The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
John Herrin Macraven, for the first time since his flight from Amboro, felt morose and depressed and nervous. He sat up in bed and carefully felt his pulse, but could detect no symptom of physiological disturbance.
He knew it was something of the mind, and not of the body, for half an hour later, when Sybil caroled her morning call from the garden under his window, he resentfully slammed the heavy wooden shutters.
“Hoity-toity!” he heard the surprised girl cry aloud, at that unexpected sign of temper. But she went on singing, as artlessly as ever.
The shutters of the second window were straightway slammed to, with even greater vigor.
“Brute!” said the girl, and there was no more singing.
It was not until he had emerged from his shadowy room into the clear white sunlight of the early morning, and. was pacing the deserted verandas and the lonely garden parterre, that the enormity of his offense, the sheer barbarity of his mood, came home to him. The more he cogitated over his pettishness, his miserable moment of pique, the more he resolved to make amends. His inward distress was so great, in fact, that the mere thought of break- fast suddenly became a mockery. He started off, without his hat, in resolute search of Sybil.
He wandered off down through the orchard, listlessly. From there he went on to the east meadow, and then out past the grape rows to the walnut grove. The very fields seemed empty and unattractive. The birds were singing, but he did not hear them, The flowers were as fresh and abundant about him as ever, the skies were as blue above him, but he did not observe them.
He stopped in the lane before a glowing cluster of brier roses, and an inspiration came to him. What could be more significant than a peace offering of these pale and delicate blossoms, still wet and sparkling with the morning's dew? So with great care and industry he cut and gathered an armful of the pink flowers, knotting the thorny stems together with a slender willow wand. Then he crept furtively back through the garden, skirting the front of the house and slipping in between hedges and bushes until he came under an open window that he knew to be Sybil's. As he listened, smiling at the thought of his happy subterfuge, he could even catch the sound of her soft movements about the room above him. He looked carefully around, to see that he was unobserved. Then he crept still closer to the window and flung the great armful of flowers into the room. If she acknowledged the gift, he would know that he was forgiven, that his ungraciousness of the past was forgotten.
Then he fell back quickly, for the voice that he heard was not the light and silvery voice of Sybil, but the measured tones of her father, giving utterance to sudden and easily discernible annoyance.
“I'd be vastly obliged, Sybil, if you'd shake the water out of this rubbish before flinging it into my trunkful of manuscripts!”
The young professor drew back. He would have turned and fled, incontinently, but it was already too late. His old-time colleague was looking down at him, with wide and astounded eyes, from the square of the open window.
“What in the name of—of science do you mean, Macraven, by slinging these confounded rosebushes at me?” And he held up before the abashed peace-maker the armful of brier roses so carefully tied with the willow wand.
The younger man continued to gaze absently at his fingers, filled with minute thorns.
“I assume this floral contribution was intended for me?”
“Er—yes, of course! I—I thought that”
The older man, still puzzled and impatient, waited for him to proceed.
“I take it they were intended rather to cheer me on my journey than for any immediate botanical examination?” mildly inquired Doctor Shotwell, turning over the huge nosegay.
“Yes—that's it!” agreed the man beneath the window, mopping his brow.
He waited for something further to be said before beating a retreat. As no word came from the window, he turned about, thrust his hands deep in his trousers pockets, and with melancholy aimlessness and the hollow mockery of a whistle, wandered off into the garden. Once out of sight of the house, however, his entire demeanor changed. He clenched his jaw and, smiting the hollow of his left hand with the tightly closed fingers of his right, he emitted one audible and eloquent monosyllable of disgust.
Macraven had once looked forward with a vague dread and uneasiness to the hour of Doctor Shotwell's departure. When that hour actually arrived, however, the younger man, with still some shred of his old-time and innate scrupulosity of thought and deed, felt sadly disturbed at his absence of regret. There were reasons for this, he suspected, but those reasons were of such a nature that he did not care to drag them into the light. Life was short, he told himself, and whatever it cost, he was going to have his day. And as he repeated that ancient and hedonistic phrase, he began to gaze absently about the countryside, as if in search of something he could not clearly define.
It was Terence, the gardener, back from the railway station, who told the professor that Sybil would be found in the strawberry patch.
The disconsolate scientist cleared the orchard fence at one lithe bound, crossed a field of clover with long strides, and caught sight of Sybil in the sun-bathed distance, a soft splash of pink against the dark green of the strawberry leaves. She was kneeling between the wide rows, and the broad milk pan into which she was putting the fruit shimmered with the refracted sunlight.
He waved to her blithely from the fence top, and then as blithely called to her. She seemed neither to see nor to hear him, so engrossed was she in her berry picking. He came to a stop within six feet of where she knelt. He remembered then that she had been crying, that a paroxysm of weeping had shaken her slender body as she had clung to her father and said good-by to him. Even while inwardly remarking that tears seemed to be the final sedative in the feminine pharmacopœia, the younger man of science had instinctively backed away from that scene, not a little affected by the sudden discovery of some deeper current of feeling beyond the rippling shallows of adolescent light-heartedness.
