Chapter XII: Her Happiest Hour

THUS Cornelia saved herself from replying to intrusive questions about where she was going, and why; but in her impulsive haste she had forgotten something. Upon her desk, upstairs, lay her heart’s secret, her mountain, all in loose sheets of paper. Beside the desk was an open window;—she had left the door open, too, and this was a breezy day. Such was instantly her condition at sight of Mr. Bromley; and with no thought but to have more sight of him, she flitted across the back yard and through an alley gate, leaving calamity brooding behind her.

Mr. Bromley, returning homeward with a book under his arm, after his morning’s browsing in the suburban public library, was not surprised to see one of his pupils emerge from a cross-street before him, since this was the neighbourhood in which most of the school’s day scholars lived; but he wondered why Cornelia Cromwell was so deeply preoccupied. She seemed to look toward him, though vaguely, and he lifted his hand to his hat; but before he could complete his salutation she looked away, apparently unconscious of him. She was walking in a rather elderly manner, with her head inclined forward and her hands meditatively clasped behind her—the right posture for an engrossed statesman philosopher, but not frequently expected of sixteen. At the corner she turned northward upon the boulevard sidewalk, Mr. Bromley’s own direction, and went pensively on before him, some thirty yards or so in advance.

His gait was slow, for that was his thoughtful habit; and the distance between them, like Cornelia’s attitude, remained unvaried until the next cross-street was reached. Here, without altering that scholarly attitude of hers by a hair’s-breadth, she walked straight into what was the proper path and right-of-way demanded by an oncoming uproarious taxicab.

With his hoarse warning signal and with his own hoarse voice, the driver raved; she heeded him not. So, taking his life in his hands, he saved her by charging into the curbstone. The wheels providentially mounted and bore him fairly upon the sidewalk;—he crashed down again to the pavement of the boulevard and roared onward, biblically oratorical about women, let hear him who would.

Mr. Bromley rushed forward and seized Cornelia’s arm. “Miss Cromwell!”

She looked up, smiling absently. “Do you think there was any danger?” she asked. “I didn’t notice.”

“Good gracious!” he cried. “Don’t you know you can’t cross streets _any_where, these days, without looking to see what’s coming? What was the matter with you?”

“The matter?” she repeated, vaguely, as she began to walk onward with him. “Why, nothing.”

“I mean: What on earth were you thinking of to step right in front of a——”

“Oh, that? Yes,” she said, gently. “I see what you mean now, Mr. Bromley. I was thinking about life.”

“You were, indeed?”

“And books,” she added.

“Well, I wouldn’t!” he said, for he had long since forgotten his advice to her in the matter. “If I were you, I’d put my mind more upon street crossings, especially during pedestrian excursions.”

She accepted the reproof meekly, not replying, and for some moments walked beside him in silence. Then she said gravely: “I believe I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”

“What?”

She repeated it: “I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t do anything of the kind.”

“You did, Mr. Bromley.”

“I certainly did not,” he said, astonished that she seemed genuinely to believe such a thing. “The taxicab was banging around all over the sidewalk by the time I reached you.”

“No,” she insisted. “I heard you call my name, and then you took hold of me. If you hadn’t, I’d have gone straight on.”

“Well, you’d have been all right to go straight on, because by that time the taxicab was twenty or thirty feet away.”

“No, I’d have been killed,” she said. “If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have been killed absolutely.”

He stared at her, perplexed, though he knew that people often retain but a confused recollection of exciting moments, even immediately after those moments have passed. Then, with this thought in his mind, he was a little surprised to find that she simultaneously had it in her mind, too.

“Maybe you were a little excited to see a person in danger,” she said. “It might have got you mixed up or something. When things happen so quickly, it’s hard to remember exactly what _did_ happen. You may not know it, but you saved my life, Mr. Bromley.”

He laughed. “I didn’t; but if you insist on thinking so, I suppose there’s no harm.”

This seemed to content her; she nodded her head, smiled sunnily, then became grave again. “And to think you’d risk your own life to save—even mine!” she murmured.

