MATCHED PEARLS Read online

  “You’re talking in an unknown tongue to me,” said Constance, staring at him again half-wistfully. “You look happy. You sound sincere, but I don’t see how you make the grade among other people if you live on such a different plane. Aren’t you terribly lonely? You don’t find other people who talk this way, do you?”

  “You’d be surprised how many there are.” He flashed at her another of his dazzling smiles that lit up his whole face. “Why, back in the city where I’ve been this last year, there were so many of them, group after group! I used to meet them at the different Bible conferences, and we always had such glorious times together. There’s no fellowship like the fellowship of those who love the Lord Jesus.”

  He said that name “the Lord Jesus” in such a tender, beautiful way that it seemed to put her afar and make her a stranger.

  “Oh, old people, I suppose,” she said half-contemptuously. “I can’t imagine young people—excuse me, I’m convinced you’re one of a kind. I’ll admit you’re interesting, but I can’t imagine a bunch of young people getting together and being interested in such things.”

  He flashed a look at her, with a slight lifting of the eyebrows, but his voice was steady, his lips were pleasant as he said, “No, they were young people. Many of them young people who were studying in one of the big Bible schools getting ready to do Christian work.”

  “Oh! Missionaries!” said Constance patronizingly. “But aren’t they usually awfully dumb and kind of frumpy?”

  “No, I didn’t find them so,” said the young man. “I’d like to take you to some of those gatherings. It would surprise you.”

  “Are you getting ready to be a missionary?” she asked him suddenly.

  “No,” he said, “I felt I could perhaps witness better at present in business. And you? Are you planning some big lifework?”

  “Me? Oh, I don’t know what I shall do. Dad’s offered me a trip to Europe next summer. All the world’s before me. I’m only planning to have a good time. You think I’m a selfish little heathen, I suppose, but I’ve been under school and college life and discipline for a long time and I want to get out from under and just go my own way.”

  “I used to think that,” said Seagrave thoughtfully, “but God showed me there was a better way.”

  “A better way?” she said.

  “Yes, just put one’s self in God’s hands and let Him have His way. I’ve had more peace and joy since I learned to do that than ever I had in all my life before. But see that plume of white smoke over there in the valley? Wouldn’t that be the morning train, and aren’t we getting rather late for our various appointments?”

  Constance looked quickly at her wristwatch.

  “Oh my goodness!” she cried and sprang to get up. “Think of my packing, not half done! However has the time flown?”

  He helped her easily to her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have been watching the time more carefully. But it’s been good to have this talk with you. I’m a stranger in town yet, you know. It was most gracious of you to come out with me.”

  “Why, it’s been beautiful!” said Constance heartily. “I didn’t dream it would be so lovely up here. And I’ve enjoyed the talk. It certainly was a unique subject. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more in harmony with the theme and the hour. I’m rather a heathen, you know, in spite of your gracious judgment of my unmodern face. But the flowers have been a wonderful sight.”

  She stooped and touched them with her fingertips and then brushed her palm lightly over the fronds of the ferns.

  “Good-bye, little flowers,” she said softly. “When I come back you’ll be gone, I suppose, but perhaps another year I’ll see you again—” Then she turned and hurried down the hill.

  The young man watched the sweetness of her face as she touched the flowers, and something very wistful came into his own eyes. He helped her carefully down the hillside till they had come to the road again, and then both fell into a quick stride, knowing that the time was short. They were silent till they came to the edge of town again, each busy with their own thoughts. Somehow they felt as if they had known one another a long time, each dreading to have this pleasant intimacy come to an end.

  Constance, as she neared her home, reflected that everybody was up now; breakfast would be almost over. She must run the gauntlet of her acquaintances who happened to be on the street, and she must meet the tantalizing questions of her brother and perhaps also of her father and mother. They would be a little hurt that she was late to breakfast on this her last morning. How crazy she had been to go off on this crazy wild-goose chase with this unique stranger.

  And yet as she looked up at him with a swift, furtive glance, there was something compelling in his gaze, something so strong and sweet and dependable about him that, in spite of herself, she had to be glad she knew him. It was nice to know there was one such man in the world. She wondered if he would stay so. If he could possibly survive the times and keep his faith.

  They had come to her father’s gate now, and she paused, unable to say the bright, flippant words that she felt would be appropriate to end such a very irregular acquaintance as this had been.

  Seagrave put out his hand.

  “I’ll thank you again for this beautiful morning,” he said with a gravely sweet look.

  Constance had a strange impulse to cry.

  “In spite of the fact that I’m only a little unsaved pagan?” she asked archly with a long sweep of her dark lashes and an upward look that she found most effective with other admirers.

  But he did not laugh away her words. He only looked long and earnestly at her.

  “I shall be praying that my Lord Jesus will meet you, somewhere, somehow!” he said gently.

  It was just at that moment when her soul was most touched that Ruddy Van swept up to the sidewalk in his new roadster and called loudly to Constance.

  “Hello, Con, got your baggage ready? I’ve come to take you to the train.”

