Moreton had ready no response. He felt an impulse toward putting his hand into his pocket to give her some money; but of course he did not do it. Never before had a look conveyed to him so sudden a discovery of the hard lines of the life of a woman who is thrown upon her own resources for earning a livelihood. It suggested to him a phase of human struggle hitherto quite shut out of his imagination, however familiar to Americans.
"Well, good-by," she presently said, with an almost cheerful smile. "I wish I could stay here always: this is pretty near my ideal of what a home should be." She cast a slow glance around her, letting her eyes linger on the picturesque old mansion and its embowering trees. Moreton fancied that her face betrayed a feeling of weariness and failure, as if her enthusiasm had suddenly vanished.
"Good-by, Miss Crabb, I wish you great success," he responded, cordially taking her hand. It was the best he could do.
"Thank you," she quickly replied. "I am determined to deserve success, at least; but it is a long way off, I sometimes fear." She turned to go to the waiting carriage, but faced him again and added: "This has been a most charming experience to me. What a sweet, restful life it must be living here. I almost envy—I almost covet Mrs. Ransom's lot. I have had such a hard——," but she did not finish the sentence. "Good-by," she repeated, and went away.
Moreton felt a pang of sympathy for this poor girl, though he had no very definite idea of what her struggles, her hopes and her failures might be. It was enough for him to know that she was good and honest and earnest, and that she felt the hardship of some galling limitations.
"Will she ever come to any thing? Is there really any chance for a person like her in this country?" he inquired of Miss Noble a little later, as he sat by her side on a rustic seat under some trees by the river.
"She may make a hit, as it is termed," was the answer. "Some of them do, and then, if she will make the most of it, she may get to where life is easier; but at best she can not hope for much."
"It seems queer and pitiful to me," he said, after a moment of thoughtfulness, "that so good and kind a girl as she evidently is should have to do such things. Her situation has deeply touched me."
"That is because you haven't been used to it. Young ladies probably do not report for the press in England," replied Cordelia. "It is a very common thing for them to do it here."
Moreton smiled, as one who gives up a sentiment rather reluctantly is apt to do, and said:
"Still I would rather not see it; she appeared out of place, somehow."
"She was quite out of place here; but she has become so used to overcoming such obstacles that she easily evaded any sense of the impropriety of invading the privacy of General DeKay's——
"No, I beg your pardon," hastily spoke up Moreton. "You do her wrong. Shedidfeel very keenly that she wasde trop, that she wasn't just free and welcome, don't you know. I saw it—she almost acknowledged it to me, in fact, and I felt downright sorry for her."
"Poor thing!" exclaimed Cordelia, her voice softening with the sudden change in her quick sympathy. "Poor girl! and we didn't try to help her or to make her feel easy. I hate myself for it. I see how mean I have been. It would have been so easy to have smoothed things for her, too!"
Moreton felt a temptation to seize this warm-hearted, impulsive girl and press her close to his breast. Indeed he had a right to be sorely tempted, for she was a strong, lithe, blooming maiden, whose steadfast honesty and purity glowed in her eyes and on her lips. Then there was the dreamy sunshine and the checkered shade and the softly rippling breeze to add to his mood, and yonder was the slumberous river lapsing away between its brakes. But he satisfied himself with simply looking at her and allowing her beauty to freshen and sweeten his heart.
"I suppose it is selfish and narrow," he presently said; "but I am heartily glad that all of them are gone—that we are left alone together, aren't you?"
She laughed, but she blushed as well, and looked away from him as she answered in what she meant for a very careless tone:
"Oh, I like company and bright talk and the excitement of numbers; it exhilarates me. This will be a dull old place, now that the party has dwindled down to four or five. I hope my father has almost run the gamut of his cartridges."
"Not a dull place," he said with a peculiar emphasis, "a dreamy, fascinating place, rather. The river yonder, see how it glimmers, and this breeze; I never was so happy at any place as I am here and now. There is a sort of mystery in the influence of things around us."
She looked at him with a quick inquiry in her clear eyes, as if to discover whether or not he was jesting. Something in his bold yet tender gaze parried her glance and her lids dropped. She drooped her head and shoulders a little, too, as if under some suddenly imposed burden.
"Aren't you very happy here?" he went on, leaning a little toward her. "I want you to be very happy."
