Jessie Belle continued her clinging when they turned about and went into the pavilion where spicy pillows of pine needles, and Indian baskets, and arrow heads, and souvenir post cards were for sale, and where she made Dana buy her one of every trinket she fancied by the simple device of saying, “Oh, I do wish I had brought my pocketbook. I’d love to have that!”
Before they had finished with ginger ale and chocolate bars and souvenirs, Dana had spent several dollars. He frowned as he put the change from a ten-dollar bill back into his pocketbook and realized how very little was left. Only a dollar and thirteen cents! And all for foolishness! Why had he done it? And Dana had been brought up to be exceedingly careful with money. No member of the family under the eye of the indomitable Madame Whipple could comfortably be otherwise. It troubled him not a little and made him silent and distraught as he conducted the elated child back to the car.
They ate their lunch on the way back in one of the lovely wooded retreats that Dana and Lynette had discovered and grown fond of during the years of their friendship. It was high above the world, with a view off toward the valley, yet screened from the road by tall pines, a little clear space floored with delicate mosses and sheltered about almost like a room, with a great smooth rock drifting out of the moss on the open side for a table, and the air resinous with pines.
If any sense of disloyalty to the wonderful girl who had come here on hikes with him all the years and been true and faithful to the friendship entered into his soul to make Dana uneasy, it was quickly dispelled by his companion. For Jessie Belle was quick to read a man’s face. She knew just when to exercise her charms, and just which kind of a charm to use. She had been quick to note that he considered her a child. That then was her role. A charming child! She even descended to baby talk with a delicious little lisp, accompanied by a drooping of her curly eyelashes and a lifting of her limpid eyes at just the right moment. Jessie Belle’s eyes were not naturally limpid. They were hard and bold, but hidden under those lashes, whose curl had been carefully accentuated with a tiny iron that morning, they acquired a limpidity which was not noticeably akin to stupidity, artificiality, emptiness, and had quite an effect on the unsuspecting Dana. A man brought up under the direct influence of a girl like Lynette Brooke is not naturally on the outlook for deceit in womankind. Jessie Belle chattered on like a charming child. She related incidents of her musical life, largely fabricated of course, or original with someone else. She told of escapades in which she had played a prominent part, and she made him laugh at things he would have preached against. If her naive frankness was surprising in one so young, he rather prided himself that he was sufficiently sophisticated not to be shocked at her. It would never do to let a girl feel she had shocked anyone. So he smiled at her questionable jokes and let her think that they did not bother him in the least, and she led him on daringly. This was no long-faced divinity student, no devoted lover absorbed in his lady, as she had been led to suppose, no knight in high and holy armor. This was a mere man, and Jessie Belle thought she knew how to manage him.
When the lunch was ended she flung papers and boxes away down the cliff without a thought of the disfigurement of the place, and turning with a flirt of her brief blue skirts, flung herself down on the moss close beside Dana, where he sat with his back to a tree amusedly watching her and dreaming perhaps of the days when he would be a great city preacher with girls like this one perhaps, hanging on his every word. A wave of ambitious pride swept over him and lighted his eyes with pleasure, and Jessie Belle thought the look was all for herself. And, well, perhaps in a way it was. She was a type of adoring femininity of which he hoped one day to be the center. That she was a new type to him, and exceedingly lovely in her wild, flower-like way to his eyes, made him more open perhaps to her power; a power that was as utterly unsuspected as a nettle might be in the stalk of some lovely bloom of the field. Dana was as unsuspecting as Adam in his garden with the serpent that afternoon. Life looked all rose color, a garden full of good things, and he the ruler of it all. It was coming near to the time for him to have it out with Lynette. That loomed a little unpleasantly in the near future. But it would soon be over and Lynette restored to favor. Then he and Lynette would take this charming child out together somewhere for the evening, a ride or the movies, or perhaps a concert if there was a good one. And Lynette would be all the more gracious for the rift there had been between them. He knew Lynette. Of course she would be ready to apologize by this time for her rudeness to his guest the night before. For Jessie Belle had by this time established herself in his mind as his guest.