  Constance looked up, annoyed, and Seagrave, with a courteous good-bye, marched away down the street, leaving her with a strange, unfinished feeling, as if something rather wonderful and interesting were gone out of her life.

  Chapter 4

  In the end Constance did not go until the noon train, and Ruddy Van Arden went back to his office crestfallen, for there was no way in which he could get off at noon to take the lady to the station without running actual risk of dismissal. He could not expect leave of absence twice in one day.

  So it was Frank who drove his sister to the train after all and gave her an unpleasant fifteen minutes until the train came, asking if she had remembered to pack the blue flowers from the dining room bowl, and if she didn’t want him to send them on to her afterward.

  Ordinarily Constance did not mind teasing. She wondered why she minded it so much this time. Perhaps it was that she was annoyed with herself for having gone off to the woods that morning at the beck and call of an utter stranger and thrown the whole morning out of its neat and orderly calculation. Or perhaps it was because she found herself thinking wistfully of the pleasant brown eyes and the earnest conversation. She had never met a man like this one before.

  “He’s all right, kid,” said Frank suddenly, watching his sister with approving eyes. “No kidding, he is. Bill Howarth told me last night he’s a number one. A real man. He has no end of honors from his college, both scholarly and athletic, and they say he’s a whiz at business. Only thing is, his dad lost all their money just before he died. So of course that’ll put him outta the running with you.”

  “What on earth do you mean, Frank, you crazy boy?” she asked sharply. “When did I ever act like a snob?”

  “Oh, not a snob exactly,” said Frank, staring off down the tracks at the approaching train. “But of course anybody that is willing to change religions for a string of matched pearls wouldn’t naturally be supposed to rush a fella that couldn’t support matched pearls. You’re outta his class, you know, kid. You got
ta live up to Grand’s pearls—or down to ’em, I don’t know which you’d call it. Supposed ta be up, isn’t it?”

  “Frank, you certainly are the most absurd and ridiculous boy,” said his sister, trying to laugh it off. “As if the man was anything but a pleasant chance acquaintance!”

  “Oh yeah?” remarked the implacable brother.

  But Constance’s cheeks were burning from an altogether new cause of disturbance that had suddenly entered her mind. Here she had been priding herself that she was honest anyway; she had confessed to the stranger that she had united with the church to please her grandmother. But she hadn’t said a word about the real reason of her yielding, the pearls for which she would have gone even further if need be than just standing up before a congregation and taking meaningless vows upon her lips.

  It was as if Frank’s words had torn away a pleasant garment from her and laid bare her real self, the sordid self that was willing to sacrifice intellectual standards that she had with pride set up for herself, just for a costly trinket. It was as if her conscience had suddenly stepped upon a thorn with her first step into that parlor car, and it limped all the way after the porter to her chair, pricked hard while Frank and the porter were settling her bags and putting her coat in the rack overhead, hurt even as her brother kissed her and hurried from the moving train with a nonchalant wave of his hand and a shouted promise to send the blue flowers.

  Constance settled down into her chair, got out the magazine that she had saved to read on the way, took off her gloves, watched the familiar home sights fly by her, and felt that vacation was really over and she would soon be back in the routine of college life again. Then she sat back and opened her magazine, but the thorn in her conscience continued to prick, and she knew she must give it her undivided attention once and for all and get rid of it some way. So she closed her magazine and put it down at her feet out of the way, letting her mind go back to that morning and the hillside with its carpeting of blue quivering flowers in the soft breeze. She went over again her confession. Had it really been a confession? Hadn’t it been more in the manner of a defiant statement? Hadn’t she really been trying to shock the young man out of his solemnity?

  She closed her eyes and faced this thought, seeing herself in a new light. It had been a rather despicable thing to do when she remembered his true eyes and the reverent way in which he had looked at her. Even yet the thought of the reverence he had given her made a warm glow around her heart. Most young men nowadays had anything but a reverent attitude toward girls. Maybe it was largely the girls’ fault, but—well. To her surprise she rather liked to have this man regard her that way. And she had set deliberately about trying to shatter this illusion of his! What a fool she had been. A rare thing like that!

  But yet she had not touched the crux of the matter, the real point of the thorn in her soul, which was that she had not really told him at all why she had joined the church. She had let him think that she did it to please a dear old lady whom she couldn’t bear to hurt, and in a way—at least in a material way—that was a praiseworthy thing to have done. But she didn’t really do it for her grandmother at all. Now she faced herself honestly and owned it. She had done it for the pearls. She wanted the pearls, and she didn’t want her cousin Norma to have them!

  Suddenly she was quite ashamed of herself. She wondered why it hadn’t seemed before to be rather raw in her to do that. But it hadn’t. It had only seemed a good joke. She had even appreciated the sarcasms of Frank as he jeered at her.

