The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
It was with a disturbing sense of disappointment, hard to fight down, that Macraven learned on arising the next morning that the three younger people had been out since six, riding cross-country. By the time he had finished his late and solitary breakfast, the riders were back; and by the time he had reached the veranda, Sybil and Anne were engaged in an impromptu steeplechase, vying with each other in making their ponies jump a high-barred wooden bench on the lawn. Dickie Sewell, who was acting as judge, soon grew tired of his silent and passive rôle.
“I say, Sybil,” Macraven heard him half seriously, half tauntingly call across the lawn, “hadn't you better be skipping in and finishing up that poetry of yours?”
“Oh, mush!” answered Sybil, with her hair streaming, as her pony took the bench back with a click of his forefeet on the wooden bar. “What's the use of poetry. when there's a man around?” And she had the audacity, even before Anne, to blow a light and artless kiss from the palm of her hand to Master Richard Sewell.
It was some time before Anne had changed and appeared before Macraven in an Irish linen waist and a white duck skirt.
“I didn't let them wake you,” she said. “I knew you'd rather get two hours of good sleep, instead of risking your neck over rail fences.”
She was quite mistaken in this; but instead of putting her right, he motioned her in silence into the library.
“What now, O King of Knowledge?” she asked, with a schoolgirl curtsy before him.
But something in the solemnity of his face, as she confronted him in the sober half lights of the great crimson-curtained room, startled her.
“What has happened?” she demanded.
Macraven, pacing the carpet, came to a stop.
“How well do you know young Sewell?” he asked.
“Why, I've known Dickie for years,” she answered, puzzled.
“Then will you tell me this—is he an honorable man?”
Anne laughed.
“I've never thought of Dickie as a man,” she replied. She was still studying her companion with perplexed eyes. “Why, what is it?”
“It's this—should Sewell and Sybil be allowed together?”
Anne sat down, a little relieved.
“Why not?” she said.
“That is not an answer,” he insisted.
“Dickie is a nice boy,” she murmured. “Of course he's a little young and frivolous from—from our standpoint. He may still be a little dandified, and think more about his clothes and his neckties than about his career. “But I think he's honorable, and honest, too.”
The professor of anthropology was glad that fate had made it impossible for him to wear anything but his customary suit of black that morning. He saw that there was a serious duty confronting him.
“But Sybil is so young,” he said gravely. “She is so—so impressionable and impulsive and ingenuous and artless!”
“Is she so ingenuous and artless?” asked Anne.
Macraven “studied her face with unalleviated solemnity. He was a little disappointed in Anne, at such a question.
“Can't you see what a child she is—a mere bundle of wayward whims and impulses and fancies?” he went on, however. “She's as innocent and unsophisticated as a flower!”
“Of course,” admitted Anne, folding her hands.
“And it seems to me that it's our duty to protect her from the dangers of a life she can't know anything about. We're older and wiser than she is”—Anne was smiling down at the toes of her tiny canvas shoes—“and we obviously would be held responsible for any foolish ideas she might get into her head, any romantic notions about—about”
“About Dickie,” prompted Anne.
“Precisely!” and the professor started pacing the carpet once more. When he spoke again, he was facing the window. “Is Sybil in love with this young man?”
“They're out in the sheep pasture gathering puffballs now!” admitted Anne, casually and quite irrelevantly.
Something that was very much like a stab of sudden pain shot through the man at the window. But there was no place for the roses of regret on the hard and narrow path of duty that he saw before him.
“Are they in love?” he reiterated.
“Why come to me,” asked Anne, with just a touch of mockery in her voice, “why come to me, when you're an authority on such things?”
“Then you refuse to help me?” demanded the other, a little indignantly.
“It is rather solemn, isn't it?” admitted Anne. “But, after all, what can we do?”
“What can we do? We can at least keep them apart—keep the child out of harm's way—until we know just what the situation is!”
“We might incarcerate Dickie in the corncrib, and poke his meals in to him through the cracks,” suggested Anne.
“I fail to see the humor in this situation,” said the man of science, wheeling angrily on her. “It's not a time for joking! I repeat that something must be done, if what I suspect is true. All I now ask for is a suspension of activities, a separation of the two, until I can complete my—my observations. That, at least, is reasonable.”
“Did you bring your microscopes up with you?” asked Anne, but so quietly that it did not reach the professor. Being wise in her generation, she relented and did not repeat the question.
“Can't you suggest anything?” asked Macraven more humbly.
Anne sat wrapped in thought. Just what she was thinking, however, she did not divulge. At last she looked up.
“Dickie has to go for the trunks this afternoon—that will take hours and hours. Let me go with Dickie.”
“And Sybil?”
“Sybil will be left here with you, where she'll be safe. Perhaps you'll be able to reason her out of it. I can imagine, of course, just how you must feel about it all. Sybil is warm-blooded and impulsive and unconventional—and she's better with you, anyway!”
“But—er—isn't this rather hard on you—that long drive through the heat?”
“Not a bit! I'll enjoy every moment of it. And Dickie is really good company, you know—in his lucid intervals!”
He looked at Anne with more conscious and critical eyes. He started to speak, but on second thoughts decided to remain silent.
“You won't be too hard on Sybil?” pleaded Anne humbly, as she shook out her skirts and turned to go.
He always nursed a vague distrust of Anne in her moments of undue meekness, so he remained silent and merely bowed.
“Then I'm going out to meet the young folks,” she said, from the door.
And as Macraven flung open the library window, he could hear the sound of their merry laughter, the call of their light and careless voices, across the many-colored garden and the green spaces of lawn.
He stood listening for a moment or two, and then he closed the window again with just the ghost of a sigh.