“That’s merely absurd, Miss Cromwell. By not the remotest possibility could it be conceived that I placed myself in any jeopardy whatever.”

“Well”——she returned, indefinitely, but seemed to reserve the right to maintain her own conviction in the matter. “I think ‘jeopardy’ is a beautiful word, Mr. Bromley,” she added, after a moment’s silence. “I mean, whether you admit you were in jeopardy or not, it’s a word I think ought to be used oftener because it’s got such a distinguished kind of sound.” She repeated it softly, to herself. “Jeopardy.” Then, in a somewhat louder voice, but as if merely offering a sample sentence in which this excellent word appeared to literary advantage, she murmured: “He placed his life in jeopardy—for me.”

“I didn’t!” her companion said, sharply. “The word is extremely inappropriate in any such connection.”

“I just used it to see how it would sound,” Cornelia explained. “I mean, whether you did get in jeopardy or anything, or not, on my account, Mr. Bromley, I was just seeing how it would sound if I said it. I mean, like this.” And she began to repeat, “He placed his life in jeopardy——”

“Please oblige me,” Mr. Bromley interrupted. “Don’t say it again.”

His tone was brusque, and she looked up inquiringly to find him frowning with annoyance. She decided to change the subject.

“Do you care much for Christmas, Mr. Bromley?” she asked, in the key of polite small talk. “It strikes me as terribly tiresome, myself. I’m positively looking forward to the next school term.”

“Are you?”

“Yes—and oh! there was something I thought of the other day I wanted to ask you. Are you a Republican or a Democrat, Mr. Bromley?”

“Neither.”

“That’s so much more distinguished,” Cornelia said. “I mean it seems so much more distinguished not to be in politics. Do you believe in woman suffrage?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” she said, and made a serious decision instantly. “I’m never going to vote, myself. The more I think about books and life, Mr. Bromley, the less I care about—about”—she hesitated, having begun the sentence without foreseeing its conclusion—“well, about things in general and everything,” she finally added.

The gentleman beside her looked puzzled; but Cornelia was unaware of the sweeping vagueness of her remark. She was not in a condition to take note of such details, her consciousness being too preoccupied with the fact that she was walking with him who dwelt upon the summit of her mountain—walking with him and maintaining a conversation with him upon an intellectual footing, so to speak. And as she felt that a special elegance was demanded by the occasion, she made her voice a little artificial and obliterated our alphabet’s least fashionable consonant from her enunciation entirely.

She waved a pretty little ungloved hand in a gesture of airy languor. “Most things seem such a baw, don’t you think?” she said.

“Bore?” he inquired, correctly interpreting her effort. “They certainly shouldn’t seem so to you, at your age.”

“My _age_?” she echoed, and gave forth an affected little scream. “Don’t talk to me about my _age_! Why, half the time I feel I’m at least a hundred.”

Her companion’s reception of the information was somewhat dry. “Not much _more_, I trust,” he said, and looked hopefully forward into the distance as if to some goal or terminus of this excursion.

But Cornelia’s exaltation was too high for her to be aware of any slight appearances that might lower it. “Indeed I do,” she insisted. “Why, when I look at the classes of younger girls that have come into the school in the years and years I’ve been there, I feel a thousand. I do, positively, I do assure you.”

From beneath a plaintive brow, Mr. Bromley’s eyes continued to search the distance hopefully, and he made no response.

Then, as he still remained silent, Cornelia did what most people do when their ebulliences are received without encouraging comment—she eased herself by a series of repetitions, enthusiastic at first, but tapering in emphasis until she had settled down again into the casual. “It’s the positive fact; these younger girls _do_ make me feel a thousand—positively, I do assure you! You mayn’t believe it, but it’s the mere simple truth, I do assure you. It is, I do——” She checked herself, being about to say “I do assure you” again; and although her own ability to use the phrase charmed her, she feared that too much of it might appear to indicate a lack of versatility. She coughed delicately, as a proper bit of punctuation for the unfinished sentence;—then, as further punctuation, uttered sounds resembling a courteous kind of laughter, to signify amusement caused by her own remarks, and thus gradually reached a point where she could regard the episode as closed.

