56. The Gable Window
Whittaker had long ceased to feel the old temptation to think too much about Roxy, not only because he had found it to be improper and unprofitable, but because of changes in his own mode of thinking. Roxy's heroism had made her more an object of admiration to him. But a man does not always love most what he admires. Such a man as Whittaker serious, earnest, scrupulous may worship the heroic, but he does not readily love a heroine. As a heroine in esse, Roxy seemed to him too great to be loved. She was not a woman to be petted or cherished, she was a woman born to suffer and to achieve. He could have written a book about her, but he would not have written a love-letter to a woman of such a mold. He no longer regretted that she had not loved him. One who has a spice of the heroic does not mate well with heroism. As Whittaker stood now and then in Roxy's sick-room he felt himself in the shrine of a saint. But he did not want to live always in a temple. And dimly he came to understand that Roxy could not have been for him.
He understood this more from his curious liking for Twonnet which grew in spite of him. Not that he had distinctly admitted to himself that he loved the lively Swiss girl. How could he, a scholar, love a girl who couldn't get her grammar lesson and who couldn't understand what in the world a square root might be ? How dared he, a minister, love a girl so entirely volatile as Twonnet? And yet this very volatility was a great de light to him. Tvvonnet's merry laugh was to his prevailing mood like a field of green wheat in the bleak winter, or a burst of sunlight on a somber day.
"What a girl she is!" Whittaker would say as he remembered how she had pelted him that day when she leaned out of the garret window, and how she had rebuked him from behind her grandmother's spectacles. But all the time he felt like a truant. Thoughts of Twonnet seemed wrong to him, and her merry face invaded his imagination even in his prayers.
Sometimes he resolved that he would not think about Twonnet. It was hardly safe for a man to allow his mind to dwell so much on a person whom he must not love. But a forbidding resolution is worst of all. For by way of strengthening his resolve he would recall reasons for not thinking of Twonnet. He had to think about her to get arguments for not thinking about her. She was too light. There was that day in the garden, for instance, when she stood, playfully, tray in hand, and sang with mock pathos :
" I've come across the sea
From Swissland a stranger,
For a brother dear to me
From Swissland a ranger."
But just here his stern logic stopped and he fell into a reverie. The logic had evoked the image of Twonnet, and his heart stood and looked at her there. He saw the dark curls, the clear brown eyes, the ruddy brunette cheeks full of laughter, the red lips singing in such half-pathetic impersonati m :
' A little toy, a little toy
Of poor Rose of Luzerne."
Somehow this struggle did not put out the flame fanning never does put out fire. The more he wouldn't think the more he did.
It was while Roxy was at the worst that Mr. Highbury, having noticed the increase of the congregation for two Sundays, and having concluded that Whittaker would not be easily removed, decided to make friends, and at the same time magnify his office of elder. So, taking with him his fellow elder, a dapper little man, cipher to Highbury's unit, he called on Whittaker, and, after much preliminary parley, advised him to marry. To which view Mr. Wingate, the minor elder, cordially assented, lie thought so, too.
" But whom shall I marry ?" said Whittaker, puzzled.
" Well," said Highbury, " you ought to marry a church member."
Mr. Wingate said he thought so by all means.
"And a person of seriousness and piety, one who can visit the sick, and get up female prayer-meetings and sewing circles," said Highbury.
" To be sure," said Wingate. " That is very important the seriousness and piety and the sewing circles especially."
'' I think," said Highbury, "that a minister's wife should not talk too much. She ought to be quiet and grave."
" Grave by all means," coincided the sprightly but deferential Mr. Wingate.
" A minister's usefulness, you know, depends so much on his wife. She ought to be a helpmate."
" You never said anything truer than that, Mr. Highbury," echoed the earnest Wingate. " A minister's usefulness, you know, is a most useful and important thing, Mr. Whittaker." Mr. Wingate here subsided into placidity. with a consciousness that he had made one original observation.
Mr. Whittaker very readily promised to consider thd advice of his elders. And after that he walked up and down the porch, and tried to think. But he could not think of anybody but Twonnet. Her he observed closely, trying to imagine that there was more seriousness abcut her than he thought. And, indeed, she was serious enough. Here was Roxy's illness to make her solemn. And there came a consciousness that Whittaker was observing her, which produced a constraint and reserve he had never seen in her before. In proportion to his interest in her, she showed a coldness toward him. A certain fear that she had been too free, and a dread of revealing herself produced self-constraint that made her seem other than she was.
