"I warned you—if you listened to me," I reminded her.
"Oh, I've not been listening—only thinking."
"Of course, and you were disbelieving. It's high time you put us ashore. I want to believe, and I want not to be drowned. So does Jim,—both of 'em."
She pointed the boat to our landing, and as she leaned her narrow shoulders far back she shot me; one swift look. But I could see much farther into the water that floated us.
[CHAPTER XXV]
THE CASE OF FATTY BUDLOW
Lest Miss Katharine Lansdale seem unduly formidable, I should, perhaps, say that I appeared to be alone in finding her so. Little Arcadians of my own sex younger than myself—and, if I may suggest it, less discerning—were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw. Miss Lansdale's mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets. But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country. Socially and industrially, one might say, she did not fit the scheme of things as the town had been taught to conceive it. Whereas, her daughter was a person readily to be understood in all parts of the world where men have eyes—as well by the homekeeping as by the travelled. Eustace Eubanks, more or less a man of the world by virtue of that adventurous trip to the Holy Land, understood her at one glance, as did Arthur Updyke, who had fared abroad to the college of pharmacy and knew things. But she was also lucid as crystal to G. Brown and Creston Fancett, whose knowledge of the outside world was somewhat affected by their experience of it, which was nothing. To all seven of the ages was this woman comprehensible. Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in the beef under his hand had been passed.
In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously—to borrow a phrase from the Argus—"by each and all who had the good fortune to be present," for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times. She was incontestably feminine. She gave the woman-call. That she seemed to give it against her wish,—without intention,—that I was alone in detecting this, were trifles beside the point. Masculine Little Arcady cared not that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit—cared naught for this so long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call in its true note wheresoever she fared.
And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to masculine Little Arcady—with one negligible exception—she seemed to try perversely not to be so. She was amazingly gracious to it—still with one exception. She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth. She affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to please. She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue of romance.
It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.