Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

The Dance-2

We were in a fever of excitement until Nichola got off. While Peleas tidied the drawing-room, I went down and wiped the dishes for her—in itself a matter to excite suspicion—and I broke a cup and was meek enough when Nichola scolded me. Every moment I expected the ice cream to arrive, in which event I believe that I would have tried to prove to Nichola that it was a prescription, and that the cakes were for the poor.

Peleas and I waited fearfully over the drawing-room fire, dreading her appearance at the door to say "good night," for to our minds every chair and fixture was signaling a radiant, "Party! Party!" like a clarion. However, she thrust in her old face, nodded, and safely withdrew, and we heard the street door close. Thereupon we got upstairs at a perilous pace, and I had down the white gown in a twinkling, while Peleas, his dear hands trembling, made ready too.

I hardly looked in the mirror, for the roses had yet to be arranged. I gathered them in my arms, and Peleas followed me down, and as we entered the drawing-room I felt his arm about my waist.

"Ettare!" he said. "Look, Ettare!"

He led me to the great, gilt-framed cheval glass between the windows. I looked—since he was determined to have me.

I remembered her so well—that other I who stood before the glass forty-nine years ago that very month, dressed for the Selby-Whitford ball. The brown hair of the girl whom I remembered was piled high on her head and fastened with one red rose; the fine lace lay about her pretty throat and fell upon her white arms, and the shining folds of the silk touched and lifted about her, over a petticoat of lawn and lace. And here was the white gown, and here the petticoat and tucker, and my hair, which is quite white, too, was piled high, and held its one rose. The white roses in my arms and in my hair were like ghosts of the red ones that I had carried at that other ball—but I was no ghost! For as I looked at Peleas, and saw his dear face shining, and remembered our long love, I knew suddenly that I am, rather, the happy spirit risen from the dead days when roses were not white—only red.

Peleas bent to kiss me—bent just enough to make me stand on tiptoe as he always does, and then the door-bell rang.

"Peleas," I scolded, "and the roses not arranged!"

"You know that you wanted to," said Peleas shamelessly. And the truth of this did not in the least prevent my contradicting it.

Sally Chartres and Wilfred came first, Sally talking high and fast, as of old. Such a dear little old lady as Sally is—I can hardly write her down "old lady" without a smile at the hyperbole—for though she is more than seventy and is really Madame Sarah Chartres, she knows and I know the cheat—and that she is just Sally all the while.

She threw off her cloak in the middle of the floor, and made a beautiful courtesy, her pearl earrings and necklace bobbing and ticking. At sight of her blue gown, ruffled to the waist and laced with black velvet, I threw my arms about her, and we wellnigh laughed and cried together—for we both remembered how, before she was sure that Wilfred loved her, she had spent the night with me after a ball and had sat by the window, night long, in that very blue frock, weeping on my shoulder because Wilfred had danced so often with Polly Cleatam. And now here was Wilfred looking as if he had had no thought but Sally all his days.

In came Polly Cleatam herself presently, in her old silk poplin trimmed with fringe, and her dimples were as deep as on the day of her elopement. Polly was nineteen when she eloped, on the evening of her debut, with Horace, who was not among the guests—and the sequel is of the sort that should be suppressed, but I must tell it, being a very truthful old woman and having once assisted at an elopement myself: They are very happy. Polly is adorable as an old lady—she has been a grandmother for nineteen years, and the offense is Enid's best friend. But whereas Sally and I have no idea of our own age, Polly, since her elopement, has rebounded into a Restraining Influence. That often happens—I think that the severest-looking women whom I know have eloped and come to think better of—everything else. The women who have no little histories like this never look severe. Polly, with an elopement behind her, is invariably the one to say, "Hush," and "I wouldn't."

Miss "Willy" Lillieblade was late. She came in wound in costly furs—heaven provided her bank account in the neuter gender—and she stood revealed in a gorgeous flowered gown—new, but quite like the one that she had worn at the very ball that we were celebrating. Miss Lillieblade is tiny; her hair has turned only a little, and she seems to have taken on none of the graces of age. She has grown old like an India-rubber ball, retaining some of her elasticity and constantly suggesting her former self, instead of becoming another article altogether. She has adopted caps—not soft, black old-lady caps, but perky little French affairs of white. She is a good deal bent, and she walks with a tall, white staff, silver-headed—the head being filled with two kinds of pills, though few know about that.

We were a great contrast, I suspect; for Miss Lillieblade is become a fairy-godmother-looking old lady; Polly Cleatam has taken on severity and poise and has conquered all obstacles but her dimples; Sally has developed into a grande dame of old lace and Roman mosaic pins, and I look for all the world like the plump grandmothers that they paint on calendars.

Peleas and Wilfred and Horace talked us over.

"Boys," said Wilfred, "they don't look a day older than when we were married—and Miss Willy is younger than anybody!"

Wilfred, who used to be slim and bored, is the plumpest, rosiest old gentleman, interested in everything to the point—never beyond!—of curiosity. Oh, these youthful poses of languor and faint surprise—how they exchange themselves, in spite of themselves, for sterling coin!

Horace beamed across at Polly—Horace is a man of affairs, still in active life in Nassau street, and his name is conjured with as the line between his eyes would lead one to suspect; yet his eyes twinkled quite as they used before the line was there.

"Polly," he begged, "may I call you 'Polly' tonight? I've been restricted to 'Penelope,'" he explained, "ever since our Polly was born, and she's forty, and now her husband is condemned to the same practice. I dare say little Polly will rebuke us any day for undue familiarity. May I say 'Polly'?"

Peleas was smiling.

"I leave it to you," he said to everybody, "to say if Ettare's hair was not white at our wedding? She has never looked any other way than the way she looks now."

Miss "Willy" Lillieblade sighed and tapped with her stick.

