Blue Ruin (Musaicum Romance Classics). Grace Livingston Hill
work he had commenced, or was it something else?” She finished shyly with her eyes gravely down, her face almost quivering in her eagerness. “I think I know the answer, Dana”she lifted her eyes for a single fleeting look“but I want to hear you say it, if you don’t mind.”
It was very still there in the edge of the pine forest, with the fringe of maidenhair below them and the shimmer of the embroidery of copper and silver and gold out in the June Valleys far away. Almost for an instant it seemed to Lynette that it was sanctuary indeed, with the whispering winds above in the pines, a bird note dropping slowly down now and then from the throat of a thrush, and Dana’s eyes upon her in that grave, sweet, utterly loving look. Then he spoke.
“Lovely, of course I’ll tell you, though there’s not so much to tell. As you say, you know it already, you’ve known it all along. Why of course it was Grandfather. I felt the obligation, sort of. I was named for him; he left me his property, or at least he left it with Grandmother in trust for me, you know. That’s the same thing. It was Grandfather’s dearest wish. And the family all expect it. A man would be a cad not to carry on after that. I thought about it a good deal when I was in college. There were several other lines I might have taken up where I would have been able to make more money and fame right at the start than seemed likely at that time I could ever make in the ministry. But nowhere would I have had more prestige of course. Really Grandfather was quite a great man. I never really understood how great until I entered the seminary. There were men there who remembered him, enthused over his preaching and all that. More than once he was held up in class as an example of a man who had reached the top of his profession. His sermons, too, were cited as illustrations of a pure, direct style that was recommended for imitation. You would have been surprised how reverently even some of the more eminent scholars among the faculty spoke of his strange, old-fashioned books of sermons. I read them long ago, of course, when I was a mere boy. They filled me with awe then with their tremendous earnestness. Of course they are quite out of date now, but classics in their way. I almost got my head turned, Lynn, they made so much of it in seminary, I having the same name and all and following in his footsteps. It did a lot for me in the way of prestige. Lynn, the light on your hair just there where you’re sitting is lovely. I don’t know but I’m glad you never bobbed your hair, though I confess I’m surprised that you’ve lived through the fashion so long without doing it. You will have to come to it of course if the fashion doesn’t change soon, though, for if I get a city church you’ll have to be quite up to date, you know.”
She looked at him startled then smiled. He was joking of course. She laughed. “A city church!” she echoed. “You couldn’t begin on a city church, of course!”
“Brownleigh thinks I can,” he said gravely, with conviction. “He says my talents would be wasted anywhere else. So you better be thinking about cutting your hair. You don’t want to look like a country parson’s wife.”
Lynette did not smile. Her eyes were puzzled as she studied his face.
“You speak almost as if you meant that,” she said lightly.
“I do,” he said brightly. “I think you would be charming with it cut. Haven’t you often longed to get it off and be like the other girls?”
“But you used to say you liked my hair,” said Lynette.
“Well, I do, but one must be reasonable. You can’t go against the whole world of course, and one gets used to those things. But Lynn, I’m hungry as a bear. Why don’t we eat? I haven’t told you yet, but I’ve got to go back pretty soon.”
“Got to go back!” said Lynette in dismay. “Why, you said we were to stay till sunset! It’s our day. It’s been four years since we sat up here till sunset and talked so long, you know. It’s”
She had almost said, “It’s my birthday, you know,” but he saved her further words.
“You don’t say! It was about this time, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too bad. But we’ll come another time, tomorrow if I can manage it. You see we’re going to have company at our house for several weeks I’m afraid, but it won’t affect me after today. I gave Aunt Justine warning I wouldn’t have anybody wished on me this summer. But I have to go down to meet them on the four-thirty train; the woman is sick and she has her child with her, and they can’t walk to the bus line. I offered to pay for a taxi but Aunt Justine seemed to think that was ungracious when they are first arriving, and she carried on so that I had to give in and say I’d come home in time to cart them up from the train. Aunt Justine is a great nuisance. She knows how to put the whole household in an uproar with just a few words. If I had my way she would be sent away. But Grandmother seems to think she has an obligation so there’s no way. Now, let’s see what’s in that basket. I declare I’ve been starving all the way up. I’m sure I smell chocolate cake and tarts. Are there tarts? I knew it! Open it quick, Lynn. We mustn’t waste anymore time!”
Lynette gravely lifted the white cloth and spread it on the moss. There lay the neat little waxed-paper packages as she had placed them, but the glory had gone out of them somehow. She heard Dana saying funny things and praising and exclaiming, but it did not seem to mean anything to her. She couldn’t quite understand why. Was she such a silly, selfish girl that she had to hang on to a piece of a day when somebody else needed it? Of course Dana must go after his aunt’s company, and of course she must not let him see that she was disappointed. What was an hour to two more or less out of a day when it was all to be theirs by and by? What would it matter if they did go down a little earlier than they had planned? Dana hated it, of course, as much as she did. And he was coming to dinner. It wouldn’t be but a few minutes they would be separated.
She looked up with a smile.
“Well, never mind,” she said with a sigh that she tried to turn into cheerfulness. “It won’t take you but a few minutes, and you’ll come right back to the house after you have got them, won’t you? You know you are to take dinner at our house tonight. You remember I invited you four years ago, don’t you?”
“Am I? Why, sure, you did, didn’t you, Lynn? How you keep little details in your mind, don’t you? That’s going to be a great asset in a minister’s wife. Lynn, I can see you’re going to be a great help to me.”
“It’s what I want to be,” she breathed almost inaudibly, as if she were registering a long-contemplated vow. “I haven’t forgotten that my own father was a minister, you know, too.”
“Why, so he was!” said Dana taking a great bite out of his chicken sandwich. “We’ll be quite following in the way of tradition, won’t we? Only I don’t intend that you shall be ridden to death by any congregation. It isn’t the fashion now for the minister’s wife to have to be the slave to the church. They don’t even make calls on anybody except the ones they want for close friends. We’ll see something of society, sweetheart, and go to some good concerts and maybe get a trip abroad now and then. You don’t realize what great things we’re coming into. You won’t know yourself five years from now. I’m not going to have you all worn out carrying soup to the sick and comforting the brokenhearted and running mite societies. You’re mine, you know. I shall need all the comforting you’ll have time to give, and we’ll have a maid to make the soup and a deaconess to visit the parishioners.”
“But I should love to do that work, Dana. Don’t talk that way. I’ve always said if I had been a man I would have been a minister.”
“Well, you’re not a man, thank fortune, Lynn, and I don’t approve of women ministers, so you’ll have to be content to minister to my wants. Come, don’t let’s quarrel. Is that a cup custard that I see? Mother Brooke’s cup custard as I live! What a feast! Lynn, was there ever a day so good as this one?”
Lynette tried to smile, handed out the wonders of the lunch basket bit by bit, ate scarcely anything herself, and wondered what had gone wrong with her day. What did this vague uneasiness in her heart mean? Of course Dana was more or less joking, as he always did, and all this talk meant nothing at all. Didn’t she know him of old? He was earnestness itself, and this was only a glorified way of trying to show her he was going to take special care of her.
Yet