And then, suddenly, Jessie Belle, with a lithe wriggle of her slim body, flung herself about and backward, her lovely little head and shoulders lying across his arms, her eyes dancing up into his startled ones, her cheery carmine lips pouting in a laugh half defiance, half daring.
“Oh, kiss me!” she cried childishly. “I’m getting lonesome. You’re so silent and gloomy! Kiss me, quick, or I shall cry!”
Dana stared amazedly at her, the color flaming into his face, and saw his arms close around her, felt his own lips drawn as if by a power without himself, stung into being partly by that challenge, partly by the power of her own tempting beauty.
Was the serpent, perchance, lurking behind the stately pine tree against which they sat, watching, whispering, “Ye shall not surely die!”
With a sudden impulse he caught her close and kissed her, half fiercely, once, and again. Then as if the touch of her lips had brought him to himself and let loose a flood of shame upon him, he sprang up, flinging her from him. The cry of dismay which came involuntarily to his lips for what he had done changed even as it left him into a half-ashamed laugh, and then another laugh as if he were adjusting himself back into the world of convention and tradition once more.
“You crazy child!” he said and tried to pass if off as a bit of fun, the while his stainless reputation toppled before his dizzy, mortified eyes. He had not thought that he would do a thing like that. Not even with such provocation. Of course, she was only a child. A kiss like that meant nothing. She did not expect it to mean anything. Her very challenge told that. She was only trying him out to see if he was a good sport. But he ought not to have done it.
Yet there was within him a strange menacing satisfaction in the fact that he had. He stared at Jessie Belle, that forced laughter still upon his lips, and saw a new light in her eyes, a fierce, wild gleam of triumph which only added to the subtle charm of what seemed now almost unearthly loveliness. There flashed through his mind the hillside that he and Lynette had seen the day before, spread with its white cloth of daisies and lighted by the tall spikes of blue flowers, an almost unearthly radiance upon their fairy scalloped bells, tolling the slender whiteness of their frail stamens in the breeze, even a stab somewhere of brilliant carmine in the tiny closed bud. Was Jessie Belle like that? A holy sacrament he had compared it to. Had Lynette been right? Was there something satanic in its beauty?
Even as the thought hovered in his mind he felt her eyes upon him now with more than challenge in their daring triumph. It was almost as if suddenly she held a power over him, a whiplash in her pretty hand, and the ancient Whipple reputation stood tottering on its foundation. Had he, Dana Whipple, the focus of all eyes in the hometown, and also in the seminary, descendent of the great and good advocate of purity and righteousness, had he suddenly done a thing of which to be ashamed?
He tried to shake it off. Tried to face those big, blue, wistful, devilish eyes of hers and show her that it was not so, that he had not yielded to her power, that he had done nothing of which he was ashamed, that she had no triumph to rejoice over, no whiplash over him. He tried to consider her lightly, and his act as nothing. But he could not face her eyes without yielding to them, and so he wavered into that embarrassed laugh and stooped to flick the dread grass from the cuff of his trouser leg.
“An unspeakable child!” He repeated with another forced, embarrassed laugh.
But sh
e answered in a low, meaningful tone that held a startling amount of menace for his previously satisfied soul.
“You know I am not a child, Dana! You knew it when you kissed me!”
The moment was fraught with intensity. The perspiration suddenly sprang in little beads to Dana’s forehead, and he grew white to the lips, because there was deeper challenge now in the girl who stood there in her smoky blue dress with the afternoon sunshine drifting down upon her black bobbed wave, her cream and rose complexion, her lovely impish eyes, her beckoning carmine lips. And then, she lifted her slim white arms and held them out, her head on one side, her eyes daring him to come and kiss her again. She knew she was lovely; she even let the wickedness show like a charm of jewels in her eyes.
