Part 66 (2/2)
”I was not sure. But I set the stage for success. It was only thus that I kept up my courage. There were so many chances that the curtain might drop on darkness--,” his hand went over hers. ”If it had been that way, I should have let the ices melt and the violets die--.”
After dinner they went over the house. ”Why should we wait,” Ulrich had said, ”you and I? There is nothing to wait for. Tell me what you want changed in this old house, and then come to it, and to my heart.”
It was, she found, such a funny old place. It had been furnished by men, and by German men at that. There was heaviness and stuffiness, and all the bric-a-brac was fat and puffy, and all the pictures were highly-colored, with the women in them blonde and buxom, and the men blond and bold--.
But Ulrich's room was not stuffy or heavy. The windows were wide open, and the walls were white, and the cover on the canopy bed was white, and there were two pictures, one of Lincoln and one of Was.h.i.+ngton, and that was all.
”And when I have your picture, it will be perfect,” he told her.
”Where I can see you when I wake, and pray to you before I go to sleep.”
”But why,” she probed daringly, ”do you want my picture?”
”Because you are so--beautiful--”
It was not to be wondered that such wors.h.i.+p went to Miss Emily's head.
She slipped out of the dried sheath of the years which had saddened and aged her, and emerged lovely as a flower over which the winter has pa.s.sed and which blooms again.
”I don't want to change anything,” Emily told her lover as they went downstairs, ”at least not very much. I shall keep all of the lovely old carved things--with the fat cupids.”
As she lay awake that night, reviewing it all, she thought suddenly of Bruce McKenzie's letter in her ap.r.o.n pocket. The ap.r.o.n was in the Toy Shop, and it was not therefore until the next morning that she read the letter.
In it Dr. McKenzie asked her to marry him.
”I should like to think that when I come back, you will be waiting for me, Emily. I am a very lonely man. I want someone who will sympathize and understand. I want someone who will love Jean, and who will hold me to the best that is in me, and you can do that, Emily; you have always done it.”
It was a rather touching letter, and she felt its appeal strongly.
Indeed, so stern was her sense of self-sacrifice, that she had an almost guilty feeling when she thought of Ulrich. If he had not come into her life at the psychological moment, she might have given herself to Bruce McKenzie.
But the letter had come too late. Oh, how glad she was that she had left it in her ap.r.o.n pocket!
She answered it that night.
”I am going to be very frank with you, Bruce, because in being frank with you I shall be frank with myself. If Ulrich Stolle had not come into my life, I should probably have thought I cared for you. Even now when I am saying 'no,' I realize that your charm has always held me, and that the prospect of a future by your pleasant fireside holds many attractions. But since you left Was.h.i.+ngton, something has happened which I never expected, and all of my preconceived ideas of myself have been overturned. Bruce, I am no longer the Emily you have known--a little staid, gray-haired, with pretty hands, but with nothing else very pretty about her; a lady who would, perhaps, fill gracefully, a position for which her aristocratic nose fits her. I am no longer the Emily of the Toy Shop, wearing spectacles on a black ribbon, eating her lunches wherever she can get them. No, I am an Emily who is young and beautiful, a sort of fairy-tale Princess, an Emily who, if she wishes, shall sit on a cus.h.i.+on and sew a fine seam, but who doesn't wish it because she hates to sew, and would much rather work in her silver-bell-and-c.o.c.kle sh.e.l.l garden--oh, such a wonderful garden as it is!
”And I am all this, Bruce, I am young and beautiful and all the rest, because I am seeing myself through the eyes of my lover.
”He is Ulrich Stolle, as I have said, and you mustn't think because his name is German that he is to be cast into outer darkness. He is as American as you with your Scotch blood, or as I with my English blood.
And he is as loyal as any of us. He is too old to be accepted for service, but he is giving time and money to the cause.
”And he loves me rapturously, radiantly, romantically. He doesn't want me as a cus.h.i.+on for his tired head, he doesn't want me because he thinks it would be an act of altruism to provide a haven for me in my old age, he wants me because he thinks I am the most remarkable woman in the whole wide world, and that he is the most fortunate man to have won me.
”And you don't feel that way about it, Bruce. You know that I am not beautiful, there is no glamour in your love for me. You know that I am not wonderful, or a fairy Princess--. And you are right and he is wrong. But it is his wrongness which makes me love him. Because every woman wants to be beautiful to her lover, and to feel that she is much desired.
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