His own earnest desire to possess her for himself, to compel her wayward and tantalizing spirit to acknowledge his mastery had increased, and like most young men in similar relations to the unknown quantity of susceptibility in a popular young woman’s heart his anxiety grew with every lessening minute between the present and the moment of confession. But at any rate Leacraft felt no indecision. Come what might he had no misgivings about his own feelings, and lingered, with no trepidation, over the thought of asking Miss Garrett to marry him. Defeat was preferable to the hardship of doubt. He would be less miserable after rejection, if rejection it was, than he was now; tormented with an immeasurable uncertainty. And his English heaviness, that semi-sepulchral seriousness which by some amusing compensation in the gifts of Nature is mingled with the very substantial merits of these people, induced a rather grim sadness in his mind, and he reached the door of 72 Monument Square, Baltimore, with no actual palpitation, but with a strained sense of the importance of his own fate which made him grave.
Leacraft had many personal merits. He had an excellent mind, a reasonably fearless heart, a sense of justice, itself the best gift of God to man, and a face, which if not distinguished by remarkable beauty became, under the excitement of feeling, and in the more propitious circumstances of good health, attractive, from a manly comeliness, not handsome perhaps, but certainly not commonplace. And he had physique. He was tall and strong, and his strength acknowledged obedience to an intelligence which made it formidable.
The door of the quiet house before which he stood, opened and there—Leacraft almost stumbled into unconsciousness—as if expecting him, as if flying on the wings of—if not Love, something else uncommonly pleasant—as if impatient to cross the laggard moments which separated them—was Sally Garrett.
It would be difficult to reproduce in words this difficult and puzzling young lady; difficult to impart by any means less effective than painting or have proven ineffective, unless somehow helped out by personal acquaintanceship—the impression which gave both to her active admirers, and to those who, for reasons best known to themselves, had tried to forget her charms. Sally was decidedly pretty, she readily, under the phases of excitement and gayety moved upward into the realms of beauty. She was fair, not large, delicately modelled, with perniciously accomplished eyes that looked out from beneath the pencilled eye-brows, and under their long lashes, with all kinds of provocative invitations, that were no sooner accepted than their desperate little giver revoked them with derision and anger.
Her lips, of course met the most scrupulous requirements of the critic, and her teeth were as fatally perfect. In coloring she furnished an example of protean adaptibility. The emblems of fury were seen in her flushed cheeks, and the tokens of contrition in the same when they grew pale with grief. This was the secret of her compelling art. She bowed to all emotions, and as they controlled her they set upon her face the evidence of their presence, refined by the resistance of a nature which abhorred wrong feelings, improved by the welcome of a spirit which was magnanimous and sympathetic. No wonder that Leacraft loved her. No wonder that a bewildered lot of other young men were in a similar predicament.
I presume at this point I owe some deference to feminine importunity. How was Sally dressed? Well; Sally had good taste, perhaps a trifle insubordinate by nature, but a rigorous subjection to good social usage had made it fairly unimpeachable. At that particular moment in the afternoon of May 27th, 1909, after his extrication from the subterranean embraces of the Baltimore and Ohio tunnel, and an uninspired walk along Charles street, Sally to Leacraft’s eyes presented the acme of sartorial perfection. She wore a white lisseree gown in which were inwoven threads of gray which gave it “atmosphere,” a kind of filmyness quite indescribable, but very inviting—above that, a waist of almost the same color, without the gray threads, and fitting tightly at the wrists with faintly voluminous sleeves—a stock of daffodill yellow encircled by an aqua-marine necklace, and in her clustering golden brown cascades of hair, rushed up into a chaste confinement between pearl-starred combs—she had thrust an amethyst aigrette. It was a willful thought, a vagary of sheer carelessness. But it looked well, and—Leacraft might have danced a jig (if he knew how) of pure ecstacy; and if his impurturbable nature would have permitted so gross a jest—it was one Leacraft had himself given her only last Christmas. You can see or infer ladies that your attractive sister, given, as I have tried to do, her natural adaptibility for embellishment, must have looked more than pleasing, that to a young man approaching her with idolatry in his heart and prayers on his lips she must have looked very nearly like the embodyment of the feminine ideal, like that inscrutable loveliness which first wins from a man his careless notice, and the next moment has him chained to its feet in servitude.
Well; such were the circumstances, and Leacraft hastily removing his hat looked with all his eyes at the fair vision, and found himself embarrassed in speaking his formal salutation:
“How do you do, Miss Garrett?” “Why, Mr. Leacraft,” replied the arch tormenter; “I thought it was Ned. He has just gone to get our tickets for to-morrow. And you, Mr. Leacraft, go with us? You will see our great battle field and hear our President. I’m sure you will find both wonderful. But come in, Mr. Leacraft.”
The vision with intoxicating grace swung back the door and preceded the tongue-tied suitor to the parlor. Mr. Leacraft left his hat and valise in the hall, and followed. Another instant, they were both seated in the deep room from whose walls the portraits of ancient and meagre, or stately and peptic Garretts, looked down upon them, and in looking were amused or distressed, according to their nature, at the display of modern elegance, helped out by a tasteful condescension to antiquities and heirlooms.
The next moment was successfully engaged in greeting Mrs. Garrett, the mother of the vision, a dignified and well preserved lady, who honored all her children’s friends with motherly hospitality, but resented mentally all masculine strategy, whose ulterior aims were the destruction of her daughter’s peace of mind. Her devotion to her daughter was itself part of a devotion which made every thing which bore the Garrett name sacred in her eyes, and which reflected a family pride, unmitigating in its self-exaction, unrelenting in its engrossing enmity to all that offended it.