Having successfully passed this rather difficult point, she looked up at him with the air of a person suddenly overtaken by a belated thought that should have arrived earlier. “Oh, by the by,” she said, “I suppose I ought to’ve asked this sooner, but I expect I forgot it because I was a little excited about your risking your li——”

“I did nothing of the kind,” he interrupted, promptly and sharply. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, it was this, Mr. Bromley. We got to walking along together after you saved—after I nearly got run over—and I didn’t even ask you where you’re going.”

“I’m on my way to lunch at the Blue Tea Room.”

“You—you _are_?” Cornelia said in a strange tone. An impulse, rash and sudden, had affected her throat.

She had never before been quite alone with the solitary inhabitant of her mountain’s summit; she had never before walked with him. Her walking was upon air, moreover. She was self-conscious, yet had no consciousness of walking—the rather, she floated in the crystal air of great altitudes; and, rapt in the transcendent presence beside her, she became intoxicated by the experience.

Cornelia had fallen in love with Mr. Bromley sublimely, instantly, upon that day when he told her to think about books and life;—there seemed to be no other reason, though her own explanation defined him as the only man who had ever spoken to her inner self—and now that she found herself alone with him for the first time, she could not bear for that time to be brief. She was already expected at home for lunch, and she knew that her unexplained absence might cause more than mere comment in her domestic circle. Her impulse was, therefore, something more than indiscreet, taking all circumstances and the strictness of her mother into account. But the exciting moment had prevailed with Cornelia before she took anything into account.

“To lunch at the Blue Tea Room?” she cried. “Why, Mr. Bromley, so am I! That’s just where I was going. Isn’t that _queer_? Why, we can have lunch together.”

The hopeful gleam passed out of Mr. Bromley’s expression, though perhaps the bright eyes looking up at him so eagerly were able to interpret his gloom as merely the thoughtfulness habitual to a scholar. His was not a practical mind; he had no thought that Cornelia’s lunching with him might have any result save to spoil the cozy hour he had planned for himself with his book as a table companion. To him she was one of the hundred pupils at the school—a little girl who had lately developed odd mannerisms and airy affectations, for no reason except that many little girls seemed to pass through such phases—and so far as his interest in her as an individual human being was concerned, Cornelia might as well have been eight years old as sixteen. He saw nothing, except that he would have to listen to her instead of reading his book, for, since she meant to lunch at the Blue Tea Room, she would probably talk to him anyhow, whether they sat at the same table or not.

“Ah—if such be the case, very well,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Very well, Miss Cromwell.” Then he added hastily, “I mean to say”—and paused hoping to think of something that might avoid the proposed tête-à-tête; but he failed. “I mean to say—ah—if you wish, Miss Cromwell.”

“_Do_ I!” she exclaimed, breathlessly; but the radiant face she showed him only gave him the idea that she was probably excited by the prospect of waffles.

Yet, when waffles—the Blue Tea Room’s specialty—were placed, as a second course, upon the small blue-and-white painted table between her and Mr. Bromley, Cornelia showed no avidity for them. She had resumed her elegant manner, and but toyed with the food. Her elegance, indeed, was almost oppressive to her companion;—she told the blue-aproned waitress, whose cultivation was betokened by horn-rimmed spectacles, that forgetting to bring butter was a “dreadful baw.” She said “baw” as frequently as she could, in fact; and she appeared to view the people at the other tables through a frigid though invisible lorgnette.

Her disdain of them as plebeians, beings unknown and not to be known, was visible in her expression;—so much so that it made Mr. Bromley uncomfortable; and here was a small miracle in its way; for in reality she did not see the other people in the room at all distinctly. They were only blurred planes of far-away colour to her; she was but dimly aware of their outlines, and failed to recognize two of them whom she knew very well.

For Cornelia all life and light centred upon the little painted table at which she sat with Mr. Bromley. The world to her was like a shadowy room at sunset, when through a window a last shaft from the rosy sun illumines one spot alone, making it glorious, and all else dim and formless. Mr. Bromley and she sat together in this golden glow, an aura that shimmered out to nothing all round about them, so that there was no definite background; and for anything more than two or three feet away she was astigmatic.