When Whittaker's school was out, on the Friday afternoon following Mark's departure on Monday evening, he walked home, thinking more intently of Twonnet than ever before. It was now four or five days since the members of his church session had bidden him to marry. But Twonnet certainly was not the kind of person Mr. Highbury had in mind when he described the stock ideal of a parson's wife. Grave in demeanor she was not. Whittaker laughed to think of her presiding over a "female prayer-meeting." She could not always keep a serious face in meeting. He remembered how she had mimicked the elder at the time of his remonstrance about Roxy. Then he said in his thoughts : " I wish she were as solemn as she ought to be to be a minister's wife." But Whittakei would not have loved her half so well, if she had been a minister's wife of the dried sort. It was the very joyousness and child-likeness of her heart that was such a fountain of delight to Lim.
When the minister in this mood reached tlie gate of the Lefaure yard, he felt like a school-boy deciding on truancy, He'd a mind to try for Twonnet anyhow, and let the consequences come. But though he did not fear the elders, he feared his own conscience, for he remembered, as Wingate expressed it, that "a minister's usefulness was a most useful and important thing." And then, too, he dreaded Twonnet's ridicule. She had made all the young men of her acquaintance afraid of her by her remorseless laughing at their foibles, and Whittaker feared that he would be made a fool of, if he made love to her.
He found Twonnet the only occupant of the house beside himself. The children were gathering periwinkle shells on the river shore, Mrs. Lefaure was away, and Twonnet had come home from Roxy's to take charge of the house.
Whittaker's first inquiry was about Roxy, and about Roxy Twonnet could talk freely with him, provided he did not look at her scrutinizingly, as had been his habit of late. About Roxy they talked, how rapidly she was convalescing, where Mark had gone, whether he would ever come back, and what effect his leaving would have on Roxy.
Twonnet sat in a rocking-chair on the porch, sewing, and Whittaker had seated himself on the edore of the porch. After awhile the conversation lagged, because Whittaker had fallen again to looking closely and searchingly at his companion. She, on her part, had immediately ceased to talk. It made her cheeks warm to be looked at in that fashion. But Whittaker presently broke out in half soliloquy, repeating three lines from Petrarch, His Italian studies had been revived since he was thinking of Twonnet by a new interest in I etrarch. Now he came out with :
"0 aspettata in ciel beata e bella
Anima, die di nostra umamtade
Vestita vai, non come l'altre carca! "
"What does that mean ?" asked Twonnet.
" Those lines have been in my head for a week," said Whittaker. "I couldn't keep from applying them to Roxy, while she was so sick. ' O looked-for in heaven, thou blessed and beautiful soul, clothed with our humanity, in a way not like the rest of us ! ' That is not quite it either, but that is what it seemed to me to be when I saw Roxy so sick. She is a most wonderful woman."
Why did Twonnet sigh and look vexed ? Why did it always make her glad to hear anybody praise Roxy excepting Whittaker ? The old jealous feeling arose again, and she said to herself, " He is always praising Roxy. He can't see anybody but Roxy." Finding tears of vexation rising in her eyes, she hastily left the porch.
Whittaker sat a long time waiting for her return, with an undefined sense of having somehow offended her, and that kind of wretchedness which a lover always feels at recognizing the fact that a man, even a lover, has but a blundering knowledge of a woman's heart. After awhile, despairing of Twonnet's return, he got up and went to his own room. But he became more and more uneasy. The more he thought that he had wounded her, the more was he inteut on apology. Would she never come back to the porch ? After awhile, he heard the voices of her mother and the children in the hall, and his opportunity for explanation was gone. He sat down at the window under the gat le, and tried to guess why she seemed so offended, but he succeeded no better than men usually do in such a case. Itemembering the time when the girl had pelted him with paper balls, he looked up toward the garret window and saw her fingers clasped around the window-sill. A powerful impulse seized him.
" Twonnet ! " he cried, with that joy of daring which a cautious man feels when he has thrown the despotic cautiousness to the whales.
She answered with a simple " Sir ? " that is de rigueur in the politeness of the country, but she did not look out. It was an old boyish trait of Whittaker's when playing a game, to make the most aggressive movements, to carry everything at the last by a daring tour de force, which always surprised those who knew his habitual caution. Now he was piqued by Twonnet's reserve, and he was carried away by the old venturesomeness.
" I'm coming up there, Twonnet."
He waited a moment. The hand was withdrawn from the sill, but there was no word forbidding him. He went directly to the attic stair, which he had never ascended before. When he got to the top, he found the garret wholly unfurnished, except by a few decrepit chairs and other invalids, put away for storage. But at the end where Twonnet kept her doll, and where she had surreptitiously held on to her childhood long after she was too nearly grown up to confess to childish amusements, there were gathered two cracked chairs, a piece of ragcarpet, a piece of an old looking-glass on a box turned upside down for a bureau, a doll's bed, and other junk and toys. Of late, Twonnet ha/, mostly given up the place to her younger sisters, but she still resorted to this gable window when she was in trouble. Whittaker found her in the midst of this strange ameublement, sitting on the floor against the light, which just tonehei with a rim of brightness her brown headaa fine a Rembrandt piece as one would wish to see. She did not say a single word as he approached, stooping .mder the rafters, but when he came close enough he saw that she had been crying. Behold another great mystery ! Why should a woman cry? Glad or sorry, pleased or vexed, loving or hating, why has a woman always to resort to this one escape for all emotion ?
