

“Now, Mary Beth,” he commanded, “you read out the questions and references, and I’ll look ’em up and read ’em!”

So for nearly two hours through that long, bright morning the two sat on the piazza and studied the Bible together. Questions grew out of the first question, and Sam found he had to go back to foundation principles and give some of the instruction that had been given to him during his winter in the Florida scout camp with John Saxon, but both the young teacher and the learner were so deeply engaged in the study that they were surprised, when the lunch bell rang, to discover that the morning had fled.

Bright-faced, the boy got up from the step and tossed back his sandy hair that matched his golden freckles and grinned at her.

“Gee! I was going crabbing this morning, but I guess it doesn’t matter. Anyhow, I’m glad I got this lesson worked out. It’s lots more fun having you do it with me. I wish I had somebody all the time. I hope I didn’t bore you.”

“Why, I think it’s wonderful!” said Mary Elizabeth. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to study it every week with you, unless you think Mr. Saxon might mind. This isn’t a secret organization, is it? This fellowship of yours?”

“Not on yer life!” said Sam. “We’re out ta get everybody studying we can. I’ll tell Mr. Saxon I got a new recruit.”

Mary Elizabeth’s cheeks flamed.

“Well, perhaps you’d better not, just yet, Sam. It might make me sort of embarrassed, you know. I’d rather wait till I learn a little more. You see, I don’t know so much about it yet. Just keep it to yourself awhile, Buddie.”

“Okay!” agreed Sam cheerfully and grinned as if he understood. And so they went in to lunch.

After lunch Sam went with Frank Bateman out in his boat for a little crabbing and later to watch the hauling in of the deep-sea nets.

But Mary Elizabeth sat on the porch and faced her future.

T
he day that Mary Elizabeth finally wrote her first letter to John Saxon, Sam had gone off to the inlet with Frank Bateman. They had taken a lunch, and Mary Elizabeth had the day before her uninterrupted.

She had been invited to go along but had declined on the plea that she had letters to write and would go another time. So quite early in the middle morning she took her writing materials and established herself in a great steamer chair where she could look out across the vista of pines and lawn and see the wide blue sea and sometimes catch a glimpse of a great wave curling high and breaking in foam on the white sand through the lacework of the iron grille that surrounded the estate.

A long time she sat with pen in hand, gazing afar, where a little white toy of a boat tossed on the blue horizon, trying to decide how to begin. She wasn’t just sure how much of her heart she was willing to reveal in that first word she would put upon the paper, but at last she began to write: