Little Eve Edgarton Part 14

"Why--why, Eve!" stammered her father. "Why, my little--little girl!

Why, you haven't kissed me--before--since you were a baby!"

"Yes, I have!" nodded little Eve Edgarton.

"No, you haven't!" snapped her father.

"Yes, I have!" insisted Eve.

Tighter and tighter their arms clasped round each other. "You're all I've got," faltered the man brokenly.

"You're all I've ever had," whispered little Eve Edgarton.

Silently for a moment each according to his thoughts sat staring off into far places. Then without any warning whatsoever, the man reached out suddenly and tipped his daughter's face up abruptly into the light.

"Eve!" he demanded. "Surely you're not blaming me any in your heart because I want to see you safely married and settled with--with John Ellbertson?"

Vaguely, like a child repeating a dimly understood lesson, little Eve Edgarton repeated the phrases after him. "Oh, no, Father," she said, "I surely am not blaming you--in my heart--for wanting to see me married and settled with--John Ellbertson. Good old John Ellbertson,"

she corrected painstakingly.

With his hand still holding her little chin like a vise, the man's eyes narrowed to his further probing. "Eve," he frowned, "I'm not as well as I used to be! I've got pains in my arms! And they're not good pains! I shall live to be a thousand! But I--I might not! It's a--rotten world, Eve," he brooded, "and quite unnecessarily crowded--it seems to me--with essentially rotten people. Toward the starving and the crippled and the hideously distorted, the world, having no envy of them, shows always an amazing mercy; and Beauty, whatever its sorrows, can always retreat to the thick protecting wall of its own conceit. But as for the rest of us?" he grinned with a sudden convulsive twist of the eyebrow, "G.o.d help the unduly prosperous--and the merely plain! From the former--always, Envy, like a wolf, shall tear down every fresh talent, every fresh treasure, they lift to their aching backs. And from the latter--Brutal Neglect shall ravage away even the charm that they thought they had!

"It's a--a rotten world, Eve, I tell you," he began all over again, a bit plaintively. "A rotten world! And the pains in my arms, I tell you, are not--nice! Distinctly not nice! Sometimes, Eve, you think I'm making faces at you! But, believe me, it isn't faces that I'm making!

It's my--heart that I'm making at you! And believe me, the pain is not--nice!"

Before the sudden wince in his daughter's eyes he reverted instantly to an air of semi-jocosity. "So, under all existing circ.u.mstances, little girl," he hastened to affirm, "you can hardly blame a crusty old codger of a father for preferring to leave his daughter in the hands of a man whom he positively knows to be good, than in the hands of some casual stranger who, just in a negative way, he merely can't prove isn't good? Oh, Eve--Eve," he pleaded sharply, "you'll be so much better off--out of the world! You've got infinitely too much money and infinitely too little--self-conceit--to be happy here! They would break your heart in a year! But at Nunko-Nono!" he cried eagerly. "Oh, Eve! Think of the peace of it! Just white beach, and a blue sea, and the long, low, endless horizon. And John will make you a garden! And women--I have often heard--are very happy in a garden!

And--"

Slowly little Eve Edgarton lifted her eyes again to his. "Has John got a beard?" she asked.

"Why--why, I'm sure I don't remember," stammered her father. "Why, yes, I think so--why, yes, indeed--I dare say!"

"Is it a grayish beard?" asked little Eve Edgarton.

"Why--why, yes--I shouldn't wonder," admitted her father.

"And reddish?" persisted little Eve Edgarton. "And longish? As long as--?" Ill.u.s.tratively with her hands she stretched to her full arm's length.

"Yes, I think perhaps it is reddish," conceded her father. "But why?"

"Oh--nothing," mused little Eve Edgarton. "Only sometimes at night I dream about you and me landing at Nunko-Nono. And John in a great big, long, reddish-gray beard always comes crunching down at full speed across the hermit-crabs to meet us. And always just before he reaches us, he--he trips on his beard--and falls headlong into the ocean--and is--drowned."

"Why--what an awful dream!" deprecated her father.

"Awful?" queried little Eve Edgarton. "Ha! It makes me--laugh. All the same," she affirmed definitely, "good old John Ellbertson will have to have his beard cut." Quizzically for an instant she stared off into s.p.a.ce, then quite abruptly she gave a quick, funny little sniff.

"Anyway, I'll have a garden, won't I?" she said. "And always, of course, there will be--Henrietta."

"Henrietta?" frowned her father.

"My daughter!" explained little Eve Edgarton with dignity.

"Your daughter?" snapped Edgarton.

"Oh, of course there may be several," conceded little Eve Edgarton.

"But Henrietta, I'm almost positive, will be the best one!"

So jerkily she thrust her slender throat forward with the speech, her whole facial expression seemed suddenly to have undercut and stunned her father's.

"Always, Father," she attested grimly, "with your horrid old books and specimens you have crowded my dolls out of my steamer trunk. But never once--" her tightening lips hastened to a.s.sure him, "have you ever succeeded in crowding--Henrietta--and the others out of my mind!"

Quite incongruously, then, with a soft little hand in which there lurked no animosity whatsoever, she reached up suddenly and smoothed the astonishment out of her father's mouth-lines.

