Read Ebook: The Heart of Arethusa by Fox Frances Barton Read F W Frederick William Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1748 lines and 78473 words, and 35 pages

None of the roomful of women would really listen, for Miss Letitia would be far too intent on counting stitches, and Miss Asenath would dream, and to Arethusa, Miss Eliza's choice of reading matter was anything but interesting; but Miss Eliza herself would be made beatific. She considered herself somewhat gifted as an elocutionist; during her course at the old Freeport Seminary, now so long ago, she had had the most lady-like of instruction. She prided herself on her ability to put "expression" into her reading. Thus would amiability be especially restored in her quarter, and poor, persecuted Arethusa might have a little while in which to attain some degree of calmness once more.

So Miss Asenath patted the place at her side invitingly. Arethusa cuddled up very close; Miss Eliza went back to the beginning of her article, having read a paragraph or two; and peace began to reign with the very first word of the reading aloud.

When Miss Eliza's voice, with all the proper inflections, had followed the various whys and wherefores of the death of Servetus to a triumphant conclusion, she was a different person. All the sharpness aroused by Arethusa's seeming scorn of Timothy had disappeared. She was even ready to say, when her niece stooped to kiss her good-night, that she was sorry if she had made her unhappy in her manner of discussing Timothy, and Timothy's matrimonial possibilities; and this was a very great concession for Miss Eliza.

"But you are making a great big mistake, Arethusa," she could not help adding, "every way, in not taking Timothy while you can."

Yet it was amiably said, and did not cause the slightest excitement.

Which goes but to prove more surely that Miss Asenath seemed to have missed her calling.

"That was such a pretty girl that just went past us, Ross."

Elinor Worthington's smiling glance followed the girl far down the deck.

For the creature was so deliciously young, everything about her; her slenderness; the joyful way she swung when she walked; even the cut of her clothes spelled youth. And she was undeniably pretty, with eyes like bits of blue sky and quantities of silky, corn-colored hair. Her mouth was almost too large, but even that could not spoil the essential prettiness of her. She was laughing at her escort, with glowing upturned face, as they swept past Elinor and Ross in their quiet corner, and her laugh displayed an unusually straight row of the whitest teeth imaginable.

"Was she?" Ross seemed most indifferent. "I didn't notice her. I never look at other women when you're around, my dear."

Elinor laughed. "You goose!" But 'way deep down in her heart she couldn't help feeling a bit flattered.

It was just past tea-time on the big home-coming liner, and it might seem as if all of its voyagers were taking an afternoon stroll. There was only one more day--to-morrow--left of the voyage before Boston Harbor, and everyone was full of the repressed excitement and restlessness of getting home. The decks were alive with couples and single folk, passing and repassing in both directions; some very briskly in real constitutionals, and some much more leisurely as though merely for the occupation of movement.

But Ross felt very lazy. He had buried himself deep in his steamer-chair and refused to budge an inch when Elinor had suggested that they might join that strolling throng.

"I'm a married man now," he said, "and I don't have to worry about exercising to keep my figure. Besides, I had much rather sit here in the corner and hold your hand under the rug."

So Elinor had humored him about the sitting still, and arranged a fat pillow under his head the way he liked it best; but she had no intention of permitting that even so newly married a couple as themselves should be seen holding hands in broad daylight on a crowded deck. Whereat, Ross pretended to sulk; he tilted his cap far down over his eyes; thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and sprawled full-length in his chair. Though instead of conveying to the passers-by any idea of displeasure, with anything or anybody, his attitude only succeeded in picturing lazy comfort.

Arethusa would hardly have known this Ross Worthington reclining so easefully in the steamer-chair as the original of her beloved photograph. She might have recognized the eyes, keen and bright in their glance as ever, and with the same debonair smiling; but the wavy dark hair was clipped as closely as the hair of any other male biped and had greyed a trifle just at the temples. He was less like a novelist's creation, and more like the men Arethusa had known in the flesh, in his appearance, certainly. For this older Ross Worthington had discarded Italian military capes and Byronic collars and flowing ties for more conventional attire. He was as commonplace and ordinary as to clothing, in every respect, as any other man on that huge steamship.

But Elinor Worthington would have attracted attention almost anywhere, and more than one of the pedestrians had given her a second glance of surreptitious admiration as they passed her. She was rather a wonderful looking person. Ross's raptures had not been altogether exaggeration. She had a world of soft white hair, pure white it was, worn simply coiled around a beautifully shaped head; its elderly color in strange and attractive contrast to the smooth youthfulness of her lovely skin. Her eyes were brown, a warm, dark brown, under long dark lashes and slightly arched dark eyebrows; and the tiny gleam of unmistakable fun that lurked in their quiet depths was again a contrast to the almost classical severity of finely cut features, straight nose, and delicately chiseled mouth, and cleanly rounded chin. And she was as graceful in her slender tallness as the girl she had admired--this woman of forty or more. It was small wonder that Ross had declared he loved to look at her.

Here in this corner with her husband, Elinor Worthington was all herself. She glowed like a rose, with none of the little stiffness in her manner she so often unfortunately showed to strangers and which only the discerning few correctly named as shyness. To the majority of people she was likely to seem cold, almost distant.

"What are you thinking about? You look so serious and far away," Ross remarked after an interval of silence.