’twas such a little thing that brought him to his senses! The snapping of a twig behind him. He had not stirred—not yet. Had the God of his grandfather sent an angel to protect him? He froze into sudden attention.
Jessie Belle, quick to catch a changing mood, flashed out her white hands, as if that was all she had meant in the first place, almost as if it had been a continuous movement, caught Dana’s hands and whirled him off his balance into a circle.
“Come, let’s dance!” she said. “I’m dying to dance. Let’s do the Charleston. Don’t you know how, you great big nice dummy? Well, follow me, just let yourself go—I’ll guide you—”
But Jessie Belle had overdone her part. Dana’s dignity was at stake. Never in his life had he allowed himself to be made ridiculous. And—there was that snapped twig.
He wrenched himself free and faced about, still struggling with various emotions, and there, standing imperturbable in the entrance of the wooded amphitheatre, his cap on the back of his head, his hair on end, his face smudged, his fishing rod over his shoulder, a string of fish in one hand, and an inscrutable look in his dark, smoldering eyes, stood Elim Brooke.
The color rolled up over Dana’s pale, patrician features, and fury blazed forth in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. What was there to say? What could he say? How could he explain the situation without making it worse? He might tell Elim what he thought of him for spying on his actions, for being where he obviously was not wanted. But the woods were free, and why should Elim not come to that particular haunt if he chose? As a matter of fact it was Elim who had originally led Dana and Lynette to this lovely spot, for just below the big rock, reached by a circuitous and somewhat precipitous path, there was a point where one could drop a silent hook down into the cool, shadowed depths of the creek and be pretty sure of getting a wily fish of no mean parts, if one knew how. There really was nothing to say to Elim on that score when he scanned the subject hastily.
And somehow Elim seemed to have grown and aged suddenly. He seemed to be grave and dignified, and to have attained a point of vantage which by right belonged to Dana. It galled him unbearably. He hated Elim with a new and savage quality which should have given him new light on himself.
Elim continued to stand there silently holding Dana with the power of his scornful boy’s glance.
Jessie Belle, for the instant, was silent, startled, staring at the intruder belligerently, puzzled to understand why a mere boy’s arrival had caused such a reaction in her companion.
“Oh!” said Elim at last, with a contempt in his voice that was beyond description. “It’s you, is it, Dana? I—thought it was a couppla bums!”
But with the first word Dana’s composure returned. He straightened his collar with a laugh, brushed a leaf from the sleeve of his immaculate coat, stooped and brushed more dust from the leg of his trousers, and arose to the occasion grandly.
“My soul! Elim! Is that you? I’m glad you’ve come. I’ve got a crazy child here that wants to dance, and she took me by surprise and whirled me off my balance. I’m getting too old and stiff to play games with children. Come on in and I’ll introduce you. She’s about your age, and you can play around together. Jessie Belle, this is—”
But Elim cast a withering glance at Jessie Belle, so full of disgust and scorn that he might as well have spit upon her, and advanced with a shrug into the shadowy arena, his back toward Jessie Belle, his eyes once more upon Dana.
“Thanks awfully, old man, but she’s not my type. I like ‘em real, not made-up! Besides, I think too much of my mother! What’s the matter with keepin’ it up yerself? You were takin’ to it fine. Shake a nasty foot, dontcha? I didn’t know they taught the Charleston at seminary. Must be great. Come on Spud, it’s gettin’ late. We gotta get those fish home fer supper.”
Spud Larkin appeared grinning in the offing, a tall boy with a freckled countenance and fire-red hair. He crossed the arena like a shadow and dropped down behind the rock after Elim as silently as an Indian. A sudden portentous stillness drifted into the quiet retreat.
