Aunt Rachel / A Rustic Sentimental Comedy

by David Christie Murray

Ruth's household occupations took her away a second time, and if she chose to fill a mere two or three minutes by writing a note to a young man who sat within six yards of her, nobody suspected her of being so engaged. When she came back to her visitors, Reuben would fain have made opportunity to be near her, but Rachel was unwinking in her watchfulness, and he was compelled to surrender his design. The bells began to ring for evening church, and Ruth and the womenfolk went up-stairs to make ready for out-of-doors. The quartette party sat downstairs with open windows, each of the three seniors pulling gravely at a long church-warden, and the junior pretending to look at an old-fashioned book of beauty, in which a number of impossible ladies simpered on the observer from bowers of painted foliage.

Sitting near the window with his back to the garden, and deeply absorbed in his own fancies, he found himself on a sudden impelled to turn his head, not because of any sound that reached him, but because of some curious intuition of Ruth's neighborhood to him. She was walking towards him at that moment, her footsteps falling soundlessly on the greensward, her face blushing and her eyes downcast. As she passed him and entered the house she raised her eyes for a moment, and Reuben read in them a sweet, enigmatical intelligence, and a charmed shyness so delicious that he thrilled at it from head to feet.

He longed, as any lover may imagine of him, to exchange a word with her. He was certain, but he desired to be more than certain. To know was nothing—his heart demanded to hear the good news and to be surfeited with hearing. But the small dragon still guarded his Hesperides, and on the way to church he escorted Mrs. Isaiah, a matron gaunt and stern, whose cheerful doctrine it was that any spoken word not made actually necessary by the business of life was a sin. Mrs. Isaiah's grim reticence was less of a trouble to him than it would have been under ordinary circumstances, for he had his own thoughts to think, and did not care to be drawn away from them.

At the lich-gate Aunt Rachel paused to shake hands with everybody but Ruth and Reuben.

“You had better take Manzini home to-night, Reuben,” said Ruth. She tried hard to make her voice commonplace; but to Reuben's ears there was a meaning in it, and his eyes answered to the meaning with such a flash of tenderness and assured joy that, in spite of all she could do, Ruth must needs lower her head and blush again.

Rachel's youthful eyes flashed from one to the other.

“I do not propose to attend the service this evening, Niece Ruth,” she said, a minute later, when Reuben and his confrere had entered on the cavernous darkness of the winding stairway. “I will call for you, however,” she added. “I shall be in the porch at the close of the service.”

At the first clause of this speech Ruth rejoiced, but at the second her sense of relief was spoiled.

“Very well, dear,” she answered. Aunt Rachel could not stand much longer between her and Reuben, and if a fight should have to be made it would be early enough to begin it when she had her father definitely on her side, as she would have to-morrow. So she went into church and made strenuous efforts to attend to the service and the sermon, and failed dismally, and thought herself terribly profane.

Aunt Rachel, being left alone at the church porch, turned away and walked straight back to the house she had left. The green door in the high wall needed no more than a push to open it, and Rachel entered the garden, and, walking straight to the table at which the quartette party had sat playing an hour or two earlier, laid hands upon Manzini's volume of duets for the violin. She took it by the back of the cover and gave it a shake, and out from its pages fell a neatly folded little note, addressed in her niece's hand to Mr. Reuben Gold, and sealed in bronze wax with the impress of a rose. The little old lady pounced upon it, and held it at arm's-length in both hands.