He believed in the power of the spoken word. It was not given him to remain quiet for long. He might have managed it with the communion of a hand-clasp; but without, it was impossible.

Just then the pretty girl and her escort passed by them again. Elinor's brown eyes watched the pair this second time until they had turned the corner of the deck.

"That girl," she said, half wistfully, "she is so delicious and young. I can't help wishing she were mine. There is something too utterly adorable about a young girl."

"She seems merely silly to me," Ross replied. "I don't see anything particularly interesting or unusual about her that should make you want to own her, or any other callow young thing her age. However, if you say she is adorable, I suppose she is.... Merciful Heavens!!"

"Ross Worthington!"

"And I never thought of her, I'll swear, until this very moment!" he muttered.

"Thought of who?"

"The child."

"What child? Ross, will you kindly make one remark that is intelligible? What on earth are you talking about? Or who?"

"My child." He turned his face to hers, ruefully smiling. "Heaven knows what you'll think of me! But.... But, Elinor, I'll swear I never thought of her until this very moment!"

His wife very nearly went over backwards.

She had thought she was getting used to Ross, and had been sure she was quite prepared for anything he might do or say that smacked of the unusual, which seemed to be one of his peculiar gifts; but this far surpassed anything yet. She had known him very well for nearly three years and while he had once, long ago, told her of a previous marriage, he had never mentioned the existence of a child; or intimated in any way that there were any ties to have drawn him to America.

But that gleam of fun was not in her brown eyes for nothing, and so she laughed. And it was such a merry peal of unrestrained mirth that Ross rose, deeply offended.

"There is nothing at all ludicrous in this, I assure you, Elinor. It's quite serious!"

Then he smiled himself. One of his greatest charms was the ability to view his own performances, as it were, from a detached perspective.

"You're quite right there, I'll have to admit. To leave you in ignorance of any family, and suddenly, after months and years of such ignorance, produce a daughter!"

"You say a daughter? Are there," Elinor's eyes danced mischievously, "are there any sons you have concealed at home, in case I should admire a passing small boy? Are you going to spend the rest of your life thus immediately granting my idle wishes?"

"No, I'm afraid I've done my very best. I'm no genie of the lamp, although it does look a bit like it."

"Then sit down and tell me all about her," she patted his empty chair invitingly. "Begin at the very beginning and tell me everything you can about your daughter."

Ross obediently draped himself once more in the steamer-chair. But he buried his chin deep in his hands and sat staring long without speaking, across the slowly rising and falling rail, at the sea.

His own disclosure had been, as much, if not more, of a shock to himself as it had been to Elinor. He had not thought very definitely of Arethusa in weeks, or even months; and now, suddenly with the chance passing of another young female creature, and his wife's admiration of her, his daughter's personality had intruded itself as one which must be reckoned with, and taken somewhat into his calculations. For the first time he realized that he had not been considering his child at all, in any plans he had made for the future; and the thought was a bit disturbing.

"What is her name?" prompted Elinor.

"Arethusa."

"Arethusa!"

"Yes. I know it's a most awful mouthful. But her mother named her," his voice softened, "her own name was Matilda; and she had always disliked it so." How long the time had been since he had thought of the mother, either! Once more he stared across the rail, out at the sunlit sea.

Elinor laid her hand gently on his arm for just a moment; a fleeting caress of sympathy for his sobered mood.

"Ross, dear," her speaking voice was unusually beautiful, as soft and clear as a bell, but it had never sounded more like low music than just now. "Ross, would you tell me something about her? Arethusa's mother, I mean. But if you'd rather not.... I've no sort of wish to arouse any memories which might hurt; but I can't help feeling, dear, that I would like to know something about her. I've never asked you before, because it seemed impertinent; but I really do not mean it at all in that sense."

"I know," he answered slowly. "But it was all so long ago, Elinor, there is nothing left to hurt. It seems sometimes now as if I had dreamed every bit of it. She was a slip of a thing; just a girl."

It had not been very long, his first cycle of love.

It was just a little more than two years from the summer day he had first met her, with her cornflower eyes as blue as the ribbons on the muslin dress she wore, and her dainty tininess, until that summer day when he had turned away from a low mound in the country cemetery, with hot rebellion in his heart that the one had been taken and the other left.

He had not wanted to go to that country party. With all a city boy's superiority he had yawned at the suggestion; then decided to go just to watch "the rubes"; and there he had found her, and his visit to the distant cousin had assumed a new significance. After they were married, he had wanted to take her away with him, but she had clung to her own home; and so he had stayed with her on the Redfield Farm, making lazy efforts to learn a trade that had no sort of attraction for him, just because she wished it.

But after she was gone, the farming had lost its excuse for being, and the tiny baby daughter, who cried when he picked her up, and who only wanted to eat and sleep, had no real power to hold him where she was. He wandered restlessly about the country-side, trying to find some place where the mother's personality had never been; and then one day he had announced to Miss Eliza that he was going abroad, to work at something congenial where no memories made it hard for him to stay. He had not intended to remain very long, a year or two perhaps. But Ross followed the line of least resistance nearly always, and the friends he had made and the life he had lived had proved attractive; little by little the ties that had bound him to the Farm had slackened, until he hardly felt them at all.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet