Cinderella of the Links

by Zona Gale

Cinderella of the Links

By ZONA GALE

ARNOLD looked hard at the little shoe.

It lay near the ninth hole, and his ball had come to rest close by the patent-leather tip. It was not at all a typical my-lady’s slipper, for although it was small, it was a thick-soled, hob-nailed, low-heeled shoe, as if the missing Cinderella were concerned about other pursuits than a prince’s ball or a pumpkin coach. It was tied with thick braid, guiltless of tins, and it was beautifully polished. Arnold picked it up, turned it over, and dropped it in his pocket.

“It must be Sara Audrey’s,” he decided, and tapped his ball into the ninth hole, smiling. When he had come down to breakfast at the Abbott house-party that morning he had met Sara Audrey and Lawrence Brixton, coming in fresh from an hour on the course. The girl had nodded to Arnold and had run away upstairs, and Lawrence had muttered a greeting brightly, and had also vanished. When Arnold had stepped out on the terrace a moment later to breathe in a blessing before breakfast and the frost had caught his face, he had consigned Miss Audrey’s rapid flitting to a probable blue nose. Now, with the little shoe in his pocket, his mind clutched feebly at something vaguely spicier. Princesses were always leaving a slipper behind in their flight. Like many philosophers, he did not elaborate his theory; that, plainly, would have spoiled it.

When his fingers were so cold that they could not close about his putter, he occasioned pious remarks from his caddy by striding back to the house, waving a red and blue hand of farewell at Lawrence Brixton, outlined against a far bunker. It was eleven o’clock, and Arnold wanted a grate fire and something hot, and, if possible, to talk with Mrs. Crothers.

A woman of other people’s interests and the good taste of her own convictions, without undue courage, was Mrs. Crothers. She was a widow, and she was enchanting, with little features, and a slim throat and captivating hands. She was one of the women whose strength and poise are never brandished, like weapons, but instead rest upon them like graces. Her voice was never raised, and her manner was made all of charm and not at all of guile.

Mrs. Crothers was alone in the morning-room, before a hearth of busy flame, when Arnold entered. She was doing nothing. Mrs. Crothers never paid men the subtle compliment so peculiarly feminine of being willingly interrupted at books or letter-writing; she was always doing nothing, and instead of putting herself about to entertain the interloper, she let him, to his satisfaction, idle up and graciously entertain her. Mrs. Crothers had been a widow for four years.

“I was wondering where everybody is,” she said, with her restful absence of intonation. “Doesn’t it smell of winter in the world?”

“How do you know?” smiled Arnold. Mrs. Crothers, in her pink morning-gown, in no way suggested the crisp, frosty morning. It was otherwise with Sara Audrey, now. The comparison was in Arnold’s mind. Sara Audrey had been often in his mind since her arrival the day before, and he wanted to talk about her.

“You are looking very charming this morning,” he said instead, having been a bachelor for even longer than Mrs. Crothers had been a widow.

“Well,” said Mrs. Crothers idly, “then I feel encouraged and anointed for better things. I was thinking what a stupid time I was going to have—I, a house-mouse, with such a field-mouse as Sara Audrey here.”

“That is disingenuous of you,” said Arnold promptly. “No girl of twenty-two, however charming, can compete with the woman who looks twenty-two and is a very little more.”

“Men like brains,” admitted Mrs. Crothers with pretty thoughtfulness, “but they love complexions.”

“My dear Geraldine!” remonstrated Arnold, who had known her husband.

“Let us be frank,” pleaded Mrs. Crothers. “Mornings are as irresistible a temptation to me to be frank and confidential as after-dinner is to most people.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Arnold, acquiescent. When a woman grows confidential he had observed that she grows confidential in questions, not answers. Mrs. Crothers appreciated his understanding and paid it the tribute of a smile.

“Ah, well,” she said, “since you are so clever, do you think that Lawrence and Sara Audrey are in love?”

“Brixton?” asked Arnold frowning. Mrs. Crothers noted the frown and sighed a little.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I think that Sara seems very well suited to him.”

Arnold made an impatient movement.

“‘Suited’!” he said. “What do you mean by ‘suited’? What does a woman mean by ‘suited,’ anyhow?”

“Why,” explained Mrs. Crothers, “suited. She can sail Lawrence’s yacht as well as he can—with two men to help her. She will pitch a tent on the links and live there, if Lawrence wants her to. She rides, and I believe she took away the Hermes tennis-cup. She talks about nothing but that kind of thing. I take it for granted that she can skate on dry ground. And you know Lawrence. Outdoors he’s a man of the world. Indoors——”

She shrugged and smiled. Everybody liked the big, awkward, young giant.

