The Tryst Of The White Lady
by
“I wisht ye’d git married, Roger,” said Catherine Ames. “I’m gitting too old to work–seventy last April–and who’s going to look after ye when I’m gone. Git married, b’y–git married.”
Roger Temple winced. His aunt’s harsh, disagreeable voice always jarred horribly on his sensitive nerves. He was fond of her after a fashion, but always that voice made him wonder if there could be anything harder to endure.
Then he gave a bitter little laugh.
“Who’d have me, Aunt Catherine?” he asked.
Catherine Ames looked at him critically across the supper table. She loved him in her way, with all her heart, but she was not in the least blind to his defects. She did not mince matters with herself or with other people. Roger was a sallow, plain-featured fellow, small and insignificant looking. And, as if this were not bad enough, he walked with a slight limp and had one thin shoulder a little higher than the other–“Jarback” Temple he had been called in school, and the name still clung to him. To be sure, he had very fine grey eyes, but their dreamy brilliance gave his dull face an uncanny look which girls did not like, and so made matters rather worse than better. Of course looks didn’t matter so much in the case of a man; Steve Millar was homely enough, and all marked up with smallpox to boot, yet he had got for wife the prettiest and smartest girl in South Bay. But Steve was rich. Roger was poor and always would be. He worked his stony little farm, from which his father and grandfather had wrested a fair living, after a fashion, but Nature had not cut him out for a successful farmer. He hadn’t the strength for it and his heart wasn’t in it. He’d rather be hanging over a book. Catherine secretly thought Roger’s matrimonial chances very poor, but it would not do to discourage the b’y. What he needed was spurring on.
“Ye’ll git someone if ye don’t fly too high,” she announced loudly and cheerfully. “Thar’s always a gal or two here and thar that’s glad to marry for a home. ‘Tain’t no use for you to be settin’ your thoughts on anyone young and pretty. Ye wouldn’t git her and ye’d be worse off if ye did. Your grandfather married for looks, and a nice useless wife he got–sick half her time. Git a good strong girl that ain’t afraid of work, that’ll hold things together when ye’re reading po’try–that’s as much as you kin expect. And the sooner the better. I’m done–last winter’s rheumatiz has about finished me. An’ we can’t afford hired help.”
Roger felt as if his raw, quivering soul were being seared. He looked at his aunt curiously–at her broad, flat face with the mole on the end of her dumpy nose, the bristling hairs on her chin, the wrinkled yellow neck, the pale, protruding eyes, the coarse, good-humoured mouth. She was so extremely ugly–and he had seen her across the table all his life. For twenty-five years he had looked at her so. Must he continue to go on looking at ugliness in the shape of a wife all the rest of his life–he, who worshipped beauty in everything?
“Did my mother look like you, Aunt Catherine?” he asked abruptly.
His aunt stared–and snorted. Her snort was meant to express kindly amusement, but it sounded like derision and contempt.
“Yer ma wasn’t so humly as me,” she said cheerfully, “but she wan’t no beauty either. None of the Temples was ever better lookin’ than was necessary. We was workers. Yer pa wa’n’t bad looking. You’re humlier than either of ’em. Some ways ye take after yer grandma–though she was counted pretty at one time. She was yaller and spindlin’ like you, and you’ve got her eyes. What yer so int’rested in yer ma’s looks all at once fer?”