May Madness

May Madness

T was a silvery light that fell upon the two women at their nightly game of piquet. The low-set lamps were shaded in pale silk, the yellow luster of the candles borrowed a moonlight purity from their silver sconces. In the polished surface of the tables hyacinths and mignonette repeated themselves, bell for bell, feathery stalk for feathery stalk. The Sheraton davenport was covered in old brocade, green of a wonderful, cool clarity. The sweeping curtains at the broad doors, the valances at the long windows were of the same color. The dark luster of mahogany, the deep tones of the rugs, the ruddy gleam the portraits on the walls, even the red embers burning down to ash beneath the white, colonial mantel seemed merely to emphasize the prevailing colorlessness, to accentuate a bloodless refinement of taste.

Only the counting of the two women at their old-world game, the occasional fall of a stick in the fire ace and the distant murmur of the bay, lapping the breakwater at the foot of the orchard, broke the evening stillness. The Webster house stood too remote from the vulgar region of traffic to be penetrated by the shrill of trolley or of whistle, and was too deeply set in its old-fashioned garden for voices and laughter from the street before it to be blown through its windows. But suddenly Mrs. Webster broke the peace.

“Antoinette,” her voice was a little sharp, “if you are too distraite for the game”

“I beg your pardon, mother,” Antoinette apologized for an absent-minded play; “that was very stupid of me.”

Mrs. Webster, though slightly mollified as to her daughter’s intentions, was not completely set at rest.

“You have scarcely seemed yourself for several days,” she said with some asperity.

“It’s the weather, perhaps,” Antoinette acquiesced. “I’ve felt a little languid.”

She leaned against her inlaid, fiddle-backed chair—a tall, slim woman nearing forty. Grace redeemed her body from angularity; the distinction of delicate breeding gave interest to her face. It had, too, something of the wistfulness of waiting inexperience and something of the melancholy of unfulfilment to lend it quality. Her mother, of a more imperious type of the aristocrat—dark, alert, domineering, erect, and lynx-eyed for all her seventy years—frowned as she spoke again.

“I wish that you might have a change,” she said with a sort of thwarted impatience, “but”

“Dear mother, don’t speak of such a thing. To change from New Weymouth must be to change for the worse. Shan’t we go on with the game?”

“Not to-night. I think that I’ll go at once to my room. Antoinette, what is that odor?” Mrs. Webster was suddenly on her feet, startled, outraged. Antoinette’s delicate nostrils widened—a Webster could not be said to sniff. Certainly a whiff of something pungent, acrid, sharpened the air that had been faintly sweet with hyacinth and mignonette.

“It’s some one smoking,” declared Mrs. Webster, without waiting for Antoinette to define the olfactory crime. “Some one smoking a very vile tobacco in a nauseous pipe.” Antoinette’s eyes could not reflect the indignation of her mother’s; discreetly she veiled them.

“It can’t be Heppy,” pursued Mrs. Webster, whereat Antoinette laughed unguardedly. “Don’t be silly, Antoinette. Of course I mean that it is not Hepzibah who is entertaining a man at this hour of the night—” It was nearing nine o’clock.

“No, mother,” agreed Antoinette. “I don’t think it’s Heppy. Heppy”—her tone lacked bitterness, “is as old as I am.”

“It’s that bold little Nora whom you would insist upon having. Antoinette, I have kept house for nearly fifty years and I have always insisted that the maids should not have followers. You must send Hepzibah out—that tobacco is being smoked in the yard—to tell Nora to get rid of that man at once. At once. And it must not occur again. You, my dear,” her voice softened, “you have been too carefully guarded against—unseemly knowledge—to be aware of the way such people as Nora act when they are what they call in love. And as for your being as old as Hepzibah”—her voice hardened again as though she replied to an accusation, “that’s a foolish remark. Hepzibah’s fifty and always was a very plain female. If you mean to reproach me for your—your singleness—I can only say that I am sorry we have never had the means, since you have been grown up, to mingle in the society where you might have married without—debasement.”

She paused. Antoinette colored uneasily and shyly. Her mother went on, half-musingly:

“After all, I don’t know. You are a woman of the most delicate sensibilities, Antoinette—of the most exquisite refinement. And men, even the best of them, are inherently—coarse. Have that person put off the grounds at once, please. Good night.”