Arnold listened, amused. It was refreshing, he was thinking, to find a woman who was broad and fine, and yet whose code did not insist on a milk-and-water withholding of just comment.

“Still,” he answered, “Brixton isn’t the only outdoor man.”

“N—no,” said Mrs. Crothers.

“Miss Audrey is very jolly,” said Arnold. “I mean, she’s very vivacious and breezy in her talk, and that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Crothers accepted the unconscious challenge and met it magnificently.

“And in her dress too,” she said, “isn’t she? We were all down for dinner last night when she came in from golf. You were dining out, weren’t you? The women were all there. Silvia had on her gold gown, Mrs. Abbott was in black lace, the girls were in white—and in came Sara, blue shirt-waist, sleeves to her elbows. Mrs. Abbott patted her on the cheek and made her come down the way she was. Sara said that she would live in a golf-skirt and with her sleeves turned up when she had a house of her own. Lawrence looked adoring, and the girl was so clever that she really made us all so ashamed of our civilized ruffles. Didn’t you notice her dress when you came back?”

“Yes,” said Arnold, “I thought that she had just come. It was mighty becoming, I must say.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Crothers with indulgent triumph. “My dear Arnold, women neither travel abroad nor take dinner dressed in that way, unless—well, she wore a duplicate costume at breakfast this morning,” she added.

“It looked very smart,” insisted Arnold stoutly.

“So does Lieutenant Bridges’ uniform at parade,” assented Mrs. Crothers. “But if he wore it at dinner, or off the ship at all?”

“And what do you prove, my dear Geraldine?” asked Arnold idly.

Mrs. Crothers wondered just how much of what she was trying to prove, it would later be wisdom to disclaim. That it might be as little as possible, she laid her hand on the arm of his chair.

“When a girl,” she said, “makes capital of her enthusiasms, whatever they are, the capital is not large. Neither, usually, are the enthusiasms.”

“No,” assented Arnold, and wondered if the lesser angels look so charming when they argue.

“There is an immense difference,” said Mrs. Crothers, “between a healthy liking for outdoors, and a fad for liking outdoors, isn’t there? Sara doesn’t sing. She cannot play. I do not recommend her dancing nor her dowry. That is no secret. She knows all this. She has therefore simply gone in for her specialty.”

Arnold listened, half frowning. It was most curious, he was thinking, that a woman who was generous and big-minded should yet resent another woman’s cleverness!

“Ah,” he said thoughtfully, “instead of going in, say, for lots of gowns?”

“Quite,” said Mrs. Crothers. “She is a type. I know many who do the same thing. I dare say that you will accuse me of talking cant, but isn’t it a pity that so many women throw away a crown and take to wearing bangles, so to speak, instead? The woman who will be her real self—reserved, simple, tender, and with humor, if she has it—has infinitely greater charm, to speak of charm alone, than the woman who puts on the armor of a specialty for her own adornment. An assumed hobby, vivacity, unwilling hostess-ship—these are half the time the bangles that a woman wears without caring twopence for them. It’s birthright and pottage all over again.”

“A man likes to be amused,” defended Arnold.

Mrs. Crothers laughed.

“Marry to be amused and live to be bored,” she said lightly. “Besides, real women are often more adorable than simply adorable women! Yet if I were a man,” she went on, “I might like to marry Sara, if only,” she added under breath, “to note the relief with which she dropped athletics.”

There was a patter and a scratching without, and in came Beagle, a little frayed skein of black silk which Mrs. Crothers worshipped for a dog. He was named Beagle, she was wont to explain with grave inconsequence, because he was a Pomeranian. She tucked him under her arm reprovingly.

“He’s been very naughty,” she complained, “and he’s had no exercise to-day. Shall we take him to walk on the terrace after dinner?”

Going slowly up the stairs Mrs. Crothers surprised and terrified Beagle by a sudden passionate gesture.

“Ah,” she cried, “what did I say all that for? I must be growing old!”

Left alone, Arnold went to his room and drew the little hobnailed shoe from his pocket. He set it on the mantel by his tray of pipes, and it pleased him. It was sturdy, self-reliant bit of leather, and it was so small. A white-satin slipper dropped in one’s path would be, he reflected, as out of date as a flowered waistcoat. He smoked contemplatively, and looked at the little shoe. This fragment of romance, forced upon him, unaccountably delighted him. Romance had never before come to him of her own free will—perhaps because he had so persistently sought her.