"After all, Father," she asked, "now that we're really talking so intimately, after all--there isn't so specially much to life anyway, is there, except just the satisfaction of making the complete round of human experience--once for yourself--and then once again--to show another person? Just that double chance, Father, of getting two original glimpses at happiness? One through your own eyes, and one--just a little bit dimmer--through the eyes of another?"

With mercilessly appraising vision the starving Youth that was in her glared up at the satiate Age in him.

"You've had your complete round of human experience, Father!" she cried. "Your first--full--untrammeled glimpse of all your Heart's Desires. More of a glimpse, perhaps, than most people get. From your tiniest boyhood, Father, everything just as you wanted it! Just the tutors you chose in just the subjects you chose! Everything then that American colleges could give you! Everything later that European universities could offer you! And then Travel! And more Travel! And more! And more! And then--Love! And then Fame! 'Love, Fame, and Far Lands!' Yes, that's it exactly! Everything just as you chose it! So your only tragedy, Father, lies--as far as I can see--in just little--me! Because I don't happen to like the things that you like, the things that you already have had the first full joy of liking,--you've got to miss altogether your dimmer, second-hand glimpse of happiness! Oh, I'm sorry, Father! Truly I am! Already I sense the hurt of these latter years--the shattered expectations, the incessant disappointments! You who have stared unblinkingly into the face of the sun, robbed in your twilight of even a candle-flame. But, Father?"

Grimly, despairingly, but with unfaltering persistence--Youth fighting with its last gasp for the rights of its Youth--she lifted her haggard little face to his. "But, Father!--my tragedy lies in the fact--that at thirty--I've never yet had even my first-hand glimpse of happiness!

And now apparently, unless I'm willing to relinquish all hope of ever having it, and consent to 'settle down,' as you call it, with 'good old John Ellbertson'--I'll never even get a gamble--probably--at sighting Happiness second-hand through another person's eyes!"

"Oh, but Eve!" protested her father. Nervously he jumped up and began to pace the room. One side of his face was quite grotesquely distorted, and his lean fingers, thrust precipitously into his pockets, were digging frenziedly into their own palms. "Oh, but Eve!"

he reiterated sharply, "you will be happy with John! I know you will!

John is a--John is a--Underneath all that slowness, that ponderous slowness--that--that--Underneath that--"

"That longish--reddish--grayish beard?" interpolated little Eve Edgarton.

Glaringly for an instant the old eyes and the young eyes challenged each other, and then the dark eyes retreated suddenly before--not the strength but the weakness of their opponents.

"Oh, very well, Father," a.s.sented little Eve Edgarton. "Only--"

ruggedly the soft little chin thrust itself forth into stubborn outline again. "Only, Father," she articulated with inordinate distinctness, "you might just as well understand here and now, I won't budge one inch toward Nunko-Nono--not one single solitary little inch toward Nunko-Nono--unless at London, or Lisbon, or Odessa, or somewhere, you let me fill up all the trunks I want to--with just plain pretties--to take to Nunko-Nono! It isn't exactly, you know, like a bride moving fifty miles out from town somewhere," she explained painstakingly. "When a bride goes out to a place like Nunko-Nono, it isn't enough, you understand, that she takes just the things she needs. What she's got to take, you see, is everything under the sun--that she ever may need!"

With a little soft sigh of finality she sank back into her pillows, and then struggled up for one brief instant again to add a postscript, as it were, to her ultimatum. "If my day is over--without ever having been begun," she said, "why, it's over--without ever having been begun! And that's all there is to it! But when it comes to Henrietta,"

she mused, "Henrietta's going to have five-inch hair-ribbons--and everything else--from the very start!"

"Eh?" frowned Edgarton, and started for the door.

"And oh, Father!" called Eve, just as his hand touched the door-k.n.o.b.

"There's something I want to ask you for Henrietta's sake. It's rather a delicate question, but after I'm married I suppose I shall have to save all my delicate questions to--ask John; and John, somehow, has never seemed to me particularly canny about anything except--geology.

Father!" she asked, "just what is it--that you consider so particularly obnoxious in--in--young men? Is it their sins?"

"Sins!" jerked her father. "Bah! It's their traits!"

"So?" questioned little Eve Edgarton from her pillows. "So? Such as--what?"

"Such as the pursuit of woman!" snapped her father. "The love--not of woman, but of the pursuit of woman! On all sides you see it to-day! On all sides you hear it--sense it--suffer it! The young man's eternally jocose s.e.xual apprais.e.m.e.nt of woman! 'Is she young? Is she pretty?'

And always, eternally, 'Is there any one younger? Is there any one prettier?' Sins, you ask?" Suddenly now he seemed perfectly willing, even anxious, to linger and talk. "A sin is nothing, oftener than not, but a mere accidental, non-considered act! A yellow streak quite as exterior as the scorch of a sunbeam. And there is no sin existent that a man may not repent of! And there is no honest repentance, Eve, that a wise woman cannot make over into a basic foundation for happiness!

But a trait? A congenital tendency? A yellow streak bred in the bone?

Why, Eve! If a man loves, I tell you, not woman, but the pursuit of woman? So that--wherever he wins--he wastes again? So that indeed at last, he wins only to waste? Moving eternally--on--on--on from one ravaged lure to another? Eve! Would I deliver over you--your mother's reincarnated body--to--to such as that?"