II Patchouly
Now it happened that while their discussion was at this point, the subject of it arrived. She did not at all come as a Quaker maiden ought, but like a breeze when the door is let suddenly open. And, indeed, in the coming, she had left the door open.
Her father solemnly closed it.
Meanwhile she had pounced upon her mother and kissed her, and now she attacked her father in the same way.
“Thank thee, daddy,” she laughed, and when he put her off, none too strongly, she ran up the stairs, still laughing, whence she called downward for her mother.
John stopped Ann as she would have gone, and, sniffing stealthily, pointed with his glasses up the stairs, saying ominously:
“Perfume!”
She sniffed and smiled.
“Patchouly!” she murmured. “John, it is my fault. I told her some things about myself the other day. They made us both very happy. I must tell some one. I think I mentioned patchouly. I thought it was extinct. What a time she must have had getting it!”
John frowned.
“Yea, yea—she takes after thee.”
“And is that so bad—as long as it is only kisses and perfume?”
He had sat quite hopelessly in his chair, with his head turned. Before he could resist, her arms were about him and she had kissed him and was gone to the steps. There she paused—on the third step—looking as she had looked long ago—she never seemed to get older—as John thought she ought—and called:
“John!”
Her husband looked. And, looking, he had to smile. No one could have helped doing that.
“John, I love thee, anyhow!”
And she rebelliously and defiantly sniffed the perfume and ran up the stair—precisely as Mary Ann had done.
“Takes after her mother,” he sighed—and smiled.
For another thought had come with the smile.
“Or does her mother take after her?”
At this moment a double laugh came down the stair. And he, down there, answered it. So that you will understand that John Estover, Friend and Overseer, and John Estover, Husband, were very different individuals.
Upstairs it was hard to distinguish one from the other of these two pretty women—which was daughter, which mother—for they were locked in a laughing, weeping embrace, and the one was showing the other a long-necked, old-fashioned bottle, labelled
“PATCHOULY.”
Well, she was like her mother, and so, when I describe the one, you will see the other. The daintiest of retroussé noses, eyes entirely too large for her face, a mouth that would smile her very thoughts—and sometimes, tell them—a curiously deep dimple in her chin. But for her attire no one would have thought her a subdued Quaker. Yet upon that even the little mother insisted.
“First,” she said, “your father wishes it. Second, you will never be so pretty in anything else. Dearie, you make me think of a blush rose hidden in the heart of a lily every time I look into your bonnet. Think what a surprise that will be to your prince that day he comes! To look into the prim, gray bonnet and find—YOU!”
And she kissed what she found there.
“And, oh, my beloved, there are ways and ways! Men must be managed and women must be pretty—and both are possible—even in Quaker garments.”
“My beloved!” cried the one.
“My sweet Marian!” responded the other.
Whereby you will know what even John Estover did not know concerning his wife and child—that they had changed the fearful name he had chosen, to the next best thing they could devise, and keep the faith. For, in her “management” of John Estover and his affairs, the little French woman kept so close to the thing he insisted upon, that when her innovations were discovered, as they sometimes were, they were considered venial instead of criminal—and this is just the difference between wisdom and folly. For, upon one occasion, when he had said:
“What was that—Marian?”
His little wife had answered:
“Mary!—Ann!” making each a staccato note, and adding, “Will I never speak the English?”
She spoke the language perfectly.