“I think I could promise myself,” he said, “to love the woman who wears that shoe. And it must belong to Miss Audrey, because all the rest of the house-party, excepting Geraldine, is made up of Amazons. Yet I never heard of the chance owner of a Cinderella slipper not being altogether charming. Therefore, Sara Audrey must be charming!”

If any woman at the house-party had been asked, she would have said that Miss Audrey would not dare to again set at defiance dinner conventionalities, but at seven o’clock that evening the girl tapped at Mrs. Abbott’s door, and met that lady just about to descend, in the Abbott sapphires. Miss Audrey herself was in a little flannel gown, cut well above her stout boots; it turned in at the such a throat, and the sleeves were up-at-elbows. Sara’s plain face was glowing and very becomingly ashamed.

“Oh, Mrs. Abbott,” she apologized, “Mrs. Carbury and Lawrence and I were delayed in the village, and the roads are so bad that we had to run back very slowly. Mrs. Carbury has gone to dress, but I am so tired——”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Abbott comfortably, “you look charming. Come down with me the way you are.”

Arnold sat at Miss Audrey’s left. He looked up the long table, at stately Mrs. Abbott, at the Misses Abbott, regal in black jet, at Silvia Carbury in one of her wonderful white gowns, at Mrs. Crothers’s pale beauty in rose, and then back at the girl beside him, in the gown in which she had played golf all morning and motored all afternoon. Sara Audrey’s features were irregular, and her cheeks were slightly hollowed, yet with her really beautiful hair tangled enchantingly about her flushed face, and with her vivacious talk about her adventuresome day, she was the most distinctive personality at the board. It flashed over Arnold that, if she were wearing the Misses Abbott’s jet and were to be silent for a space, no one would give a second glance at her. As it was, Calverly was looking at her through his single glass, Lieutenant Bridges on her right was frank in his admiration, and young Brixton, opposite, was frowning at him with a will. Arnold remembered the shoe, up by the tray of pipes, and rejoiced.

“Miss Audrey,” he said, “do I enter the before-breakfast game in the morning?”

She uttered a little dismayed exclamation. “Again?” she said, with an involuntary frown. “But I was up at seven this morning! Oh,” she caught her breath with a smile, “but you really wish it, do you? How delicious of you!”

“Of course I really wish it,” said Arnold, puzzled.

Miss Audrey looked up at him with studied, yet beguiling, appeal.

“You are not just humoring me?” she asked in a low voice.

“On my honor, no,” said Arnold in surprise. “What an idea, Miss Audrey. Hasn’t everyone told you how selfish I am?”

She sighed.

“Then you forgive me,” she said humbly, “for appearing—so?” with a little deprecating glance at the flannel gown.

Arnold passed airily over the matter of the taste of her question.

“Forgive you,” he asked, “for looking charming?”

“You are very good,” she said softly, “to my shabby frock.”

Presently Arnold heard her discussing, with Lieutenant Bridges, the Abbotts’ new ice-boat, and then, in a flow of technicalities, the best kind of bits to be used in coaching. Memory of Mrs. Crothers’s words of that morning smote him, and it occurred to him that it would be legitimate deliberately to try to make Sara Audrey talk of something else. Unlike the rank and file, Arnold was skilled and delicate in eliciting opinions; he never ventured upon the amusement in the studiously offhand fashion that warns a woman that she is being scrutinized. He knew men and affairs, he loved books, and he had certain standards which were for him inexorable, and not merely opinions. Therefore, when Sara Audrey deftly waived the subject of literature by telling of a new motoring novel, and when she skimmed past one or two discussions by the timely memory of a good story, and then turned eagerly to the lieutenant to answer his polite inquiry about her mare’s foreleg, Arnold began to understand. Yet her love for her “specialty,” as Mrs. Crothers had called it, seemed to him so sincere and so frankly a mode of self-expression, that he respect it, and she continued to attract him.

After dinner Mrs. Crothers, who had watched the two for an hour between the rose-colored shades on the table, smiled into Arnold’s eyes in the drawing-room.

“The lieutenant,” she said, “knows about Pomeranians. He is going to take Beagle on the terrace with me.”

Arnold made the almost fatal mistake of abstractedly smiling his compliance. Mrs. Crothers’s face hardened a little as she took the lieutenant’s arm.

“I must be growing old,” she murmured to herself dismally.

Arnold played the early-morning game next day with Miss Audrey. The cold drove them in early for breakfast, but they were off immediately afterward for a gallop. At Hartleigh, the twelve-mile village, Arnold proposed a return, if they were to be in time for lunch.

“Just a little farther,” pleaded Sara Audrey. “This is my last day, you know. And I am so perfectly happy on Baffling.”

