“It isn’t a crumb of what’s due him,” she pleaded. “Do you think I expect he’ll love it? No. It’s only the best I could do—the best I can do—to save him the shock of finding it all awful. Oh, I didn’t, I so don’t want him to think we are—barbarians!”
She gave it out to me from the depths of her heart, and I accepted it completely, with no reservations or comments. It was the one real passion of her life, as I’ve said. She was laying bare to me the utmost she had done and longed to do for Hurrell Oaks.
“To think that he is coming here!” she murmured. “I’ve waited and hoped so to see him—only to see him—it’s about the most I’ve ever wanted. And it’s going to happen, dear, in my own little rooms. He is coming to me! Oh, you can’t know what he’s meant to me in all the years—how I’ve studied and striven to learn to be worthy of him! All—the little all I’ve got—I owe to him—everything. He’s done more than anybody, alive or dead, to teach me to be interested in life—to make me happy.”
She threw her long arms around my shoulders and pressed me to her, and kissed me on the forehead. The chapel clock struck ten.
“You’ll come, too, won’t you?” she asked, stepping back away from me in sudden cheerfulness. “For I want you to see how wonderful he will be.”
She put her arms about me once more, and went with me to the door when I left. In her forgetfulness of all forms and codes she had become a perfect chatelaine. She opened the door almost reluctantly, and stepped out on to the meager landing, and stood there waving her hand and calling out after me until I had got well down the narrow staircase.
The day dawned at last. The hour had been set at five o’clock, as Miss Haviland’s Shakespeare course wasn’t over until three-thirty, and the faculty hadn’t seen fit, after “mature consideration,” to give her pupils a holiday. But the elect of Newfair were talking about the event, and discussing what to wear, and whether they ought to arrive on the dot of five or a few minutes after, or if they wouldn’t be surer of seeing him “at his best” by coming a few minutes before.
I met Professor Norton again in the park that morning.
“All ready for this afternoon?” I asked him.
His lips went tight together, and quivered in and out over his small round beard as he tried to face me. And then he looked down away, and began digging another hole in the gravel walk with the broad toe of his congress boot. He shot a glance at me, in a moment, and gazed off at the falling leaves.