CHAPTER IV

DREAMS AND WAKINGS

The incomparable Lucy Tait was still but a star to be adored in her distant heaven when I went away from Little Arcady to learn some things not taught in the faded brick schoolhouse.  It was six years before I came back; six years that I lived in a crowded place where people had no easy ways nor front yards with geranium beds, nor knew enough of their neighbors either to love or to hate them.

I came back to the Little Country a mannish being, learned in the law, and with the right sort of laugh in my heart for the old school days, for the simplicity of my boy’s love.

But, there and then, with her old sweet want of pity, did she smite me again.  Through and through she smote the man as she had smitten the boy.  Treacherously it was, within my own citadel, at the very moment of my coming.  Gayly up the remembered path I went, under the flowering horse-chestnut, to the little house standing back from the street, only to find that, as of old, she blocked my way.  She stood where the pink-blossomed climber streamed up the columns of the little porch, and her arm was twined among the strands to draw them to her face.  She was leaving,—­but she had stayed too long; not the child with yellow braids, humorously preserved in my memory, but a blossomed, a fruiting Eve, with whilom braids massed high in a coronet, their gold a little tarnished.  Later it came to me to think that she was Spring, and had filched a crown from Autumn.  In that first glance, however, I could only wonder instinctively if the tassels yet danced from her boot tops.  I saw at once that this might not any longer be known.  One could only surmise pleasantly.  But straightway was I Atlas, stooping a little, rounding my shoulders under the earth she deigned to walk upon.

And the disconcerting strangeness of it was in this:  that though she was no longer the woman child, yet with one flash of her gold-curtained eyes had she reduced me to my ancient schoolboy clumsiness.  She was a woman, but, I was again an awkward, stammering boy, rebelliously declining to believe that a state she had come away from could retain any significance, industrial or otherwise.  Nor, in the little time left to us, did I ever achieve a condition higher than this.

Consciously I was a prince of lofty origin in her presence, but ever unable to make known my excellencies of rank.  It was as in a dream when we must see evil approach without power to raise an averting hand.

She was Spring with a stolen crown of Autumn; and again, she was a sherbet—­sweet, fragrant, cold, and about to melt—­but not for me.  I knew that.

I heard presently that she spoke well of me.  She spoke of my having a kind face—­even the kindest face in the world.

“The kindest, plainest face in the world,” was her fashion of putting it.  And of course that made it hopeless, since, surely, no woman has ever loved the kindest face she knew.