"Pooh!" said she, "old married people always live in the past. I'm a young thing of seventy-four, and I've learned to live in the present. Let's dance. My neuralgia is coming back."

We had the chairs away in a minute, and Peleas summoned the little musicians from the dining-room—a Danish lad with a mane of straight, light hair over his eyes, and his equally Danish sister in a collarless loose wool frock. They struck into the Varsovienne with a will—heaven knows where they had unearthed the music—and at the sound my old heart bounded and, Peleas having taught me the step when Nichola was not looking, I danced away with Horace as if I knew how to do nothing else. Peleas danced with Miss "Willy," who kept her stick in her hand and would tap the floor with it at all the impertinent rests in the music, while Peleas sang "tol" above everything.

Sally insisted upon dancing alone—I suspect because her little feet are almost as trim as when she wore ones. She lifted her blue gown and sailed about among us, and Polly put on her set expression and kept her head prettily on one side for all the world as she used, though her gray curls were bobbing. Wilfred, who suffers frightfully from gout, kept beside her at a famous pace, and his eyes were squinted with the pain. "Tol te tol te tol!" insisted Peleas, with Miss "Willy" holding her hand to her neuralgia as she whirled. I looked down at the figures of the carpet gliding under my feet, and for one charmed moment, with the lilt of the music in my blood, I could have sworn that now was not now, but then!

This lasted, as you may imagine, somewhat less than three minutes. Breathless and limp, we sank down one by one, though Sally and Peleas out-danced us all, and kept on until we dreaded to think what the morrow held for them both. Miss Lillieblade was down on her knees by the fire, trying to warm her painful cheek on an andiron knob, and laughing happily. Polly, with flushed face and tumbled hair, forgetful of nudity and poise, was fanning herself with a plaque that had been knocked down. We all knew, for that matter, that we would have to pay—but then we paid anyway. If one has to have gout and attendant evils, one might as well make it a fair exchange for innocent pleasure, instead of permitting it to be mere usury! Peleas said that, afterward.

Sally suddenly laughed aloud.

"They think that we have to be helped up and down steps!" she said blithely.

We caught her meaning, and joined in the laugh at the expense of a world that fancied we had had our day.

"If we liked," said Miss Lillieblade, "I have no doubt we could meet here every night, when no one was looking, and be our exact selves of the Selby-Whitford ball."

Horace smiled across at Polly.

"Who would read them to sleep with fairy stories?" he demanded.

Polly nodded her gray curls and smiled tenderly.

"And who would get my son, the senator, a drink of water when he cried for it?" demanded Sally gaily.

Peleas and I were silent. The evenings that we spent together in the nursery were so bitterly long ago. ...

"Ah, well," said Miss Lillieblade, with a little sigh, "I could come, at any rate."

She was silent for a moment.

"Let's dance again!" she cried. We danced a six-step—those little people could play anything that we asked for—and then we walked through a minuet, to rest, Peleas playing a double role in that. And thereafter we all sat down and shook our heads at the music, and pretended to be most exhausted, and I was glad that the rest pretended, for I was really weak with fatigue, and so was Peleas. For half an hour we sat about the fire. Miss "Willy" with her face usually on the andiron, though she recalled more delightful things than anybody.

"Then there was Aunt Effie, in Vermont," she said, her voice cracking on its high tones, "who went about, when the plain skirts came in, declaring that she never would have one that wasn't full, because she couldn't make a comforter out of it afterward!"

In the laugh that followed Peleas and I slipped out. We were both in an agony of foreboding, for we had not once heard the area bell ring, and if the ices and cakes had been left outside it would probably be true that, by now, they had gone to the poor.

The back stairway was dark—Nichola always extinguished all the lower lights when she went out. We groped our way down the stairs as best we might, Peleas clasping my hand. We were breathing quickly, and for myself, my knees were trembling. The enormity of our situation for the first time overcame me. What if the ice cream had not come? Or had been stolen? What about plates? And spoons? Where did Nichola keep the best napkins? And, after all, Sally was Madame Sarah Chartres, whose entertainments had been superb. All this flooded my spirit at once, and I clung to Peleas for strength.

"Peleas," I whispered weakly, "did the ice cream man promise to have it here in time?"

"He's had to promise every day since I first ordered it," Peleas assured me cheerfully; "five or six times, in all."

"Oh," said I, as if I had no character, "I feel as if I would faint, Peleas!"

Three steps from the bottom I stood still and caught at his coat. Through the c***k over the top of the door I could see a light—in the kitchen! At the same moment an odor—faint, permeating, delicious, unmistakable—saluted us both. It was coffee!

Peleas flung open the door, and we stood transfixed on the lowest step.

The kitchen was brightly lighted, and a hot fire blazed on the hearth. The gas-range was burning, and there a kettle of coffee was playing its fragrant role. Plates, napkins and silver were on the dresser; the ice cream freezer was under the window; and on the table stood the cakes, cut, and flanked by a great tray of thin white sandwiches. And in the rocking-chair before the fire, wearing her best white apron and waiting with closed eyes sat—Nichola!

"Oh, Nichola!" we cried together in awed voices, "Nichola!"

She opened one eye, without so much as lifting her head.

"For the love of heaven!" said she, "I'm glad you've come, at last. The coffee is just ready. Go back up-stairs, both of you!"

We went. In the dark of the stairway we clung to each other, filled with amazement and thanksgiving. We could hear Nichola moving briskly about the kitchen, collecting her delicacies. How had she found us out?

From above stairs came the laughter of the others—echoes of that ancient ball which we had been pretending to relive—trading that empty past for the largess and beauty of now!

Peleas slipped his arm about me to help me up the stairs.

"Oh, dear heart," I cried suddenly and happily, "I'm so glad that now is now—and not then!"