The Star in the Window (Stokes)/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
IT was raining the following Sunday evening. It had been raining all day long—a steady, drenching downpour that had waked Reba in the early morning with a hollow, pattering sound on the roof outside her window. She had hoped it might clear toward evening, but when she started out at half-past seven to keep her appointment with Nathaniel Cawthorne, there was still a complaining mist and drizzle. She had not seen him since his declaration. As she hurried along the rain-drenched sidewalk, the expression upon her face, hidden by the dark shadow of her umbrella would have reminded David again of the crayon of his father at nineteen. It was a set, determined expression.
Reba had been doing some deep thinking since Aunt Augusta's unexpected maneuver. She had looked forward into the future, she had looked back into the past, and both ways she had seen before and behind her the same unvaried repetition of familiar details stretching on and on. It was as if she were standing midway on a straight piece of railroad-track traversing miles of verdureless desert, and in both directions there appeared nothing more inspiring than an endless stretch of monotonous railroad-ties and telegraph-poles, fading away to the vanishing-point. Cousin Pattie would run any sort of risk to avoid with honor such routine.
At first Reba had simply played with the idea of marriage as a way of escape, much as Nathaniel Cawthorne simply played at first with the idea of murder as a way of escape for his mother. But every time Reba considered the possibility it set her heart to thumping with its appeal. If she should marry the stranger, then the day-in day-out invariableness of existence in Ridgefield would be relieved by the feature of uncertainty. He would be absent for three years, and after three years, when she was twenty-eight or nine would she not welcome anybody, whoever he was, who had the authority to claim her for new worlds, new scenes, new adventures? Only a husband could possess such authority. Only a husband could force Aunt Augusta's return to her old post.
Her mother preferred Aunt Augusta's ministrations to hers. It wouldn't be unkind to the invalid. She, Reba herself, would be the only one who would suffer from the results of such an act. And she might suffer. Of course there were risks—big risks, she supposed. But hadn't her grandfather run risks, dared, defied, hacked his way through, Cousin Pattie had said, to his success? And wasn't her own weak, trembling, inglorious parent an example of the kind of man who was dominated by doubts and fears? Reba argued that she would be sure to suffer if she meekly accepted a lifelong sentence of thankless service in Ridgefield. Perhaps a wise adviser would tell her that she would likewise be sure to suffer if she married in any such abnormal, abortive fashion. Well, possibly. Grant it. But it would be a different kind of suffering, anyway!
During the tormenting hours of indecision which had preceded this rainy Sunday morning, Reba had asked herself more than once what could be worse, when she was old and dried, than the haunting thought that she had had a chance to escape bondage but had lacked the courage to grasp it. Oh, she would prove to herself and to Cousin Pattie, and to her grandfather, that she could defy and dare as well as they. She would take the offensive in life, as they had done. She, too, would plan and carry through a campaign against circumstances. She would marry her sailor friend. She would run the great risk. She would marry him before she went home. A man to whom a girl was merely engaged held no prerogative over blood relations in Ridgefield.
As Reba hurried along to meet her lover this rainy Sunday evening she tried to quench with old arguments the doubts and fears that would, in spite of her, spurt out now and then, like little sharp-tongued flames from a fire that isn't yet dead. It wasn't as if she were young, she told herself. She would never meet anybody else, who would care for her. Not in Ridgefield. She never had, and she was growing older every day. Besides it wasn't as if the seafarer's crudities grated on her. They didn't. There was probably a queer, crude, unhewn sort of streak in her. She recalled that the machine-grease that rimmed the fingernails of the freshly-scrubbed hands of the Italian whom she used to watch hadn't spoiled his fascination for her. "Nathaniel Cawthorne!" she whispered to herself once or twice. "Nathaniel Cawthorne! What a queer, unfamiliar name! Nathaniel Cawthorne—Nathaniel Cawthorne!"
He was waiting for her under a huge umbrella, beside the dripping horse-chestnut tree. Their greeting was awkward, embarrassed.
"Good evening," they both said, and then halted.
"I'm sorry—the seat's all wet," Nathaniel apologized, as if somehow it was his fault. "I brought a newspaper for you to sit on, but it's no use. It soaks through. I'm sorry."
"It doesn't matter."
"There's no other place for us to go, I suppose."
"No dry place, I guess. I'll tell you," Reba suggested, "I'll put my umbrella down and stand under yours; then if we move under the tree we won't get so very wet, and can talk well enough too."
They did this, and a minute later, Reba, standing very straight before Nathaniel, under the shelter he held above her, her hands clasped upon the handle of her closed umbrella, which she held on the ground, like a staff, in front of her, looked up and began, "I've been thinking about what you told me here the other night."
"Yes." He was abject, shoulders stooped, head bent. "Yes, miss, I suppose you have. Don't mind saying anything you feel like," he murmured, trying to make it easy for her. "I'm used to knocks. I shan't mind, miss."