It seemed to Dana that life had suddenly gone upside down and fastened him in a situation impossible for a Whipple to tolerate. In swift procession the forces which had gone to make up his life circled round him, like stark, horrified ghosts, lifting hand of holy horror at the position he had allowed himself to assume before the world, for that it would presently be broadcasted to the world with those two boys aware of it, he did not doubt. There were the shades of all the Whipples past, his grandfather and the great preacher in the lead, his father close behind, his tyrannical grandmother, his mother, Aunt Justine, and Lynette, with her white face and sad eyes as he had seen her last standing on the porch in the sunset. Lynette’s mother! Lynette’s patrician grandmother! The whole gossiping, praying, prideful village! Yes, and further than that. The theological seminary! All the professors, and his fellow students whom he had so carefully and at such odds subdued to his allegiance. The church at large who had him in view as a promising leader of things religious. The particular congregation upon which his immediate hopes of the future were pinned.
They circled around him in quick, questioning groups to his excited imagination and insisted upon his righting the situation at the instant before it became forever too late.
There were those two unspeakable devils down behind that stone, waiting undoubtedly, listening.
And how long had they been there before he discovered them?
Cold chills crept down his spine. Cold beads of perspiration broke out upon his forehead. His throat grew hot and dry. His eyes seemed to be balls of fire. He felt as if he were in an airplane high in a storm that had taken to diving into space of its own volition, and the engine had suddenly gone dead. He must do something at once or his great reputation would crash to the ground in utter destruction.
Presence of mind! Concentration! What were those things they taught in the seminary? He must right himself at once.
Clearing his throat and assuming a cheerful attitude, he took out his watch dramatically.
“Great Scott! Jessie Belle, do you know what time it is, child?” he said in tone of declamation, audible he was sure even down to the fish in the cool pool below. “We’ve got to get right back. I must get off a telegram to one of my professors before six o’clock or I may lose a chance to preach in one of the best vacant churches in the East. Come on, pick up your duds and let’s get to the car. We’ve wasted time enough playing games.”
“What’s eating you, Dana Whipple?” said an arrogant Jessie Belle, flashing her eyes and setting her painted lips in an ugly red gash as if she might have been Jezebel herself. “Aren’t you going down and fight those dirty kids for what they said about me? I won’t stand for being treated like that. No gentleman would stand for it.”
“Nonsense, Jessie Belle, they’re only a pair of ignorant kids. Don’t be a fool. Come, you’re only a child yourself. I’ve got to get back home. I have an engagement. I had no idea it was getting so late.”
An evil look came into Jessie Belle’s belashed eyes.
“You’re a coward!” she said in the sophisticated tone of a girl of the slums. It seemed to transform her into a menace.
But Dana was intent upon
the part he was acting, upon his well-modulated laugh and his distinctly pitched voice, a voice that could reach so easily to the people way back in the last seat under the galleries, and was even now echoing over the rock and down to the fishing hole below.
“Thank you, Jessie Belle,” he laughed lazily. “If compliments are being handed out I might call you several degrees of a child.”
“You’re afraid!” hissed Jessie Belle. “You’re afraid of those boys!”
“Have it your own way,” orated Dana Whipple wearily. “I’m going home. If you don’t get down to the car at once you’ll have to walk, for I’ve got to send that telegram.”
After that the woods were silent, save for the snapping of a twig under a quick step now and then, a bird’s note high in the branches, the soft plink of a pebble sliding into the water.
Dana had gone with great strides down to the car without looking back. He had not even seen Jessie Belle’s scorn of him. His very back was indignant as he disappeared between the branches. She stood sulkily, lowering, her wrath smoldering. He would come back! Of course he would come back. And she would make him go down and pitch those despicable boys into the water. That first one had been awfully good looking. Jessie Belle never could tolerate indifference in a good-looking man or boy. He must be punished and be made to take notice. This Elim, whoever he was, should be humbled till he groveled at her feet. And then perhaps she might take notice of him, for he was good looking. But it was up to Dana to do the humbling. Dana had been yellow. Dana had been afraid of him. She would humble Dana, too. She had almost had him where she wanted him, and then that horrid boy had come. That was where the long-faced part of the theological student came in probably. He was a slave to his orders. He was afraid to be caught. But she could manage him. He would come back.
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