The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 13

Early the next afternoon Sybil and Dickie Sewell made ready for half a day of trout fishing.

“If we're not back for dinner;” Sybil announced, “don't think of waiting. We'll cook our own supper, if we have to, down on the river bank!”

She noticed the look of disapprobation that flitted across Macraven's face.

“The same as you and I did that day up at Anona Island,” she added, turning to Macraven with a bewitching smile.

And she was off, with Dickie carrying the creel and rods at her heel, waving a merry good-by to them as she passed out of sight beyond the syringa bushes.

“Happy youngsters!” said Anne, as she stood looking after them.

“It's astonishing, the emancipation of the modern woman!” was Macraven's answer.

All that afternoon, in fact, he felt listless and irritable. It was too hot for walking, and reading seemed out of the question. When Anne went indoors to write letters, he idled about the garden, and then returned and paced the veranda once more, abstracted and preoccupied.

The dinner hour came and went without the return of Sybil. Anne went to the orchard gate, at Macraven's suggestion, for one last look. But there was no one in sight, so they sat down and ate alone. Evening came on, warm and soft and gray. A silvery-brown dusk crept over the field. The twilight deepened, and at last, with the coming of darkness, Macraven sent for Anne.

She could see by the knit brows and the familiar old Dean-of-Amboro look that he was worried, even before he spoke.

“What are we to do about this?” he asked her shortly.

“About what?”

“About the fact that it's nine o'clock at night, and Sybil and young Sewell not yet home!”

“But what difference does it make?”

He looked at her. in astonishment.

“It makes the difference,” he solemnly asseverated, “that my presence in this house practically constitutes a guardianship over this child!”

“She's not such a child as you may think,” ventured Anne.

“Child or no child, it is my duty to exercise that discretion which her own father might.”

Anne remained silent. The feeling took possession of him that there was something guarded and disingenuous in her position toward him. He felt that she was repressing something.

“Anne Appleby, do you know where these young people are?” he suddenly demanded.

She studied his face for a moment in silence.

“Yes,” said Anne at last. “I do.”

“Then I insist on knowing!”

“Why should you?” she in turn demanded. “What good would it do?”

“Then I am to regard you as—as circuitous as they are?” he flashed back at her.

“Just as you choose, O King of Knowledge!” she told him mockingly, as she took up her novel.

Never before had he seen Anne guilty of a gesture of dismissal. It amazed him, for a moment, but the mingled pride and dignity of a career crowned with authority saved him, in the end. He turned on his heel, went down the steps, hurried over the dark lawn, and made his resolute way to the eastern end of the great farm, in search of the fugitives.

The first fierce fires of his rage had somewhat burned away by the time he reached the pasture field. His alleviated indignation, however, brought with it no slightest weakening of his resolution. He told himself, again and again, that there would be some good, plain speaking when he came upon that truant couple. It was not that he resented their love-making, if love-making it was. But duplicity and double-dealing, this secretive and artful way of going about things, was more than he was able to endure.

The full golden moon, by this time, was well up above the quiet hills and treetops. The air was warm, yet fresh and odorous with the heavy dew that glimmered like seed pearls on the clover leaves and shimmered on the cobwebs between the fence rails, until, in the soft light, they looked like little fish nets of silver swung in a sea of opal.

No soul, however preoccupied or indurated, could withstand the charm of such a night. Macraven walked on less feverishly, stopping now and then to breathe in the many-odored, misty air along the meadow bottoms. The very earth on which he walked seemed etherealized, insubstantial. Almost unconsciously he found himself quoting Sybil's poem of love and moonlight:

He stood still, ankle-deep in the wet, heavy grasses, looking up at the moon, a spirit of soft exaltation creeping through him at the beauty of the night. As he stood there, looking and listening, the faintest lap and ripple of water filled the quiet air. He realized that he was close to the river and moved forward peeringly, looking for some path.

Then he drew up suddenly, with a start. For before him, not two hundred feet away, outlined against the stretch of open water that lay beyond them like a winding ribbon of silver, sat the runaways for whom he was seeking.

He noticed Sybil first. She was sitting beside young Sewell, on the smooth bark of an old overturned buttonwood tree. She was gazing in silence out at the moonlight and the rippling water. One hand supported her chin, the other rested on the shoulder of the youth at her side. Macraven could see her profile clear cut against the light, and through that lucid, yet muffled luminosity, strangely enough, both her face and that of the boy at her side seemed suddenly statuesque, as impersonal and beautiful as Praxitelian marble. It was, perhaps, due to the refracted light and the dampness of the river air, but around each youthful head hung an opalized circle of light. For causes that he could not fathom, the watching Macraven was touched and awed into a mood of hesitation, unable to fight down the sense of intrusion that oppressed him.

Then he turned his head away quickly, warned by some movement from the silent lovers. He knew, in that moment when he had looked away, that their lips had met.

A sudden and overmastering torrent of indignation swept through him. It angered him to think that even unconsciously they had betrayed him into this mean and unlovely figure of the eavesdropper. All his resoluteness of purpose came back to him, and he moved forward to make his presence known.

As he did so, he was conscious of a second presence in his neighborhood. He turned quickly, and found Anne at his side. She was bareheaded, too, and as she lifted her face to him, unusually pale in the pale moonlight, he could see the little diamonds of dew in her thick hair. She reached out a hand and caught him by the arm.

“Don't!” she whispered.

“Don't what?” he asked, not yet recovered from his surprise.

“Shhhh!” she whispered, with her forefinger lifted to her lips.

She, too, Macraven saw, looked ethereal and unearthly and sylphlike in the pale glow of that spiritualizing moonlight.

“Why shouldn't I?” he asked, gazing at the unconscious and happy couple on the fallen buttonwood tree.

“Oh, don't!” pleaded Anne, and something in the solemnity of her voice overawed him.

“But why not?” he persisted, hesitating.

“Because—can't you see,” she murmured, without looking at him, “it's—it's love?”

He looked toward the moonlit water and the lovers once more, and for a moment or two remained there, silent. Then he turned to Anne, mystified by the rapt softness of her voice, amazed by the indefinable transformation of her face. Through the silence she could hear his sudden heavy sigh.

And then they turned and walked homeward together, side by side, in silence still.