Elation sweet as music possessed her. She was not only lunching at a restaurant with a Distinguished Man, quite as if she were a prima donna in Paris, but that Distinguished Man was Mr. Bromley—Mr. Bromley himself, pale with studious wisdom, yet manly, and incomparably more exciting than the symbol of him drawn with five lines and a dot upon her mountain. She had sometimes trembled when she looked at that emaciated symbol: What wonder could there be that she became a little too elegant, that her laughter rang a little too loudly, or that she showed herself disdainful of lowly presences in a dim background, now, when she sat facing her Ideal made actual in all his beauty?

Beauty it was, in good faith, to Cornelia, and, so far as she was concerned, Praxiteles, experimenting to improve Mr. Bromley, could only have marred him. There was gray in his hair, but it was not emphasized, since he was an ashen blond; and for Cornelia—unaware of his actual years and content to remain so—he had no age, he had only perfection. So beautiful he was in the rosy light with which she encircled him.

“Aren’t you going to eat your waffles, now you’ve got ’em?” he asked, a little querulously.

“Waffles?” she said, as if she knew of none and the word were strange to her. “Waffles?”

“Aren’t you going to eat them? I supposed that was why you came here.”

She looked down at her plate, appeared surprised to find it occupied, and uttered a courtesy laughter with such grace it seemed almost that she sang the diatonic scale. This effect was so pronounced, indeed, that several people at other tables turned—again—to look at her, and Mr. Bromley reddened. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You mean these waffles. Yes, indeed!” And here she repeated her too musical laughter, accompanying it with several excited gestures of amazement as she exclaimed, “_Imagine_ my not noticing them when they’re absolutely my favourite food! Absolutely they are, my dear man, I do assure you!”

Then, having touched a waffle with her fork, she set the fork down, placed her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and gazed upon her companion lustrously. “Mr. Bromley,” she said, “how did your father and mother happen to choose ‘Gregory’ for your first name? Were you named for somebody else, or did they just have kind of an inspiration to call you Gregory.”

“I was named for an uncle,” he replied briefly.

“How beautiful!” she murmured.

“What?”

“It’s a beautiful name,” she said, and, not changing her attitude, continued to gaze upon him.

“Why in the world don’t you eat your food?” he asked, impatiently. He had become but too well aware that Cornelia was attracting a covertly derisive attention; and he began to think her a bothersomely eccentric child. Following her noticeable elegance and her diatonic laughter, her dreamy attitude in the presence of untouched waffles was conspicuous, and he was annoyed in particular by the interest with which two occupants of a table against the opposite wall were regarding him and Cornelia.

One of these interested persons was another of his pupils, a girl of Cornelia’s age. He could not fail to note how frequently she glanced at him, and after each glance whispered seriously with her mother across their table; then both would stare surreptitiously at him and his rapt vis-à-vis. There was something like a disapproving surveillance—even something inimical—in their continuing observation, he thought; nor was he remote from the truth in this impression.

Cornelia’s schoolmate was enjoying herself, excited by what she had easily prevailed upon a nervous mother to see as a significant contretemps. Moreover, the daughter had just imparted to the mother a secret known to half the school, but not to Mrs. Cromwell.

“Crazy about him!” the schoolmate whispered. “Absolutely! She picked up the stub of his pencil and kept it, and a piece of an old broken pipe. We teased her, and she got red and ran away. She won’t speak to us for days if we say anything about him she doesn’t like. Everybody knows she’s simply frantic. Did you ever see such airs as she’s been putting on, and did you hear her calling him her ‘dear man’ and talking about ‘I do assure you’? And then looking at him like _that_—the poor smack!”

“I never in all my life saw anything like it!” the mother returned, her brow dark and her eyes wide. “She looked straight at us and never made the slightest sign when we bowed to her! The idea of as careful a woman as Mrs. Cromwell allowing her daughter to get into such a state, in the first place, is very shocking to me; and in the second, to permit her to come here, at her age, and lunch in public with a man she’s in such a state _about_—a man supposed to be her teacher and old enough to be almost her grandfather—I simply can’t imagine what she means by it.”