"Oh, yes, I'm always happy. I never was unhappy in my life," she answered with a show of vehemence, instead of the careless lightness that she intended should appear. "I'm never serious enough to become sad."
Moreton looked at her with tender fervor, the power of love full upon him, and yet the silly rhyme kept ringing in his brain:
"The light of her eyes,And the dew of her lips,Where the moth never fliesAnd the bee never sips."
Truly love-making has all of human nature in it, from the grandeur of extreme exaltation down to the mere piping of sheerest nonsense; but the nonsense for the time, is just as sweet as any part, so much does it borrow of the rapture of the occasion. There is comedy of a slender sort in it, which it seems a sacrilege to separate from the sacred part, and yet we all are tempted into poking quiet fun at the big, strong men who awkwardly dabble in love's sweet stream. So few of them can come boldly down to the current and at once arrest it and have their will of it outright.
"What would you do if you were poor, like Miss Crabb, and had to face the world and struggle for life?" he asked with an absurd inconsequence in his manner and voice.
"I can't imagine such a thing," she quickly answered, "I really can't. It would be very, very hard, no doubt. But I sometimes think I might be of more use, that my life is quite empty of real value. I shouldn't know how to do any useful thing."
"You might make some one happy. That would be good."
"I have no knack; I am selfish, frivolous, intent upon my own happiness," she said, looking up with a bright smile.
"Just a word, sometimes, is better than any other alms," he continued.
"Eleemosynary cheerfulness and breath of charity, as our good minister is fond of calling it," she responded with a gay little laugh. "I do sometimes try to be agreeable and bright, just to please people."
"That's mere social clap-trap, it doesn't mean any thing. It must be genuine, don't you know—come right out from the heart. You must really desire to make some one happy."
There was something in the vehemence of his voice and manner that caused her to look into his eyes with a quick change from her careless levity to a puzzled gravity of expression, that would have amused a disinterested observer.
"How much would you do to make me very happy?" he went on, speaking as if the question might be one of life and death. "You would like to make me happy, wouldn't you?"
"Why do you ask that—what——" Her eyes had drooped and she made an unavailing effort to lift them again to his face. Here was his opportunity.
"Because I love you, love you better than all the world, Cordelia," came his hurried response. His arms made a quick initial movement, instantly arrested, for the place was not just suited to any violent demonstrations; then he added, breathlessly:
"Do you love me, Cordelia?"
She glanced rapidly around, as if expecting to find in the landscape some relief from the embarrassment that flooded her cheeks with blushes. Just then, Reynolds and Mrs. Ransom passed down the pathway leading from the mansion to a little landing on the river, where a small boat lay moored. They were too much absorbed in conversation to notice the lovers, though they could almost have touched them as they went by. Miss Noble remained silent, watching Reynolds assist his graceful companion into the boat and draw in the little painter. Suddenly she looked up and very demurely said:
"They're going for a row on the river: why didn't we think of that? I delight in going out on the water."
"You would take a profound delight in any thing just now that would help you to avoid answering my question, wouldn't you?" he grumbled. "You've forgotten what it was I inquired about, haven't you?"
She laughed in a low, clear way. Reynolds and Mrs. Ransom, lightly startled by the sound, turned their faces quickly and waved a greeting, as they glided out upon the placid stream. They appeared very happy.
"I shall not be put aside so lightly," he went on; "I can't bear it. You must answer me, Cordelia."
"Answer you what?"
He sprang to his feet, and stood gazing down at her with his face actually pale with emotion.
"You don't mean it? You can't mean to drive me from you in this way?" he cried, his voice a little husky.
"Sit down, do, they're looking at us—they'll know what it is," she murmured, making a deprecatory gesture with her hand.
He obeyed, saying rather ungraciously as he did so:
"What if they do know? We needn't care, they're no better. Reynolds is nearly crazy about her; he means to propose to her as soon as they're round the curve." He could not help laughing a little at his own absurdity. But Cordelia pretended to pout.
"You should not say such things about Agnes; she doesn't deserve your levity."
"I didn't say any harm of her," he hastened to reply. "I spoke of Reynolds: he is very much in love. You do not blame him for thinking a great deal of her—I don't blame him at all. I think it is deuced clever of him, don't you know."
She rose as if to go away.