Yet already her tears were forgotten, it seemed, as she half turned and studied the silent figure in black with covert side glances from under the wide rim of her pink sunbonnet.
“Good morning!” she said at last, quite meekly.
“Good morning, Miss Sybil,” returned the humbled man of learning.
Sybil, looking up from under the brim of her sunbonnet, saw that his ill temper was as much a thing of the past as her own tears. So she turned to him, with a sudden little outthrust of her berry-stained hand.
“I'm sorry!” she said.
Something in the wistfulness of her glance, in the plaintiveness of her voice, smote him to the heart.
“Don't!” he implored, with an involuntary and quite ridiculous swallowing motion of the throat, as if he had discovered a gland that did not belong there.
Sybil looked on her work and saw that it was good.
“Aren't you sorry, too?” she asked, as she picked a casual berry or two.
The young professor got down on his knees beside her. He poked about under the dark-green leaves, both as an excuse for the attitude and as an effort to cover his sudden confusion.
“Not the green ones, please!” said Sybil softly, giving him her eyes.
He took her hand, her sun-browned, timorous little hand, and held it in his.
“I am sorry!” he said, with a gulp. And then, as if he had just realized the terrible dimensions of his outrage, he dropped the hand and fell to picking strawberries, grimly and feverishly.
Sybil sighed. Then she sat up and, crushing a great overripe scarlet berry between her scarlet lips, studied her companion's solemn face.
“How could you?” she reproved mournfully. “You—you might have been kind to me—until Anne came, at least!”
He began to look very miserable, and very guilty. He wondered to which that reproof applied—to the slamming of a wooden shutter or to the holding of a berry-stained hand.
“It's so Why, I'm blushing!” said Sybil.
The young scientist looked so long for the blush that she had nothing to do but hang her head before the directness of his gaze.
“I wonder why it was?” she asked dreamily, toying with a strawberry leaf.
“You wonder why you blush?” interrogated the professor.
Sybil nodded her head and moved the heaping milk pan farther down the row.
“Why, a blush is nothing more than a sudden suffusion of the facial veins due to momentary paralysis of the vaso-constrictor nerves. Personally, I reject Darwin's theory that a person who thinks, for instance, others are looking at her directs her attention to her own face, resulting in a flow of blood toward that part.”
“Oh!” said Sybil.
“My own theory of this most interesting of all organic and functional manifestations which accompany the simple emotions is that the blush is a vestigial remnant of the childhood of our race. I mean, that this woman's blush of yours is inherited from the twilight of time, when woman was the hunted and man the hunter”
“But isn't that the way it still is?” interrupted the girl gently.
“Of course, my dear, of course,” pursued the man of science. “But as I was about to explain, this blush of yours is an echo of the time when to be admired or complimented was a sign of danger. It is a whisper to you from your ancestors. Primitive woman knew that the expressed approbation of the male meant prompt struggle or flight for her, more expenditure of energy, more heart action. And the heart, which is only a muscle, acquired the habit, as it were, and has not been able to shake it off. Do you follow me?”
Sybil, eating a strawberry, nodded.
“Is the heart only a muscle?” she asked dreamily. She ate another strawberry meditatively. “Perhaps that's why it can get so tired and ache so sometimes!”
The professor tried not to show his impatience at this intrusion of sentiment into the cold white light of science.
“For example,” he continued, facing her with gently tapping index fingers, “here are you and I, alone in this vast field. You comprehend that we are no longer pagan, that civilization has laid its duties and obligations on me, that you are in no danger whatever of—of unseemly advances.”
Sybil gazed at him solemnly, round-eyed and attentive, nodding her head.
“You know all this—the personal woman in you does—yet the natural, the representative woman in you still blushes. That is to say, Nature still flashes her semaphoric danger signal, although for centuries and centuries not a car wheel of emergency has moved along that track, so to speak!”
“Isn't that interesting?' said Sybil, her utterance a little thick with a half-eaten strawberry. “And, after all, there isn't the slightest danger, is there?”
Stoutly and decisively the young professor assured her that there was not, and Sybil suddenly flung away a strawberry that proved to be bitter and overripe. Then she rose to her feet.
“I'm nearly starved, and there's Hannah ringing the lunch bell for the second time. And we're going to have strawberry shortcake!”
The man of science heard the sound of the distant bell tinkling musically across the waving fields. There seemed something unspeakably pleasant in the sound.
Side by side they made their way toward the lane. At the fence Sybil turned to him.
“Will you help me over?” she asked demurely.
He went first. Then he took the pan of berries. Then he turned back for the waiting girl. As he reached up for her groping hands, the lightly balanced figure in pink swayed forward. He caught her, and her roselike raiment seemed to envelop him in a sudden odorous cloud of color, as a shower of rose leaves might muffle and hide away some solemn and age-worn tablet of an earlier century.