The schoolmate giggled. “Cornelia’s mother? Don’t you believe it. Mrs. Cromwell doesn’t know a thing about it.”

“Then she _ought_ to know, and immediately. If one of my daughters behaved like that, I should certainly be thankful to any one who informed me of it. I certainly——”

“_Look!_” the schoolmate whispered, profoundly stirred. “Look at her _now_!”

Cornelia was worth the look thus advised. Under repeated pressure to dispose of her waffles, she had made some progress with them, but now with the plate removed and a cooling sherbet substituted before her, she had resumed her rapt posture, her elbows upon the table, her chin upon her hands, her wistful bright eyes fixed upon the face of the uncomfortable gentleman opposite her.

“Was your uncle a very distinguished man, Mr. Bromley?” she asked. “I mean the one they named you ‘Gregory’ after.”

“Not in any way,” he said. He had finished his own lunch, and moved back slightly but significantly in his chair. “Hadn’t you better eat your sherbet?” he suggested. “I believe it’s about time for me to go.”

She sighed, lowered her eyes, and obediently ate the sherbet; but ate it so slowly that by the time she had finished it they were alone in the room except for a waitress, who made her own lingering conspicuous.

“Now, then,” Mr. Bromley said, briskly, “if you’ve quite concluded your——”

“But I haven’t had any coffee,” Cornelia interrupted. “I always have a small cup after lunch.”

“Does your mother——”

“Mamma?” she said, appearing greatly surprised. “Oh, dear, yes. She takes it herself.”

He resigned himself, and the waitress brought the little cup; but as Cornelia conveyed the contents to her lips entirely by means of the accompanying tiny spoon, and her care not to be injured by hot liquid was extreme, he thought that never in his life had he seen any person drink an after-dinner cup of coffee so slowly. And, all the while, Cornelia, silent, seemed to be dreamily yet completely engrossed with this long process of consumption; her lowered eyes were always upon the tiny spoon. The impatient Mr. Bromley sat and sat, and finally lost his manners so far as to begin a nervous tapping upon the rugless floor with the sole of his right shoe.

This was the oddest child in the world, he thought. A little while ago she had looked at him with so intent a curious dreaminess that she had annoyed him; now she seemed to have forgotten him in her epicurean absorption in half a gill of coffee. And so he frowned, and shifted in his chair and tapped the floor with his shoe, and did not know that the tapping had grown rhythmical. For, though her eyes were lowered and her lips were silent, Cornelia was keeping time to it with a song. Each tap of Mr. Bromley’s foot was a syllable of the song.

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me;
I count them over, every one apart——

. . . But at last her pearls were gone; the little cup was empty. “Now,” he said, “if you’ve finished, Miss Cromwell——” And he pushed back his chair decisively, rising as he did so.

Still she sat and did not look up, but with her eyes upon the empty cup, she asked: “Would you let this be my lunch, Mr. Bromley? Would you mind if I charged it to Papa?”

“Nonsense,” he said. He had already paid the waitress. “Ah—if you intend remaining here——”

“No, I’m coming,” she said, meekly. “I just——” She rose, and as she did she looked up at him radiantly, facing him. “You—you’ve been ever so nice to me, Mr. Bromley.”

Her cheeks were glowing, her lifted happy eyes were all too worshipfully eloquent; and for a moment, as the two stood there, Mr. Bromley felt a strange little embarrassment, this time not an annoyed embarrassment. Who can know what is in a young girl’s heart? Suddenly, to his own surprise, he felt a slight, inexplicable emotion;—something in Cornelia’s look pleased him and even touched him. Just for the five or six seconds that he knew this feeling, something mysterious, something charming, seemed about to happen.

“No,” he said. “It’s you who were nice to me. I—I’ve enjoyed it—truly.”

She drew a deep breath. “Have you _really_?” she cried. And with that, she turned and ran to the door, all sixteen. But, with the door open, she called back to him over her shoulder, “I’m glad it’s Friday, Mr. Bromley.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s only till Monday when school begins!”