"Come, now, turn about is fair: you made me sit down again when I got up," he said, catching her hand and gently pulling her down beside him.
What further was said between them has never been gathered from the sweet wind that bore their fragmentary murmurings away among the old trees and down the silvery windings of the river. I presume that, no matter how much the circumstances of courtship may differ, true love, in the hey-day of youth, or in the vigorous prime of life, has certain constant quantities by which it may readily be known; and one of these is so sweet that, to one not personally interested, it narrowly misses being entirely too sweet for deliberate discussion. John Ruskin has, I believe, more than suggested an amendment to the ordinary methods of love-making, but lovers seem inclined to follow the old, familiar rose-scented plan, no matter how silly it may appear to superannuated philosophers and art critics.
Reynolds had been shut away from society for so long a time that he had returned, in a degree, to the susceptibility and receptivity of extreme youth. We grow like what we contemplate, is a very trite truth, and he had absorbed much of the outright simplicity of the mountaineers, without losing any of the character he had long ago formed. Self-knowledge may be very valuable, but self-study does not tend always toward happiness. One might almost venture to say that, in a vast majority of cases, serious self-analysis amounts to remorse if nothing worse. Moreover, one usually chooses solitude in which to erect one's furnace and laboratory of self-criticism, where one may make the heat as high and protracted as one pleases. The result is usually a mass of unsightly slag instead of the fine and precious metal one has hoped to turn out. Hence it is that a hermit returning to the world after years of seclusion and self-delusion finds it a paradise when he had expected to see it a hell. Men and women are so much purer and stronger and nobler than he had pictured them, and all the ways of human social life are so much sweeter and fresher than his diseased brain had remembered them to be, that he sloughs his crust, like a serpent, and comes out a new man.
The doctrine that evil experiences are ever of value, or rather that a baptism in sin ever worked a positive good to the recipient, is too dangerous to be received; but it sometimes appears that there is an annealing influence exerted on character by the intense heat of uncontrollable passions, tempering it at last to the highest degree of sensitiveness and susceptibility. Reynolds was aware, in a vague way, of the change so rapidly going on within him. It was as if his nature were putting forth a tremendous spurt of power with which to eject from its tissue the evil of the old life. What a mystery there is in remorse and repentance and reform! But how much greater the mystery of evil, that terrible, invisible acid, combining with all the bases of human nature and disintegrating every crystal of beauty! How shall the stream of a life, once defiled, be purified? The simplest reagent will disclose the presence of sin, but what process will eliminate it?
The Hand that made the mirror must remove the spots of tarnish.
Love is always the gateway of a new life. When its purple mists and its wafts of heavenly perfumes come upon its victim his whole nature feels as if the ultimate sources of impulse had been cleansed, sweetened and electrified. New needs, new aspirations, fresh hopes and the dewy vigor of morning leap into the heart. Ah, then how bitter is the memory of misdeeds! Just then if Satan would get behind and forever disappear, what a relief! What a joy if all the past could be wiped out, as with a sponge, and existence be left to date from the advent of love!
The meeting of Reynolds and Mrs. Ransom was much more than the ordinary contact of life with life, whereby the spark of passion is generated; it was significant of a blending of their past experiences as well as of the creation of a new life for both. Even on the instant when a mutual interest was awakened, their minds flashed back over the past. No doubt love ought to be prospective always; but it can not often be so.
Agnes Ransom could not realize that she was a widow. It was more as if a very sweet romance of her experience had ended in sorrow and disappointment. She looked back upon the short space of her wedded life with a vision dimmed by mists and shadows. She was half aware that her nature had gained much and lost little by the experience. It all seemed very sad to her, and yet she felt that the sadness was rather an atmosphere of the past than of the present. It hovered somewhere behind her, it did not affect the future. Still there was a protest somewhere, gentle and weak, but quite troublesome, against this new, strong, imperious, wayward love, now rising in her bosom and anon sinking away almost into the depths out of which it had come. She trembled sometimes with a great fear, at other times she abandoned herself to it with a serene fullness of content.
