Part 24 (1/2)
”Well,” I answered, ”it can't be helped now. You must get into my boat at once--I'll send one of Salter's men down to fetch your canoe--and we must row straight back to Oxford immediately.”
She obeyed me mechanically, and I began to pull away for very life.
”There's nothing for it now,” I said pensively, ”except to propose to you. I half meant to do it before, and now I've quite made up my mind.
Will you have me?”
Ida looked at me without surprise, but with a little pleasure in her face. ”What nonsense!” she said quietly. ”I knew you were going to propose to me this afternoon, and so I came out alone to keep out of your way. You haven't had time to make up your mind properly yet.”
As I looked at her beautiful calm face and lovely eyes I forgot everything. In a moment, I was over head and ears in love again, and conscious of nothing else. ”Ida,” I cried, looking at her steadily, ”Ida!”
”Now, please stop,” said Ida, before I could get any further. ”I know exactly what you're going to say. You're going to say, 'Ida, I love you.' Don't desecrate the verb _to love_ by draggling it more than it has already been draggled through all the grammars of every European language. I've conjugated _to love_, myself, in English, French, German, and Italian; and you've conjugated it in Latin and Greek, and for aught I know in Anglo-Saxon and Coptic and a.s.syrian as well; so now let's have done with it for ever, and conjugate some other verb more worthy the attention of two rational and original human beings. Can't you strike out a line for yourself?”
”You're quite mistaken,” I answered curtly, for I wasn't going to be browbeaten in that way; ”I meant to say nothing of the sort. What I did mean to say--and I'll trouble you to listen to it attentively--was just this. You seem to me about as well suited to my abstract requirements as any other young woman I have ever met: and if you're inclined to take me, we might possibly arrange an engagement.”
”What a funny man you are!” she went on innocently. ”You don't propose at all _en regle_. I've had twelve men propose to me separately in a boat in America, and you make up the baker's dozen: but all the others leaned forward lackadaisically, dropped the oars when they were beginning to get serious, and looked at me sentimentally; while you go on rowing all the time as if there was nothing unusual in it.”
”Probably,” I suggested, ”your twelve American admirers attached more importance to the ceremony than I do. But you haven't answered my question yet.”
”Let me ask you one instead,” she said, more seriously. ”Do you think I'm at all the kind of person for a Senior Proctor's wife? You say I suit your abstract requirements, but one can't get married in the abstract, you know. Viewed concretely, don't you fancy I'm about the most unsuitable helpmate you could possibly light upon?”
”The profound consciousness of that indubitable fact,” I replied carelessly, ”has made me struggle in a hopeless sort of way against the irresistible impulse to propose to you ever since I saw you first. But I suppose Senior Proctors are much the same as other men. They fly like moths about the candle, and can't overcome the temptation of singeing their wings.”
”If I had any notion of accepting you,” said Ida reflectively, ”I should at least have the consolation of knowing that you didn't make anything by your bargain; for my fifteen hundred dollars would just amount to the three hundred a year which you would have to give up with your fellows.h.i.+p.”
”Quite so,” I answered; ”I see you come of a business-like nation; and I, as former bursar of my college, am a man of business myself. So I have no reason for concealing from you the fact that I have a private income of about four hundred a year, besides University appointments worth five hundred more, which would not go with the fellows.h.i.+p.”
”Do you really think me sordid enough to care for such considerations?”
”If I did, I wouldn't have taken the trouble to tell you them. I merely mentioned the facts for their general interest, and not as bearing on the question in hand.”
”Well, then, Mr. Payne, you shall have my answer.--No.”
”Is it final?”
”Is anything human final, except one's twenty-ninth birthday? I choose it to be final for the present, and 'the subject then dropped,' as the papers say about debates in Congress. Let us have done now with this troublesome verb altogether, and conjugate our return to Oxford instead.
See what bunches of fritillaries again! I never saw anything prettier, except the orange-lilies in New Hamps.h.i.+re. If you like, you may come to America next season. You would enjoy our woodlands.”
”Where shall I find you?”
”At Saratoga.”
”When?”
”Any day from July the first.”
”Good,” I said, after a moment's reflection. ”If I stick to my fancy for flying into the candle, you will see me there. If I change my mind, it won't matter much to either of us.”
So we paddled back to Oxford, talking all the way of indifferent subjects, of England and our English villages, and enjoying the peaceful greenness of the trees and banks. It was half-past six when we got to Salter's barge, and I walked with Ida as far as the Randolph. Then I returned to college, feeling very much like an undetected sheep-stealer, and had a furtive sort of dinner served up in my own room. Next morning, I confess it was with a sigh of relief that Annie and I saw Ida Van Rensselaer start from the station _en route_ for Liverpool. It was quite a fortnight before I could face my own bulldogs unabashed, and I bowed with a wan and guilty smile upon my face whenever any one of those twelve undergraduates capped me in the High till the end of term. I believe they never missed an opportunity of meeting me if they saw a chance open. I was glad indeed when long vacation came to ease me of my office and my troubles.
II.
Congress Hall in Saratoga is really one of the most comfortable hotels at which I ever stopped. Of course it holds a thousand guests, and covers an unknown extent of area: it measures its pa.s.sages by the mile and its carpets by the acre. All that goes unsaid, for it is a big American hotel; but it is also a very pleasant and luxurious one, even for America. I was not sorry, on the second of July, to find myself comfortably quartered (by elevator) in room No. 547 on the fifth floor, with a gay look-out on Broadway and the Columbia Spring. After ten days of dismal rolling on the mid-Atlantic, and a week of hurry and bustle in New York, I found it extremely delightful to sit down at my ease in summer quarters, on a broad balcony overlooking the leafy promenade, to sip my iced cobbler like a prince, and to watch that strange, new, and wonderfully holiday life which was unfolding itself before my eyes. Such a phantasmagoria of brightly-dressed women in light but costly silks, of lounging young men in tweed suits and panama hats, of sulkies, carriages, trotting horses, string bands, ice-creams, effervescing drinks, cool fruits, green trees, waving bunting, lilac blossoms, roses, and golden suns.h.i.+ne I had never seen till then, and shall never see again, I doubt me, until I can pay a second visit to Saratoga. It was a midsummer saturnalia of strawberries and acacia flowers, gone mad with excessive mint julep.