"I wasn't quite sure," Reba went on, "just what you meant the other night."
"Perhaps," he murmured, "I better not try to explain just what I did mean. Perhaps I better slip away on my boat next week without offending you any more with my affairs. I don't want to offend you." He was making it difficult for Reba.
"You won't offend me," she assured him. "Please tell me what you meant."
"Why, I meant I wasn't just fooling with you," he murmured.
"Neither was I—with you."
"I meant," he went on, "if I was the right kind, fine and educated, you know—like you, and like your folks—I'd ask you—oh, I guess I'm sort of a fool. Tell me so. That's all you've got to do. I'd ask you—well, to be more than just friends with me."
Reba looked up at him, and said, "I'm very glad to be more than just friends with you."
"But, miss, I mean" She wouldn't understand. He would have to come right out with it in bald words. "I mean—you and me being married some day."
"I thought that was what you meant," Reba told him. "It's what I mean too."
He gave a little start at that. "It's what you mean too?"
"Yes, if you want me to," she said.
"You will marry me, miss?" he asked incredulously.
"Yes." Her voice was beginning to be a little unsteady now. "If—if that was what you meant, and you still would like to have me."
He didn't reply for a second—he couldn't—just stood staring down at her. "You don't dislike me, then?" he whispered.
She gave a little nervous laugh. "Why, of course not."
"You'll be engaged to me?"
She nodded.
He didn't offer to touch her, but his sheltering attitude—bent shoulders, bowed head, and the huge umbrella he held protectingly above her, became, somehow, a caress. "Oh, I'll try to make myself more worthy of you, miss," he pledged, voice trembling.
"Hadn't you better call me by my first name?" Reba suggested.
"Rebecca," he corrected gently. He was evidently deeply stirred. "I'll try to become what you'd like me to be," he went on earnestly, "and all the time I'm away, I'll be working, and improving myself—making myself more fit and suitable for you. And when the three years are up, and I come back, if I'm not—if I've failed to become what you expected, I shan't hold you to your promise—Rebecca," he said fervently.
"Oh, but it was my idea," exclaimed Reba. "I thought perhaps," she began again, "that it might be just as well for us to be—married before you went away," she brought out bravely.
"Before a week from yesterday? We sail Saturday week."
"I think it could be managed," she said.
"But as I am? So—so unfit for you?"
"I think it's the safest way." Then, candidly, "I've got to go back home Saturday," she explained, "and take care of my invalid mother, and if we're only engaged my first duty will always be there, while if we're married—don't you see, if we're married—I belong to you."
"To me! You belong to me!" He drew in a deep breath. "You'll be back here bearing my name for me?"
"Well," she hesitated over that a little, "I didn't know but what we better keep it secret, for a while. I didn't mean I'd tell my family just now. It would mean so much explaining—you not here, nor anything."
"Of course," he agreed. "Of course that would be the better way."
"I thought," she went on (she had it all nicely planned), "we might get married next Saturday, sometime—it takes a few days, I think, for licenses and papers and things—in the morning, perhaps, before I have taken my train for home." She stopped abruptly. "Would that—do you think that would be all right?"
"Is that the way you'd like it?"
"If you would. Yes, that's the way I'd like it."
"It's the way I would too, then."
There was a silence, a prolonged, significant silence, in which they were both keenly aware of a vague something that awed and frightened a little. It was Reba who broke the silence at last, a little hysterically.
"I'm sure I don't know just how one goes about doing what we're going to do—getting the papers, and making it lawful—and all that. Do you? And I don't know who to ask."
"You don't need to worry about that," Nathaniel assured her. "It's my end of the job. I'll see to that. There's a kind of clergyman fellow who's going to try a month or so of life with us on the 'Ellen T.' for his health—run down or something, I guess—and I'll ask him. He'll know. We'll have it right anyhow. I know the marriage ceremony—'solemnization of matrimony,' it's called—almost by heart," he went on. "I picked up a book, named Common Prayer-book, once, in a second-hand book-stall in Liverpool. It's like poetry—some of it. It runs on like music in parts. Do you like that book, too, miss?" he inquired eagerly. "I mean, Rebecca?" he added.
"I never read it, I'm afraid," Reba had to confess. "It's Episcopalian, I think."
"I guess so. No doubt. Well, anyhow, the marriage ceremony is all in it. I can't make myself think you're willing to get up before a minister and say outloud that you're willing to take me 'for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part.' But I suppose you are—I suppose I've heard right, that you are."
"Yes, I am."
"Well, then, I better take you home now. You'll be getting wet," he said.
"But hadn't you—wouldn't you like to know more about me, before we consider it absolutely settled?" Reba asked. "Who I am, I mean, and my folks, and all that, just as you've told me—and my age," she brought out.
