White Gloves
I
“You are the most beautiful thing in the world!”
Elaine, who had been looking down, looked up. She was a pretty girl, but not beautiful, or at least not extravagantly so. She had fair hair, candid eyes, cameo features, a complexion of cream, which occasionally had claret in it, and an air of having no nonsense—or, at any rate, very little nonsense—about her.
“Indeed you are!”
Ruis Ixar smiled as he spoke, displaying the gleam of white teeth, a gleam that contrasted curiously with his eyes, which were dark and melancholy, and with his skin, which was strikingly, almost unnaturally, brown. Otherwise, save for that detail, save, too, for a slight affectation in his attire, he was a good-looking young man dressed completely in white—in white serge, white shoes, white gloves.
Though the time was high noon of a midsummer day and the place a New England village, those gloves he retained. They perhaps indicated the foreigner that his name proclaimed.
A little before he had drifted—from no one knew whence—into this somnolent Massachusetts hamlet, and had settled himself at the inn, a low, two-storied building that faced the village church. Barring the inn and the post-office, the church was the only public building in this place, which, though not far from a great city, is one of the quietest I have ever known. Its name, an Indian one which it is unnecessary to give, means, in English, “place of peace.” Peaceful it was and doubtless still is, with that peace which comes of the absence of trade, the rarity of passersby.
Peaceful, also, was the church, which was generally empty, somnolent like the village, yet, unlike it, refreshingly cool. For that reason, unless it were for another, hour after hour Ruis Ixar loitered in the dim aisles where, on weekdays, the silence was stirred only by chimes that, in minor keys, sobbed, rather than announced, the flight of time. But it may be that their melancholy appealed to this young man, fusing, as it must have, with the melancholy which was his.
The pastor, a gentle soul, wondered at the unusual and persistent worshiper, and imagined that he had perhaps a crime on his conscience—a reflection for which presently he rebuked himself; for clearly, the donations that the young man put in the plate at each service betokened a grateful heart.
That idea aiding, acquaintanceship ensued, in the course of which the pastor found occasion to introduce the young man to certain people—among others, to Colonel Doremus and his daughter, Elaine.
Colonel Doremus was a large, stout man, slightly lame, who drank now and then, though not to excess. His daughter you have already met. The colonel’s home stood near the church, which latter, after the introduction, saw Ixar no more.
It was otherwise with the colonel’s home. There, hour after hour, the young man sat with the girl as he had sat in the aisles; sat, too, though less protractedly, with her father. To both of them, as was but natural, he told of himself—told that, born of Spanish parentage in Santiago de Cuba, he had been educated in England, from which country he had recently returned.
“And why not?” thought the colonel, who, rising from a seat on the porch, limped indoors and helped himself from a decanter.
But the young man was obviously a gentleman. The colonel limped back, and asked him to stop and dine.
There are men who can refuse a favor with greater grace than others can grant one. At the invitation, Ruis Ixar contemplated his gloved hands. Then, with that grace, he declined.
This occurred the day after the introduction. On subsequent occasions the invitation was renewed. Always the result was the same.
The colonel, who had been in Spain, though not in Cuba, was not surprised. Castilians, he was aware, never extend invitations, and, he reflected, perhaps did not accept them either. But the point was obscure. With a libation, he dismissed it.
Yet, though Ruis Ixar would not break bread with the colonel, he came to his house, as he had gone to the church, and gradually entered the thoughts of Elaine. Imperceptibly she began to await his coming; and on one occasion when he came, imperceptibly the claret deepened in the cream of her skin. There was no claret to deepen in his. Beneath its dark veil, it was ashen.
“He never got that coat of tan in England,” the colonel told himself. “His face looks as though it had been frozen at the north pole and then baked at the equator.
“How long is it since you were at Santiago?” he asked.
“Six weeks,” the young man answered. “After the gray London sky to which I had been so long accustomed, the ferocity of the Caribbean sun burned me to the bone—to the marrow. I fell ill, and came north to recover.”
“And why not?” thought the colonel, who, as usual, limped away.
It was on this occasion that the girl’s color deepened, for it was then that the young man’s remark about beautiful things cropped out.
“Will you give me a picture of yourself?” he added.
The girl parried.
“Will you give me yours?”
But Ixar had none. There are people who have a physical dread of the camera. He said he was one of them.
“Nonsense!” retorted Elaine, who had a way and a will of her own. “The operation is quite painless, and in Boston there is such a good man. We might motor in. It is barely twenty miles, only—”
“Only what?”
“Our chauffeur has injured himself.”
But at this Ixar, with a zeal which he afterward regretted, announced that he could run a machine. Elaine suggested that they should go at once; and shortly, with the open car for chaperon, the two young people flew off.
Presently the photographer’s studio was reached, photographs in assorted sizes were taken,
