The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge's house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers.At times the book would fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in her violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked up the apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it.
With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful day-dreams of girlhood.When you saw that faraway look in her eyes, it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube.
At other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over the blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towards France to say farewell to it.
Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed to rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald was getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the least suggestion of anything of the sort.
Or, if it wasn't that, then her lover had just returned to her side, tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in the Soudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer and to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in the watches of the night.He was asking her for a sign, any kind of sign,--ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign,--and Zena was plucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear her father's step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township, and start reading it like mad.
She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and being parted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, and saying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers of Hohenbranntwein.
And I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic, because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that.An Algerian corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the asking, and as for a wounded English officer,--well, perhaps it's better not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regular military hospital.
Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right.You've only to look at them to realize that.You see, you can get in Mariposa a print dress of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitely better than anything you ever see in the city,--especially if you can wear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple trees and the green grass of a tennis court.And if you remember, too, that these are cultivated girls who have all been to the Mariposa high school and can do decimal fractions, you will understand that an Algerian corsair would sharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them.
Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because they are not.I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a buccaneer or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of ordinary people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain.So it is that each one of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in one of the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town.
I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most completely enchanted are the cheapest.As for the enchanted princes, they find them in the strangest places, where you never expected to see them, working--under a spell, you understand,--in drug-stores and printing offices, and even selling things in shops.But to be able to find them you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and the Errant Quest and that sort of thing.
Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed of bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on foam-flecked chargers.But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard to imagine.So, when Mr.Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of Oneida Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there merely to pass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was aware of his existence.
That may be a slight exaggeration.She knew, perhaps, that he was the new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from the Maritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and that he had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa, and that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church, and that his salary was eight hundred dollars.Beyond that, she didn't know a thing about him.She presumed, however, that the reason why he went past so fast was because he didn't dare to go slow.
This, of course, was perfectly correct.Ever since the day when Mr.
Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on his bicycle just after bank hours.He would have gone past twenty times a day but he was afraid to.As he came up Oneida Street, he used to pedal faster and faster,--he never meant to, but he couldn't help it,--till he went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with his little yellow blazer flying in the wind.In a second he had disappeared in a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the momentum of it carried him clear out into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pause or look back.
Then Mr.Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country, trying to think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his bicycle would be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida Street, and would get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the pedals whirled round with a buzz and he came past the judge's house again, like a bullet out of a gun.He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, and even then it took all the nerve that he had.
