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Page 51
He did not wish the station platform of Market Blandings to
become suddenly congested with red Indians so that he might save
Joan's life; and he did not wish to give up anything at all. But
he was conscious--to the very depths of his being--that a future
in which Joan did not figure would be so insupportable as not to
bear considering; and in the immediate present he very strongly
favored the idea of clasping Joan in his arms and kissing her
until further notice.
Mingled with these feelings was an excited gratitude to her for
coming to him like this, with that electric smile on her face; a
stunned realization that she was a thousand times prettier than
he had ever imagined; and a humility that threatened to make him
loose his clutch on the steamer trunk and roll about at her feet,
yapping like a dog.
Gratitude, so far as he could dissect his tangled emotion was the
predominating ingredient of his mood. Only once in his life had
he felt so passionately grateful to any human being. On that
occasion, too, the object of his gratitude had been feminine.
Years before, when a boy in his father's home in distant Hayling,
Massachusetts, those in authority had commanded that he--in his
eleventh year and as shy as one can be only at that interesting
age--should rise in the presence of a roomful of strangers, adult
guests, and recite "The Wreck of the Hesperus."
He had risen. He had blushed. He had stammered. He had contrived
to whisper: "It was the Schooner Hesperus." And then, in a corner
of the room, a little girl, for no properly explained reason, had
burst out crying. She had yelled, she had bellowed, and would not
be comforted; and in the ensuing confusion Ashe had escaped to
the woodpile at the bottom of the garden, saved by a miracle.
All his life he had remembered the gratitude he had felt for that
little timely girl, and never until now had he experienced any
other similar spasm. But as he looked at Joan he found himself
renewing that emotion of fifteen years ago.
She was about to speak. In a sort of trance he watched her lips
part. He waited almost reverently for the first words she should
speak to him in her new role of the only authentic goddess.
"Isn't it a shame?" she said. "I've just put a penny in the
chocolate slot machine--and it's empty! I've a good mind to write
to the company."
Ashe felt as though he were listening to the strains of some
grand sweet anthem.
The small but sturdy porter, weary of his work among the milk
cans, or perhaps--let us not do him an injustice even in
thought--having finished it, approached them.
"The cart from the castle's here."
In the gloom beyond him there gleamed a light which had not been
there before. The meditative snort of a horse supported his
statement. He began to deal as authoritatively with Mr. Peters'
steamer trunk as he had dealt with the milk cans.
"At last!" said Joan. "I hope it's a covered cart. I'm frozen.
Let's go and see."
Ashe followed her with the gait of an automaton.
* * *
Cold is the ogre that drives all beautiful things into hiding.
Below the surface of a frost-bound garden there lurk hidden
bulbs, which are only biding their time to burst forth in a riot
of laughing color; but shivering Nature dare not put forth her
flowers until the ogre has gone. Not otherwise does cold suppress
love. A man in an open cart on an English Spring night may
continue to be in love; but love is not the emotion uppermost in
his bosom. It shrinks within him and waits for better times.
The cart was not a covered cart. It was open to the four winds of
heaven, of which the one at present active proceeded from the
bleak east. To this fact may be attributed Ashe's swift recovery
from the exalted mood into which Joan's smile had thrown him, his
almost instant emergence from the trance. Deep down in him he was
aware that his attitude toward Joan had not changed, but his
conscious self was too fully occupied with the almost hopeless
task of keeping his blood circulating, to permit of thoughts of
love. Before the cart had traveled twenty yards he was a mere
chunk of frozen misery.
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