Chapter IV Clover’s Announcement
The next day Jack Van Tassel came home. The first warning the Bryants had of his arrival was in hearing the familiar whistle of a scrap from Carmen, which was Jack’s particular call.
Only Clover and her mother were at home, Mildred having chaperoned the younger children to a lawn party in the neighborhood.
“It is Jack!” cried Clover before the footstep had reached the steps. She looked hopefully at her mother, who returned the significant gaze.
“He wouldn’t whistle,” continued the girl with soft eagerness, “if he weren’t—if he weren’t the same old Jack.”
“I hardly feel equal to seeing him to-day,” said Mrs. Bryant tremulously.
“You shall not, dear,” was the hurried response, as Clover ran downstairs from her mother’s room where they had been sitting. She threw open the house door.
“Clover herself,” exclaimed the visitor, laughing with pleasure, and wringing her offered hand with painful cordiality.
“I’m glad you’ve come at last,” she answered; “and you don’t look sorry.”
“Not a bit of it,” was the breezy answer. “Where are Mrs. Bryant and Mildred, and the small fry? I want to see everybody.”
“The girls and Frank will be inconsolable to miss your first call, but they’ve gone to a children’s party; and mother, I am sorry to say, isn’t able to see any one to-day.” While the girl spoke, her eyes alternately met Jack’s with a sort of wistful gladness, and then fell away. Her face expressed the relief she felt to be thus standing and talking in friendly, easy fashion with her old schoolmate.
“But come in and sit down,” she added. “You did not come home at Christmas, so we have a whole year’s talking to do.”
“Let us talk in the boat, Clover. Sorry Mrs. Bryant isn’t well. I’ll call again when she can see me. It is just right for a sail. Don’t you want to come?”
“Yes, indeed,” returned the girl heartily. “I have had only one sail this summer. Let me go and get my hat, and say good-by to mother.”
She ran upstairs and presently returned. Not a trace of yesterday’s care appeared in her countenance as the two started out gayly on the road they had often traveled together.
Hyde Park still bore traces of being a country village. The young people walked through fields of sweet clover and goldenrod, where now massive hotels and blocks of granite and glass uprear. Chatting and laughing, they hastened on toward the boat-house.
“It is pleasant to be back, I declare,” said Jack heartily, looking with affection over the billowy water, striped with greens and blues, which had been his boyhood’s playground. “Father says old friends are best, and I believe he is right.”
“Is he coming with us, this afternoon?” asked Clover half shyly.
“Why no,” replied her companion, looking at her with undisguised astonishment. “You don’t mean to say father has developed a taste for sailing while I have been off at the seat of learning?”
“He always liked it very well, didn’t he?”
“Why, I believe he always preferred driving. I told Michael to put the Flirt in the water. Yes, there she is. Now for an old timer, Clover; the wind is superb.”
The girl followed the speaker out upon the pier, and, resting her hand lightly in the one he offered, stepped into the boat. Jack followed, and they moved slowly along the little harbor and out through the narrow opening between pier and breakwater, which has ushered so many boating parties into the joys of a brisk voyage, and will do so no more forever.
Jack set the sail, and they began to move swiftly southward. The breeze was strong, and had already raised waves over which the boat sprang, striking a billow before she cut it, with a splash which echoed in the heart with a thousand invigorating memories. It was going to be what Mildred called a “jouncy” sail, and Clover, leaning back amid the boat’s cushions, would have been supremely content could her mind have been set at rest upon one point.
Jack, unconscious of her reservation, bared his head and, holding the tiller with one hand, waved the other toward his companion. “Now I am at home,” he declared.
Clover smiled and nodded in silence. She regarded him with less complacence than she had felt half an hour before. It was passing strange to feel a little shy and uncomfortable as she looked at Jack,—not to be able to chaff him concerning the little mustache that was a new acquisition, and which scarcely shaded his mouth.
The Flirt’s white wings bore them past the dark pines on the shore, past the sea-wall of the pleasant park, and the canal which fed its little lakelets. Then on, past sandy beach and wild wood where the children picked flowers in early summer, past sloughs where adventurous boys skated in winter,—a deserted, unpromising, monotonously level bit of country, surely, to be chosen as a cynosure for the eyes of all nations; to be destined to become “the dazzling focus of a world’s activity.”
Clover, as she gazed, saw only her old playground. No vision came to her of a white city, lovely and unsubstantial as though fashioned from the clouds of heaven, and holy because the offering of the best of men’s hearts and brains. No such foreshadowing came to blot out and lift her above her personal hopes and fears. She was recalled from absently viewing the landscape by Jack’s cheery voice.
“Shall we put about?” he asked.
“Yes, we might as well,” she replied, and as she lowered her head the boom swung over.
“I hope you won’t get wet,” he continued apologetically, for the spray was flying high and higher. “This wind is growing to be too much of a good thing. You must excuse my preoccupation, but I’m trying not to let you be drenched.”
“Oh, never mind me,” replied Clover. “You know you always said I was almost as good as a boy. I’m not going to lose my reputation on account of a few pints of water, I assure you.”
“If I had only put in a reef,” said Jack regretfully, “and you had your waterproof.”
But the lake was growing boisterous and the facts remained that they had neither reef nor waterproof.
“I suppose we shall have to go in, but this is fine, Clover.”
“Indeed it is; and does it really bring you to the conclusion that there is no place like home? I am interested, for you see I don’t know any place but home.”
