A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

Thereafter, a headlong chase together across Europe in quest of their separate parties. A growing intimacy—"You must let me be of any assistance I can on your journey," the boy had remarked in his gentle courtly manner. He was not more than twenty-four; and good to look upon, with his wavy black hair and pleading dark eyes; eyes that were the only contradiction in a face compounded of strong curves, firm jaw and determined mouth and outjutting squarely-formed eyebrows.... Kathleen smiled tenderly enough at memory of his straight young comeliness. And was it incapacity or merely laziness on his part which had caused all the practical management of that fantastic continental scamper to lapse into her hands? management of times and trains and meals and foreign money and luggage at the Customs?... But she was accustomed to leadership, and she found a rare sweetness in Gareth's admiration of her competence; admiration which he mingled with an old-world romantic deference to a certain element of innocent and unprotected maidenhood which his upbringing seemed to take for granted even in a schoolmistress in her twenty-seventh year.

Twenty-seven!—and this was still the period of the late eighteen-nineties, when girlhood ended abruptly at thirty; when middle-age was supposed to begin at forty; and the intervening years were for the unmarried to learn their lesson of quiet resignation. Twenty-seven!—Kathleen was clutching hot-fingered at the moments, lest she should be left with empty hands. And the days ate at the years ... and she was going abroad in the company of nine females and the spirit of discontent.

... Gradually, a fretful eagerness to join up with her party, merged into a mischievous eagerness to avoid doing so; to prolong a little while, though by cheating and stealth, the charm of travelling a woman with a man by her side, as nature and tradition demanded. Folly, perhaps; but the sort of folly of which a girl—a very young and silly girl—would be capable.... As proof of her own capacity for such youth and folly, Kathleen welcomed the impulse; encouraged it. And then, just as it seemed impossible to stave off any longer the encounter with duty and discipline, fate had aided her with a genuine accident by which they had been shoved late on a rain-misted evening into the wrong train at the little Alpine station, and had been carried off to Alpenruh, instead of to Lauterbrunnen in the opposite direction; and had been forced to spend the night at the gold-brown châlet hotel. And the next morning was washed in vivid blue and sunshine; the snowy mountain peaks called for repetition of the thunderous saga of their names: Schreckhorn, Faulhorn, Wetterhorn, Finsteraarhorn!... And the tinkle of ascending cowbells among the mountains, duetted with the musical plash of cascade and rivulet; the mules champed and flicked their tails in the winding village street; the guides sat comfortably astride of the wall, and surveyed the round rickety tables outside the cafés, the bundles of walking-sticks and chamois-heads so prodigally displayed for sale; the pines wafted their resinous fragrance through the green-shuttered windows of the hotel; and down the polished wooden stairs, Gareth was awaiting her, and clear yellow honey for breakfast.... It was not a morning even to think of Fräulein Gerhardt and Mademoiselle Lefranc, and Elsie and Gwendolen and Kitty and Beatrice and Dora and Flo and Mary, doubtless angrily bewildered at this desertion of the English history and arithmetic teacher.

But Gareth had pleaded: "Let us stay here—just for to-day...."

Presently he confessed that on the latter part of their journey he had been taking the utmost care to avoid catching up with the Society of Young Botanists. Once he had even caught sight of them....

"I couldn't bear to end our good time. Can you forgive me for dragging you into this?"

Kathleen smiled—but made no counter confession. She let him think he was responsible for their daring escapade, because she was twenty-seven, and he twenty-four, and it gave him a fearful pleasure to think so.

Thus the affair had begun. Was she wrong in letting it take its course? Plenty of leisure now to regret, if regret were to be her portion.

No.... She was glad they had lingered on at Alpenruh; even when the brilliant fever of her youth at its zenith, the flame of reds and browns which she had inherited from an Indian grandmother, from whom had also been bequeathed her noiseless walk and the streak of buried fierceness in her nature, even when all this had rushed Gareth past all dreaming chivalry to a passion of strictly chivalrous adoration—even then she did not regret, in retrospect, having provided herself with this fortified memory against all future bitterness of self-reproach for wasting the years.

She did not for a second doubt that the episode was definitely at an end, and laid aside. Certainly, at parting, Gareth's hand had sought to detain hers in a lingering clasp; but beyond the actual "Good-bye, Kathleen," he had not put into words any desire to prolong the play after the curtain had fallen. Nor had she known till the present, how serenely one can dwell in the mellow afterglow of happiness, though summer be drawing to its end in the railinged squares of North Kensington.