She offered Antoinette her withered cheek, which burned sallowly with the excitement of her little oration, and marched out of the room, quite regal in her scorn of the lower classes and her defiance of mere nature.

Antoinette, left in the room so seldom polluted by the presence of coarseness, stood still for a second, her arms hanging limp by her side, her troubled eyes unseeingly bent upon the flowers, her lips parted in a sigh. Of course it would have been a disgrace—of course—she roused herself with a little shake. Debasement, her mother had said. Yes, that was what it would have been for a Webster of New Weymouth to think even of marrying a man like that! His mother had kept a little truck-farm at the edge of the town; he had brought vegetables to the kitchen door—a serious-faced, absorbed lad of eighteen or nineteen when she, a girl of fifteen, was preparing under Hepzibah’s tutelage to become the thorough housewife the Webster tradition demanded her to be. She had talked with him on the kitchen porch—he used her language, she had been patronizingly amazed to discover. Ah, he had talked a better language than hers—courageous, determined, big with ambitions and plans! What a square chin he had had, what high cheek-bones, what a rough thatch of mahogany-red hair, what dog’s eyes for color and faithfulness! An Irish setter her father had owned in those more opulent days had always reminded her of poor Bernard Moran. Her father was a judge; Bernard’s had been killed in an accident in the shoe-shops where he worked. Her mother had been quite right!

But she grew hot again with the recollection of the afternoon when her mother had ordered him from the house. He had been to college then, he had worked his way through—what had he not done for the sake of education, that poor woman’s son! He was twenty-two or three, and he had worn a dreadful collar—too large, too low, with his long, sunburned neck showing grotesque above it. Ah, it would have been impossible—dreadful! But was it not almost more dreadful to be nearing forty with no more tender recollection than that—the memory of the insulted boy who had stumbled out of the prim, pretty room, his dog’s eyes turned upon her in piteous appeal and forgiveness?

“Antoinette!” Over the stair rail came the imperious voice of her mother; “Have you sent Hepzibah out yet? That tobacco stench fills the rooms on the east side.”

“Right away, mother!” She hurried to the kitchen. The great clock ticked, the gray cat purred, the big, nickel lamp beamed brightly. But Hepzibah did not sit in her gingham-cushioned rocker.

“Of course. It’s Friday. She’s gone to prayer-meeting,” Antoinette reminded herself. “I’ll tell Nora myself.”

She stepped out into the miracle of the spring night. When before had she been out of doors after evenfall? When had she seen the moon save from her chamber window? Even on summer nights her mother preferred the retired, spacious coolness of the house to the piazza.

She drew a deep breath—not of air, but of moonlight, of wide, cloudless sky, of dim, blossoming orchard, of flower-scents, of the sweeter, more stinging odor of earth upturned for planting. The erring Nora was forgotten. Her whole being relaxed to the caress of the spring. She threw back her head to feel it upon her throat, she opened wide her arms that it might flow about her, her parted lips besought it. It was an ecstasy, soft and painfully keen—the surge of departing youth to greet the ageless wonder of the world.

She could not tell whether she trod air or dewy grass or fragrant mold as she floated down the garden to the orchard. She could scarcely tell whether it was the moon, high and white in the serene sky, that diffused  light, or the billowy masses of the trees that glimmered before her. She scarcely knew whether it was the sea—all its turbulence spent upon the line of islands out beyond the harbor—that lapped the gently curved arm of the inlet with soft, monotonous murmurs. Moon and sea, waiting earth and seed and blossom, night and sweetness and mystery, and the sudden joy of her own heart, were all one.

Then she became aware of another sound, harmonious with the spring evening—a laugh that was a blossom, a sigh that was a moonbeam, a word that was as gentle as the spent wave upon the beach. She paused abruptly—she had come to the arbor-vitæ hedge at the end of the grounds. Outside lay the highroad above the beach. She listened. The tender murmur went on. The keen odor of tobacco stole through the air. The shameless Nora—no, the happy, the blessed Nora!

Her feet slipped from the sound-subduing grass to the gravel path. There was a start in the shrubbery, a sibilant warning, a disentangling of arms.