When Whittaker essayed to sit down on one of the chairs, he saw something of the old familiar twinkle in her eyes, and when the hypocritical chair gave way and precipitated him to the floor, he understood the meaning of her smile.
"It's too bad, Mr. Whittaker," she said, in the midst of her laughter. " I ought to have told you, but it's so funny \o see you fall over."
A little disconcerted, Whittaker picked himself np, aiid then gently pitched the chair into a corner, inwardly saying that she had set it there, or at least left it there, on purpose for him. Then he, too, tried to sit down on the floor, cutting a verv awkward fio;ure, as a man not educated to the tailor's trade is sure to do in such an attempt. His final adjustment of himself brought him at last into a half-kneeling attitude, before her. But if his physical position was an awkward one, his mental posture was even more so. He had brought himself face to face with a merry, mischievous girl, who was a shrewd and prudent woman besides, and who had been his confidant in a former love affair three years before. He had, so far as deliberation was concerned, made up his mind to nothing. He only knew that he loved this girl, good as she was mischievous, and that she was making game of him, having completely upset his dignity by a broken-legged chair, left in cold blood as a trap for him. He had nothing to say. But ha must sav something. Naturally, under the circumstances, he began at the wrong end. After gaining time by trying to talk about the arrangements of her play-house, he said:
"Mr. Highbury and Mr. Wingate were hereon Monday, to advise me to get married. What do you think of that ? "
" That would do very well, if Roxy were not married yet," said Twonnet, half poutingly taking the old doll into her lap, and pretending to have great difficulty in adjusting a pin in its clothes. By this means she let her curls fall down around her face, and screened herself a little from Whittaker'e too intent gaze.
" Roxy ! " said Whittaker " I shouldn't marry Roxy if she were Roxy Adams yet."
" Why, you said just awhile ago that she was 'looked-for in heaven,' and was a 'blessed and beautiful soul.' "
" So I did. But a man can't love an angel, however much he may admire her. There is no rest to Roxy's goodness."
Twonnet was going to tell him that he was just as good himself, but she didn't. What she did say was that this doll had got its broken nose by falling out of this very window six years ago.
" Highbury and Wingate gave me a recipe for the compounding of a parson's wife," he said. " She was to bo half angel and half sawdust."
Twonnet laughed outright at this, and Whittaker was a little shocked at himself; but he had cut loose from his usual decorum of speech and action ; and he enjoyed talking in what seemed to him a reckless and abandoned way.
"For my part, I think you would make the best wife I know," he said, awkwardly.
" Yes," said she, looking up. " Think of me leading a prayer-meeting. I'd set a broken-legged chair for old Mother Tartrum, and I'd give Mrs. Highbury a rocking chair with one rocker off. See how solemn I can be. And Twonnet drew her face into a queer pucker, and said, in a dry, hard voice, " Sing the twenty-first psalm, second part." Whittaker was just about to remonstrate with her for her light treatment of sacred things, when the comical pucker on her face gave way, and she began to cry.
He did not know what to say to anybody crying. So he waited until she leaned her head on her hand and grew more quiet. Then he spoke again, this time vehemently.
" I don't want a wife for a church. I don't ask you to marry the female prayer-meeting or the sewing circle. I am a man, if I am a minister. I don't love you as a parson. I love you, Antoinette Lefaure, and I want to know if you can love, not a parson, but me, Charles Whittaker? "
Twonnet did not speak, or raise her head. After a while, Whittaker timidly took hold of her hand. He could not bear to see her cry, so presently he took her handkerchief from her lap and wiped her eyes. Then she smiled a little.
" Id it all right, Twonnet ? " he said, trying to look in her eyes, which she turr.ed away.
" Mr. Whittaker," she said, with a trembling voice, " my mother's calling me. I'll have to get you to let go of my hand, if you please."
Whittaker relaxed his grasp. The mother was still calling " Antoinette ! " but Twonnet did not seem in a great hurry to go. Whittaker leaned forward, took her face between his hands, and kissed her on the cheek, aa he might have kissed a child. And then Twonnet cried again. And then he had to wipe away the tears, and kiss her again to comfort her.
" Qu'avez vous? What have you been crying about? " asked her mother, when she came down-stairs.
" Mr. Whittaker's been talking to me. He's been telling me all about a love affair of his."
"What a foolish child you are to cry over Mr. Wl ittaker's love affairs ! "
" I couldn't help it," said Twonnet, meekly.