MATCHED PEARLS

by Grace Livingston Hill

The ceremony was over and they were seated for the sacrament. Constance noticed as she sat down that the man beside her was tall and had a courteous bearing. She had not noticed his name as it was called. Doubtless some newcomer since she had been away.

  The solemn ceremony proceeded amid soft music from the fine organ; tender old melodies that reminded her of her childhood days; exquisite fragrance from the lilies in the chancel; blended prisms of color flung across the perfumed air from the Tiffany windows; scraps of white bread on silver plates; tiny, tinkling crystal glasses like ruby jewels passing; blood-red wine against the whiteness of the lilies in the chancel; soft, cool polish of matched pearls against the softness of her neck. It all was a lovely dream to Constance, just a picture in which the colors and setting harmonized. It meant nothing in her life, a brief incident and pearls. What did it matter if she had the pearls for her very own? She had a passing moment of wonder as she touched the tiny glass of wine to her lips. Memory flashed back to a Sunday long ago when she had wept bitterly into her grandmother’s lap that she could not have this privilege, and now here it was hers and she was reluctant. Was all life like that? She wondered. Nothing attained until desire had passed!

  At last the final solemn march and passing of the mystic symbols was complete; the painful stillness, soft-music-laden, was over; the final hymn and benediction finished; the minister admonished the members to greet one another with a cordial right hand of fellowship before they left; and the organ burst forth into a triumphal Easter paean of victory.

  Constance lifted up her head with a relieved breath and glanced around her. She was free now for the rest of the day. Her penance was over and the prize was upon her.

  Then a voice beside and above her spoke, a pleasant, confidential voice that yet was clear above the trumpeting of the organ, with something throbbing, deep and stirring, in its lilt.

  “I guess that means that we’re to greet one another, doesn’t it?” the voice asked. “We’re members of one household now, members of the Body of Christ.”

  Then Constance was aware of a hand, shapely, well cared for as a woman’s, yet firm, big, strong, the hand of a real man. And it was obviously being held out to her in greeting, a kind of holy greeting, it seemed. She was suddenly aware that all the people around her were shaking hands and offering congratulations, just like a wedding reception! Heavens! Did one have to endure another ordeal also? And who was this presumptuous person who seemed determined to shake hands with her? A stranger!

  She lifted haughty eyes and met the handsomest brown eyes she had ever looked into, young, friendly, pleasant eyes; and then without her own volition she found her hand folded in a strong, quick clasp.

  The stranger was taking almost reverent note of the sweet line of forehead under gold hair and little tilted hat brim, lovely curve of cheek and lip and chin, the soft white neck above the lustrous pearls, and doing them homage with his glance.

  “My name is Seagrave. May I know yours?” he asked with utmost courtesy.

  Then Constance remembered her patrician birth, the pearls she wore so regally, the shabbiness of the blue serge trousers she had glimpsed through prayer time, and lifted her chin, stiffening visibly, and answering in a voice like a clear, lovely icicle. “I am Miss Courtland.”

  “Thank you, Miss Courtland. I am glad to know you,” he said with quaint, old-time formality. “I hope we’ll meet again.”

  Constance gave him a little, frozen smile and swept him an upward appraising glance.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said haughtily. “I’m going back to college Tuesday.”

  Their glances met for just an instant, a puzzled questioning gaze, and then her girl friends surged between them; when she looked again, wondering if she must introduce him, he was gone.

  “Who’s your boyfriend, Con?” whispered Rose Acker, one of her most intimate friends. “Isn’t he perfectly stunning looking!”

  But Constance only smiled and went forward to her grandmother who was waiting with proud eyes and sternly pleasant lips.

  As they drove along in the car toward home, Constance looked for the stranger among the people on the pavement, but he was not anywhere among them. She wondered if she would ever see him again. He was impertinent of course, or perhaps only ignorant, she decided, but nevertheless interesting. A new type.

  “Well,” said her brother, Frank, coming down the steps to fling open the car door for them when they reached home, “is the grand agony over?”

  “Do you see my lovely pearls?” asked Constance quickly with a warning look at her brother as she noted the wicked twinkle in his eyes.

  “Some pearls!” said the reckless youth. “Cheap at the price, I’ll say! What do I get, Grand, if I go and do the same sometime?”

  But the little old lady with the keen dark eyes shut her thin lips in a firm line and spurned her grandson’s offered arm, tripping up the steps like an indignant robin, holding her black taffeta shoulders irately as she marched into the house without answering.

  Chapter 2

  Constance came downstairs early the next morning. She had promised to play a set of tennis with Ruddy Van Arden. She wanted to get in touch with the brightness of the morning and stretch her wings a little just to feel how good it was to be at home again.

  Her father and mother were not down yet, breakfast wasn’t ready, and Frank, of course, would not even be awake. Perhaps she would go up and lay a nice cool, dripping washcloth across his eyes and forehead and call good morning as she slipped away again, before he roused and threw it at her.

  But first she would bring in the morning paper and just get a glimpse of the yard. She had caught a glimmer of daffodils down near the walk, and was the forsythia bush really out in bloom?

  She opened the front door and picked up the paper, glanced idly over the headlines, then looked toward the daffodils. Yes, they were out. She would go down and look at them. So tucking the paper under the arm of her pretty, knitted dress of blue and white, she started across the lawn.

  She was halfway down to the walk before she saw Seagrave coming up the street with something in his hands, carrying it wrapped in white like a cake. She paused, irresolute, the color coming to her cheeks, then hastened on. Why should it be anything to her that he was passing her father’s house? He was a stranger. She need not recognize him. It was not likely he would know her again, she told herself, and hurried down to where the daffodils made brave array along the path to the street.

  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 see
n.

  “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.