“Is that a fact?” Van Tassel glanced at his companion with a recollection of what his father had told him of her relinquished European trip.
“Yes, I am narrow to the last degree. I have never been out of my native State.”
Jack eyed the girl with admiring compassion.
“You’ve never even seen a hill, Clover.”
“Never,—excepting the one in Lincoln Park.”
Jack laughed. “Which was carted there in wagons,” he added.
“The things I’ve never done, and never seen, would fill a large volume,” went on the girl, her soft hair, golden in the sunlight, blowing into a halo around her forehead, as she leaned on her elbow among the cushions; “but then I’m not sure I shouldn’t be as homesick, if I went away, as May Frisbie was last summer. Do you remember, while she was in Switzerland, she wrote home: ‘For real scenery give me Illinois!’ Ah, here is some Lake Michigan!” for a dancing noisy wave had leaped above the gunwale, a few spoonfuls vaulting saucily into the girl’s lap.
“Pardon me, Clover. It is too bad; but we will be inside in a minute. Sorry we had to be cut short in our career.”
“Never mind, we’ve sailed while we sailed,—not dawdled along.”
“And you will come with me again soon, I hope.”
White-crested billows pursued them to the narrow opening in the breakwater, as, wind-buffeted, the little craft entered the harbor.
When they landed, Jack left the boat-house janitor to take down his sails, Clover put on her hat, and they walked up to the road together.
“All this time and not a word of congratulation,” began Jack gayly, as they started toward home.
Clover met his eyes with a quick, glad turn of her head, relieved from the suspicion that had been filling her with apprehension; and impulsively she put out her hand.
Her companion clasped it. “Well, better late than never,” he said.
“I am so glad!” she returned, low and excitedly, “I was afraid you didn’t know it,—that perhaps your father hadn’t told you of our engagement.”
“What! You engaged, Clover?” returned Jack in great astonishment, pausing in his walk. “Why, of course I didn’t know it.” He shook her passive hand again, and started on. “I haven’t had a chance for any talk with father yet, for when I dropped in at the office, this morning, he had some old duffer with him. I only meant just now to fish for congratulations for myself, that my grind is over. I’ve been receiving a lot of them lately, you know. Excuse the egotism. Now I understand why you have seemed to have something on your mind this afternoon. I do congratulate him most heartily, whoever he is. He’s a happy man. Do I know him?”
Jack saw his companion turn pale to her lips, as he asked the question, and her eyes amazed him by their piteous wistfulness as she raised them to his.
“I have made a great—a great mistake to speak,” she returned faintly, “but I thought from what you said—and I hoped so you would not object! He is,” eagerly, “oh, he is happy, Jack. It is your father.”
The young man stared blankly into the white face, then his own turned red. Through all the tan of seashore sun she could see the color rise, and as the affectionate interest that had shone from his expressive eyes gave place to a violent revulsion of feeling, it seemed to her that a physical coldness crept around her heart.
“This is news to me,” he said in a voice she did not know. “I—I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Clover.”
The girl winced. The contempt of her old playfellow was the severest blow she had ever had to bear. She walked fast under the stress of feeling, and her companion kept pace with her.
“This is why she refused the Breckinridge invitation,” thought Van Tassel hotly. “My poor, generous, blind father.”
They kept silence for half a block, then Clover spoke again, recovered calmness in her pale face.
“Your father said that if we were honest with each other, we should not do wrong,” she said clearly, “and we have been very honest. He loves me. He wants to take all my cares upon himself. Nearly all our means of subsistence has recently been taken from us, and I was bewildered and helpless when Mr. Van Tassel came to me with his love and generosity.”
“An irresistible temptation, no doubt,” replied Jack dryly.
“It was a great temptation. I have the future of three children in my care, with all my inexperience; but the keenest pang in my helplessness was mother’s condition.”
“You are honest; if you were equally so with my father, I do not wonder it occurred to his great heart to do as he has done.”
The hot blood flew to Clover’s cheeks. “You are wrong to insult me,” she said, controlling herself with heroic effort, for her hurt youth longed to seek relief in flight instead of waiting to parley. “You will soon know that Mr. Van Tassel loves me; and—and”—suddenly turning suppliant, “when he told me so, and represented all that he could do for me if I would consent to marry him, why should I have refused? I did not know it would make you so angry, Jack, and,” with eager explanation, “I do not care for anybody.”
Her companion gave a short laugh. “A nice lookout for my father,” he said curtly.
“You will not understand—you will not approve!” she said passionately, in a low voice that began to tremble. They were nearing her home now. “It is hard for you; perhaps it is wrong to you. So far as my own happiness goes, I could give it all up for your sake, for your rights are to be considered. Ah, there is mother in the window. She sees you, Jack!”
The white head behind the window-pane inclined, and Van Tassel mechanically lifted his hat.
“Do you see the peaceful look in her face?” went on the girl’s unsteady voice. “She has only looked like that since yesterday. No,” with new strength, and no supplication in her manner as she unconsciously drew herself up, “I will not waver. Say what you please to me. Think what you will of me; I can have but one thought, I must have but one, and that is—mother!”
Van Tassel lifted his hat once more, as to a stranger.
“Not one friendly word?” she asked desperately, her breath coming fast.
“What do you want?” asked the other. “That I should wish you prosperity?”
“You surely do not wish me ill, Jack?”
“You have just declared your intention not to consider me. What can my wishes be to you? My only course is to efface myself,” and without another word of farewell Van Tassel bowed, and, turning on his heel, hurried away up the street.