  But now, today, after her morning on the hillside, it all seemed different to her. Now why was that? Had that young man’s strange ideas made a difference in herself? Had she received a new vision, a kind of a glimpse of what spiritual things might really be if one paid enough attention to them? She was inclined to laugh at the idea, and yet she had to face the fact that she was actually ashamed of herself for having stood up before a congregation, beside a young man like that to whom the ceremony meant so much, and done it just for a string of pearls!

  She tried to think what his face would have looked like if she had told him about the pearls. She recalled what he had said about false vows, and her cheeks burned. She remembered the sadness of his voice, a kind of disappointment in it at what she had told him. If he had known about the pearls, she knew it would have been even keener. And his words! They would surely have been more scathing. She knew enough religious phrases to think herself of things he might have said. “You have betrayed the Lord for a string of pearls.” What was it Judas sold Christ for? Oh yes, thirty pieces of silver! And she had done the same thing for matched pearls. Perhaps she was as bad as Judas. At least Seagrave would have thought so. What right had a man to be as good as that? Self-righteous, that was what it was, to set up a standard and go around making other people feel uncomfortable because they didn’t believe in the same things! There was no sense to it. Why would she persist in thinking about that man any longer? She had nothing to do with him, would very likely never see him again. He would probably be sent off to some other city by the time she got back. People did that in business, got sent to a Western office or something. Well, she hoped she never would see him again. Prig! Going around and nosing into strangers’ business. Scraping acquaintance with a girl in church when she was uniting with a perfectly respectable church and then daring to give her flowers and leave his handkerchief—! Goodness! She had never returned that handkerchief! Where was it? Had she stuffed it into her suitcase at the last minute thinking it was something of her own, or had she left it lying on her bureau or floor for her brother to discover and send on with appropriate inscriptions of poetry or something? He was perfectly capable, of course, of doing that.

  Well, she wouldn’t return the handkerchief anyway. He would just think she wanted him to correspond if she did. She would forget it, and he could, too, or else think he had put it in his pocket and lost it. Anyway it didn’t matter what he thought. She must snap out of this. She was getting perfectly maudlin on the subject.

  She sat up with a jerk and opened her magazine, absorbing herself as well as she could in a thrilling murder and detective story, but ever in between the paragraphs would come some sentence that Seagrave had spoken that morning. Some arresting phrase that kept her wondering. Born again. That was the thing he had talked about so much. She tried to think it out. What had he said was the way to get born again? Was it just that you had to believe something? That was absurd, of course. You couldn’t believe a thing that you couldn’t believe.

  Of course he had used the illustration of riding in an airplane, but then that wasn’t quite a parallel case. One rode in planes as a matter of course. Now if some special plane had been condemned, if it had a doubt cast upon its workmanship or mechanism, she wouldn’t go in it. And that was what had happened to her spiritually. She had been to college and found out that these things he talked about were myths, fables, legends, traditions. How could one believe any more in a fable after one had been enlightened? How could he? He had been to college, too, and seemed more than commonly intelligent.

  And yet he did believe with all his soul. There was no denying that. He was utterly sincere in everything he said.

  During the whole of that five-hour journey, Constance debated with herself. She didn’t even finish the detective story. It didn’t somehow seem worthwhile. She finally laid down the magazine and closed her eyes. Too many times had a pair of brown eyes come across the page and interrupted the trend of the story. She was more interested in the stranger of the hillside than in the story.

  Then she found herself recalling every trifling word or action of her contact with the handsome stranger, from the moment when he addressed her in the church to his farewell smile and the set of his fine shoulders as he walked away, when Ruddy Van so annoyingly appeared on the scene.

  She remembered each expression of his face, each intonation of his voice; she thrilled at the memory of his handclasp and the almost reverent way in which he lifted her from the hill
side and helped her to her feet. She remembered every word he spoke. Somehow the words he had read from his little Testament had gone deep into her heart. She could not throw them off though she tried hard to do so. It was not going to be pleasant having such words clinging in her mind when she got back to college. But of course college and a normal life would drive them out again, just as college had first driven away the early teaching of her grandmother and her Sunday school teachers.

  Before her journey was over, Constance had made the incident of the stranger into a lasting memory of her life. She thought that she was going to be able to shake it off as soon as she arrived at her destination, but she found herself succumbing more and more to the memory of the man. She even allowed herself to think wistfully what it would be to have such a man for an intimate friend, perhaps the most intimate friend of her life. Of course it would be utterly unthinkable to live up to such standards as he held, but there were ways in which such a friend and companion would be wonderful. It would put living on an entirely different plane. Of course she never would be willing to pay the price. She was too fond of her world and its ways, too eager for matched pearls and the like. Yet she found herself thinking wistfully of a future in which there might appear such a person who would yet be satisfied with herself as she was.

  She was roused from her absorption by the stir of the passengers getting ready to get out, and the porter appeared to brush her shoes, take her baggage, and receive her generous tip.

  Half-reluctantly she opened her eyes and came back to her regular life again, knowing that Seagrave must henceforth have no part in her thoughts and plans. He was merely a pleasant, romantic little incident, like the flowers he had given her that were likely withered by this time and would soon be forgotten.