So they rode on to the next village, and returned, in consequence, in the midst of luncheon. Mrs. Abbott, who was just leaving the table, put Miss Audrey at the tea-tray, and as she sat there in her habit, with her hair straying about her glowing face, which the exercise had lighted almost to prettiness, she held Arnold and the lieutenant and Lawrence in talk about a new skating figure, and a proposed ice-carnival and toboggan-party.

“Oh, but I must be growing old,” again thought Mrs. Crothers wearily.

Miss Audrey went off to motor soon after luncheon, and Arnold spent the afternoon in the billiard-room. About five o’clock he heard the machine puff round to the stables, and he went down for tea and drank numberless cups in expectation of Miss Audrey’s arrival. At half past six, however, when he went up to dress for dinner, he had seen nothing of her. At all events, he reflected, she would certainly be in evening dress to-night, and perhaps inclined to feminine conversation befitting chiffon and frills. He looked forward to a harmless triumph over Mrs. Crothers.

Just before seven he strolled down to the drawing-room. It was still empty. He walked to the window and looked out on the great brooding stillness of the winter evening, crisp and starry, and locked by the dark and the frost. On a sudden impulse he unlatched the long window and stepped out on the terrace. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw something crossing the drive. Even in the dusk he recognized the dainty step and high head of Baffling, Miss Audrey’s mare. A groom was leading the animal, and Arnold’s first thought was that her rider had met with some accident. A moment later he saw that the groom, instead of going to the stables, was simply walking up and down before the side door leading to the servants’ quarters. As the stable clock truck seven the side door opened, and a little figure slipped out, mounted the waiting horse, and cantered down the drive. Arnold was sure that it was Miss Audrey. He was dismayed to have spied upon her, even unwittingly, yet he was concerned to know why she should be leaving the house alone at the hour of dinner. He saw the groom run round to the front entrance, which puzzled him still more, and the meaning of the manœuvre had not yet dawned upon him when Mrs. Abbott and her daughters entered the drawing-room, and he turned back to meet them, bringing with him a breath of frosty air.

“Eskimo!” cried Mrs. Abbott with dignity.

“Laplander!” cried the younger Miss Abbott, whose idea of wit was ever a modification of the parental badinage.

“Dreamer!” cried the elder Miss Abbott, whose specialty was sympathy, and who never neglected an opportunity to reprove and outshine her younger and prettier sister.

Then the others came in, Mrs. Crothers, Mrs. Carbury, the lieutenant, Mr. Calverly, and Lawrence Brixton, the latter with an anxious eye for the one missing guest. In the same moment the butler was heard to open the front door, there was a swish of skirts in the hall, and Sara Audrey entered, her sallow face radiant, and rosy as if from a long ride. She paused for a moment in the door-way, her riding habit caught up, a trim little boot across the threshold, and she put back from her flushed face a glorious tangle of hair that might have been blown by a rough wind as she galloped home.

“Ah, I’ve been lost, redly lost this time!” she cried, and went straight to Mrs. Abbott, a fascinating mist of tears in her voice. “Dear Mrs. Abbott,” she said, “please, please—to-night, send me to my dinner in the nursery, like any bad child.”

“My dear girl,” cried Mrs. Abbott, “I’ve never seen anything more charming. Do, pray, come down as you are, and look quite yourself. Doesn’t everyone say so?”

And everyone but Arnold did say so.

 

“May Beagle go for a walk with you and me?” asked Arnold, after dinner. Mrs. Crothers looked up quickly, her heart beating unreasonably at the little lift and drop—the something very tender in his voice. He brought her cloak and found Beagle, and they walked on the terrace in the clear night. Beagle snapped unhappily in Arnold’s arms.

“No, Beaglechen,” said Mrs. Crothers, “I’m punishing you by making Arnold carry you. You’re bad.”

“Thanks,” said Arnold, “thanks. And what did he do—this Pomeranian Beagle?”

Mrs. Crothers laughed indulgently.

“I discovered before dinner that he must have gone off with one of my shoes,” she confessed. “Little wretch. Which would you part with least willingly—a custom-made shoe or a registered dog?”

Arnold stood still and wondered, and then laughed out suddenly and happily,

“Really?” he said, looking down at her.

“Really what?” she returned. “That’s no answer.”

“But you don’t like to play golf!” cried Arnold, incredulously, with complete incoherence. “I thought my Cinderella of the links must play golf!”

“I haven’t an idea what you are talking about,” said Mrs. Crothers rather helplessly, “but I certainly don’t like to play golf, and what’s more, I won’t pretend to.”

“Don’t,” begged Arnold with unexpected heartiness. “Don’t, Cinderella.”