"It wouldn't make any difference," he remarked quietly.
"It might. I meant to tell you right off. I'm older than you are," she confessed.
"It wouldn't make any difference," he repeated.
"I'm two years older," she told him.
"It wouldn't make any difference," he said for the third time.
Again a silence. They were embarrassing to-night—these silences, Reba thought. He stared so, and breathed so, and appeared to take it all so seriously.
"Just listen to it rain!" Reba exclaimed. Anything to relieve the tension.
"Yes. I was listening to it," gravely he replied. "I was thinking how pretty it sounded, beating on our roof," he added, "with you and me snug inside here, alone."
He made a little motion toward her, but Reba stepped back quickly—alarmed, and suddenly defensive.
"I—I think we ought to go now."
"You needn't have been afraid."
"Oh, I wasn't. I wasn't. I—I only thought it was getting sort of late."
He gave her no other chance to reprove him. They met as usual on the following Monday and Thursday nights, for their two last séances within the dimmed interior of the Garden Theater. But he did not offer to touch Reba. She sat very straight and erect in her place beside him on those two last nights. Her elbow did not rest on the chair-arm between them, and both her feet were tucked away in the dark, out of all danger of collision. The fact was, the new definiteness of their relations had made her shy and self-conscious—had made them both shy and self-conscious.
But Nathaniel's cautiousness was not wholly due to lack of confidence, or shyness either. He was very anxious not to frighten the gentle creature who had entrusted herself to him. Where another man of less fine instincts, but more polish, might have failed, the uncouth sailor succeeded in never once arousing in Reba a frenzy of doubts and misgivings, which more arduous courting would surely have done, and sent her begging to withdraw from her promise.
And yet, the five short days of their engagement were not without their memorable moments. On Monday when they said good-night under the arc-light, a block away from the Alliance (since their relations were so soon to become a matter of secrecy, they avoided the publicity of the entrance) the sailor had said to Reba, "If you ever should feel like calling me anything—any name, I mean—not now, of course, but when it comes natural and easy, like I call you Rebecca—perhaps you'd call me what my mother used to. I'm Nat Crow at sea, you know. I'm Nathaniel Cawthorne on paper, but my mother used to call me Nathan."
"Then I will, too," Rebecca had promised.
"Thanks. Well, good-night."
"Good-night, Nathan," said Reba.
"Good-night, Rebecca," trembled the sailor.
And on Thursday night, under the same arc-light, he had lingered again. "It's all right for Saturday, he assured her. "That clergyman chap says we can come to his house and he'll do it for us, and use my Common Prayer-book. I've bought a new suit of clothes for it," he confided to Reba. "Blue serge, and," he went on eagerly, "I'm going to get you a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley at a hot-house place. That's what the clergyman fellow says is right. So you'll have things like other young ladies have them. I wanted you should. And—and—I want you to try something on," he fumbled in his breast-pocket. "I've got it here—a ring. I wanted you should have a ring, like it says in Common Prayer, even though it is going to be a secret 'solemnization of matrimony'. I've heard that most young women like a wedding-ring."
He produced a grimy piece of tissue-paper, and clumsily unrolled what was inside it, letting it lie on his large outstretched palm. It was an old-fashioned wedding-ring—a plain gold band, broad and heavy. "It was my mother's," he explained; "the one my own father gave her—not that brute. My own father was a good man. I thought I'd like you to have my mother's ring. I'd like to think of you wearing it sometimes, nights, when nobody'll see. I think my mother—she'd like to have you wear it, too. My mother used to talk to me a lot about keeping straight, and all that, for the sake of the nice refined girl I'd marry some day. I never thought she'd be so nice and refined as you, though, and I guess mother didn't either."
"I'll wear it every night," promised Reba, "and daytimes on a ribbon round my neck."
She held up her bare left hand. Gingerly he slipped the ring onto her third finger.
"Just fits!" exclaimed Reba.
"I thought your hands were just about the size of hers," the sailor replied. "I'm never going to let them get so rough and hard-worked though. They ought to be cared for, tender, same as flowers."
Reba smiled at that. "You talk just like a poet sometimes."
"Well," he replied, "when I was a kid in school, writing compositions and things, I used to think I'd like to be a poet." He paused. "Now all I want to be is rich, for you."
Reba slipped off the ring and passed it back.
"I don't care about your being rich," she said.
"Oh, I know what you mean. You'd rather have me get to be an educated gentleman. Is that it? So's you won't be ashamed of me in crowds. I know. Well, I've got to work hard and be both for you."
"Oh, don't bother about the getting rich part," reiterated Reba.
"Just bother about getting to be educated," he said. "I see. Well, I'll try." Then, after a pause, "I feel awful sorry now about what that Chinaman did to my hand," he added.