“O Miss Antoinette!” cried Nora guiltily, “is it me that ye’re lukin’ for?”

“Is that you, Nora?” said Miss Antoinette tranquilly. “No, I wasn’t looking for you. I’m only taking a little walk. Ah!” she made a courteous pretense of just then seeing the other figure against the hedge. “Good evening.”

“It’s—it’s my cousin, ma’am,” faltered Nora.

“Yes? I’m glad Nora has friends in New Weymouth to keep her from being homesick,” the descendant of the Websters remarked with serene insanity. She heard the gasp of Nora’s incredulity as she passed through the opening in the shrubbery and out on to the beach-road.

Moonlight and the long, shining crests of the waves, moonlight and the earth one great blossom, moonlight and young love! She went on, wrapped in these things. Some new houses faced this road, she remembered; not all the owners of the old estates had held so rigorously, so religiously, so thriftlessly, to undivided possession as had her mother. New streets had been cut through, and wonderful structures, turetted, gabled, faced the bay. Of course the Websters did not know who lived in them—shoe-shop potentates, the big grocer, and such persons, her mother had said, dismissing them all. Into one, she knew—Hepzibah had told her—Senator Moran had lately moved. Strange how that gawky youth had forged ahead! He owned the mill in which he used to work, he owned the shop in which his father had died—they talked of him for governor. Why, she wondered, had he never married—some woman of his own class?

In one house the shades were up clear to the top of the windows, after the careless way of men in housekeeping. A big, green-shaded lamp cast an all-revealing glare upon the contents of the room—rather tasteless, expensive things. Only the desk at which a man was bent in work had the look of fitness which use gives. The man’s face was strong and ugly, big-boned, deep-eyed. His hair was thick and rough.

He rose and yawned, stretching his arms high above his head. From a jar on the desk he filled a pipe. Then he passed through a door and out of her vision. But she stood still, staring into the room across the slope of lawn that separated her from the house. In her ears was Nora’s laugh, Nora’s whisper of love, Nora’s sigh of surrender—and confused with these was the recollection of the hurt look in a boy’s eyes twenty years before.

It was the strong odor of tobacco that aroused her. She heard a slow, sauntering step in the road. A man strolled toward her, smoking. She shrank back a little. He eyed her keenly, a householder eying a loiterer. Then he gave an exclamation.

“Miss Webster!”

“Mr. Moran.” Her voice was miserable. They stood silent. “I came out for a breath of air,” she explained. “1 did not know I had come so far. I—I had not seen your house before. I did not know it was yours. The light—I must be returning.”

“You will let me walk back with you?”

“Thank you, yes,” said Antoinette. He made a movement to empty his pipe, forgotten in his fingers until that moment.

“No, don’t,” she begged quickly. “Please don’t let me spoil your smoke. I like it. I’m particularly fond of it.” He stared at her and then asked awkwardly:

“Won’t you take my arm? It’s rough—and dark.” Antoinette, who had found the road smooth and white in the moonlight, laid her hand shyly upon his sleeve. They walked slowly and silently along, too embarrassed, too unfamiliar, for talk. It was he who finally broke the spell.

“I’ve no gift of small talk,” he said. “Miss Antoinette—I’ve never gotten over the way your mother ordered me out of your house—a boy’s a sensitive thing. But I’ve never gotten over the feeling that brought me there—the feeling that I wanted to tell you what I was doing.”

“I have always thought myself much to blame”—Miss Antoinette heard with astonishment the words her lips framed—“not to have asserted myself at that time. But—I was young; my mother—ah, well, Mr. Moran, we both owe you great apologies! But I’m afraid it is only I will make one. Mother—her generation—her standards—” disloyally she admitted her mother’s liability to err and to keep on in error.

“I can make shift without an apology from your mother,” declared Bernard Moran with youthful, irreverent cheerfulness. He dashed the hot ashes from his pipe and stuck it into his pocket. Then his hand lifted hers closer to the hollow of his right arm. It fluttered at his touch. Then it clung contentedly where he placed it and held it.

She was-quite mad—she knew it. She only prayed that she might dare be mad by sunlight also.