From a Bench in Our Square Part 12

"'And bade betwixt their sh.o.r.es to be The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea,'"

he quoted with dramatic intonation, adding helpfully: "Matthew Arnold.

Or is it Arnold Bennett? Anyway, think how far away those places are,"

he pleaded. "From you!" he concluded.

A little decided frown crept between her eyebrows. "I've accepted you as a gentleman on trust," she began, when he broke in:

"Don't do it. It's a fearfully depressing thing to be reminded that you're a gentleman on trust and expected to live up to it. Think how it cramps one's style, not to mention limiting one's choice of real estate.

A gentleman may stake his future happiness and his hope of a home on the toss of a coin, but he mustn't presume to want to see the other party to the gamble again, even if she's the only thing in the whole sweep of his horizon worth seeing. Is that fair? Where is Eternal Justice, I ask you, when such things--"

"Oh, do stop!" she implored. "I don't think you're sane."

"No such claim is put forth on behalf of the accused. He confesses to complete loss of mental equilibrium since--let me see--since 11.15 A.M."

Here the Mordaunt Estate, who had been doing some shrewd thinking on his own behalf, interposed.

"I'd rather rent to two than one," he said insinuatingly. "More reliable and steady with the rent. Settin' aside the young feller's weak eyes, you're a nice-matched pair. Gittin' a license is easy, if you know the ropes. I'd even be glad to go with you to--"

"As to not being married," broke in the b.u.t.terfly, with the light of a great resolve in her eye, "this gentleman may speak for himself. I am."

"Am what?" queried the Estate.

"Married."

"d.a.m.n!" exploded the young man. "I mean, congratulations and all that sort of thing. I--I'm really awfully sorry. You'll forgive my making such an a.s.s of myself, won't you?"

To her troubled surprise there was real pain in the eyes which he turned rather helplessly away from her. Had she kept her own gaze fixed on them, she would have experienced a second surprise a moment later, at a sudden alteration and hardening of their expression. For his groping regard had fallen upon her left hand, which was gloved. Now, a wedding ring may be put on and off at will, but the glove, beneath which it has been once worn, never thereafter quite regains the maidenly smoothness of the third finger. The b.u.t.terfly's gloves were not new, yet there showed not the faintest trace of a ridge in the significant locality.

While admitting to himself that the evidence fell short of conclusiveness, the young man decided to accept it as a working theory and to act, win or lose, do or die, upon the hopeful hypothesis that his delightful but elusive companion was a li--that is to say, an inventor.

He would give that invention the run of its young life!

"We--ell," the Mordaunt Estate was saying, "that's too bad. Ain't a widdah lady are you?"

"My husband is in France."

With a prayer that his theory was correct, the young man rushed in where many an angel might have feared to tread. "Maybe he'll stay there,"

he surmised.

"What!"

In a musical but unappreciated barytone he hummed the initial line of "The Girl I Left Behind Me."

"'The maids of France are fond and free.'

"Besides," he added, "it's quite unhealthy there at this season. I wouldn't be surprised"--he halted--"at anything," he finished darkly.

Outraged by this ruthless if hypothetical murder of an equally hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words. Before she could find them--

"I'll wait around--in hopes," he decided calmly.

So, that was the att.i.tude this ruffian took with a respectable and ostensibly married woman! And she had mistaken him for a gentleman! She had even begun to feel a reluctant sort of liking for him; at any rate, an interest in his ambiguous and perplexing personality. Now--how dared he! She put it to him at once: "How dare you!"

"Flas.h.i.+ng eye, stamp of the foot, hands outstretched in gesture of loathing and repulsion; villain registers shame and remorse," prescribed the unimpressed subject of her retort. "As a wife, you are, of course, unapproachable. As a widow, gra.s.s-green, crepe-black, or only prospective"--he suddenly a.s.sumed a posture made familiar through the public prints by a widely self-exploited savior of the suffering--"there is H-O-P-E!" he intoned solemnly, wagging a benignant forefinger at her.

The b.u.t.terfly struggled with an agonizing desire to break down into unbridled mirth and confess. Pride restrained her; pride mingled with foreboding as to what this exceedingly progressive and by no means unattractive young suitor--for he could be relegated to no lesser category--might do next. She said coolly and crisply:

"I wish nothing more to do with you whatever."

"Then I needn't quit the Garden of Ed--I mean, Our Square?"

"You may do as you see fit," she replied loftily.

"Act the gent, can't chuh?" reproved the Mordaunt Estate. "You're makin'

the lady cry."

"He isn't," denied the lady, with ferocity. "He couldn't."

"He'll find no spot to lay his head in Our Square, ma'am," the polite Estate a.s.sured her.

"If he wants to stay, he'll have to live in his van."

"Grand little idea! I'll do it. I'll be a van hermit and fast and watch and pray beneath your windows."

"You may live in your van forever," retorted the justly incensed b.u.t.terfly, "but I'll never speak to you as long as I live in this house.

Never, never, _never_!"

She vanished beyond the outrageous decorations of the wall. The Mordaunt Estate took down the "To Let" sign, and went in search of a helper to unload the van. The deserted and denounced young man crawled into his own van and lay down with his head on a tantalus and his feet on the collected works of Thackeray, to consider what had happened to him. But his immediate memories were not conducive to sober consideration, shot through as they were with the light of deep-gray eyes and the fugitive smile of lips sensitive to every changeful thought. So he fell to dreams. As to the meeting which had brought the now parted twain to Our Square, it had come about in this wise:

Two miles northwest of Our Square as the sparrow flies, on the brink of a maelstrom of traffic, two moving-vans which had belied their name by remaining motionless for five impa.s.sioned minutes, disputed the right of way, nose to nose, while the injurious remarks of the respective drivers inflamed the air. A girlish but decided voice from within the recesses of the larger van said: "Don't give an inch."

Deep inside the other vehicle a no less decisive barytone said what sounded like "Give an ell," but probably was not, as there was no corresponding movement of the wheels.

What the van drivers said is the concern of the censor. What they did upon descending to the sidewalk comes under the head of direct action, and as such was the concern of the authorities which pried them asunder and led them away. Thereupon the inner habitants of the deserted equipages emerged from amid their lares and penates, and met face to face. The effect upon the occupant of the smaller van was electric, not to say paralytic.

"Oh, glory!" he murmured faintly, with staring eyes.

"Would you kindly move?" said the girl, in much the same tone that one would employ toward an obnoxious beetle, supposing that one ever addressed a beetle with freezing dignity.

The young man directed a suffering look upon his van. "I've done nothing else for the last three days. Tell me where I can move to and I'll bless you as a benefactress of the homeless."

"Anywhere out of my way," she replied with a severity which the corners of her sensitive mouth were finding it hard to live up to.

"Behold me eliminated, deleted, expunged," he declared humbly. "But first let me explain that when I told my idiot chauffeur to give 'em--that is, to hold his ground, I didn't know who you were."

She wrinkled dainty brows at him. "Well, you don't know who I am now, do you?"

"I don't have to," he responded with fervor. "Just on sight you may have all of this street and as many of the adjoining avenues as you can use.