Close to the river's bank, all overgrown with wild vines and darkly shadowed by clustering trees, there stood, distant about a mile from the DeKay place, an almost shapeless pile of brick and stucco, the ruins of a once stately Southern mansion. It had been burned, whether by accident or the work of an incendiary is not known. Some tragic legend was connected with its history—a vague story of hereditary feud, bloody encounter, the gloom of crime and the solemn hush that follows after violent death. It was not a story ever told by a DeKay, for it affected the history of the family a generation or two ago. The very oldest negroes on the plantation knew something of the dark outlines of the tragedy; but they had learned not to more than vaguely hint the extent of their knowledge by equivocal allusions and dubious generalities. The affair dated back to the early Alabama days, when slavery was in its most prosperous state in a financial way, and when chivalry, so-called, was at its zenith. The ruin, with its picturesque walls overgrown with vines, was a fitting monument of the decay of medieval customs in the South as well as of the downfall of a once proud and in many ways brave and generous family.
It was towards this pathetic pile that Reynolds pulled with vigorous oar-strokes, as he and Mrs. Ransom set out upon the river from the little landing at DeKay Place. Unconsciously and with the ease that comes of great nervous and muscular force, made ready by his recent years of healthful habits and out-door training, he put such impulse into the little craft as made it leap like a skipping fish, leaving a whirling wake behind it, gleaming and darkling in sun and shade. He had not yet spoken of love. Indeed his heart was so full of this new and sweetly stormy passion that he could not master it sufficiently to clothe it in words. He was ever at the point of speaking and ever faltering and holding back his voice. So he found a relief in great muscular exertion. It was love thrilling along his nerves and sinews that made his arms tireless. He felt as if each long, strong sweep of the oars were bearing Agnes and him away from all the rest of the world, away from the past and into a sweet, shadowy solitude like that which the imagination has, in all ages, seen swimming on the furthest horizon, and towards which all lovers have hopefully but vainly steered their dream-ladened barks.
A sense of unworthiness repressed and almost smothered, a strong conscience bound down and enveloped in the fire of passion, these would make themselves felt in a dull, heavy, indefinite way. He could not shake off for long at a time a consciousness that all this deep, sweet, strong happiness flooding his soul to bursting, was ephemeral, and would vanish at the touch of the first sinisterfaux pasby which the past might be uncovered.
Mrs. Ransom, in the after part of the boat, sat facing Reynolds, her lissome figure in an attitude of almost childish carelessness and grace. She was, apparently, as unaware of her rare charm of person as was he of his immense physical power. It is one of the wholesomest of out-door influences that eliminates, for the time, the frivolous conventionalities of social life, and establishes in their stead something of the freedom of the wind and the transparent freshness of running water. Nature, by some occult process, reaches our hearts and sponges off the sediment of artificial sentiment, so that the simpler elements of life are set to work in us without any hindrance. Given a boat, a calm, clear river, fine weather, a man and a woman, youth, strength, health, and what an infinitude of happiness may be expected! It is often the case that human experience is, under such circumstances, condensed to the last degree of denseness, or expanded to an ethereal tenuity never dreamed of in the hot-house narrowness of city life. Out-door realities are so strong and dreams are so wide and fair where the sun shines and the air is full of balm and the water flows with such a liberal, far-going murmur. Tragedy has a broader and deeper significance enacted without any stage limitations, and comedy catches a sparkle from the brooks and the daylight and the starlight, never reflected from gas jets and painted backgrounds.
Very little was said between Mrs. Ransom and Reynolds in the time it took to reach a place where they could land near the ruin, their conversation confining itself to observations on such little incidents as happened during their quick flight. Once a flock of wood-ducks sprang in a rapid whirl from the water near them and winged their way up the stream, their bright colors shining with a peculiar twinkle, as far as the eye could follow them. Little shadowy sandpipers ran along the sandy margins, here and there, or flew across from bank to bank with their comical jerky motion. In some places the reeds grew down to the water's edge in dense brakes wherein the hermit thrush and the catbird could be seen by fitful glimpses. The rapid movement of the boat kept changing the point of view, and at each change some new arrangement of the trees, the cane, the tall dry stalks of water grass or of the bold banks of the river attracted the eye.
Reynolds felt the stimulus of his passion tingling in his blood. His bronzed cheeks wore a faint flush and his eyes were full of earnest, tender light. He stranded the prow of the boat on a little crescent of sand at the foot of the bluff and helped Mrs. Ransom out. She had directed him where to land, and now he turned to her and asked:
"Now, how shall we get up to the top of the bluff?"
"There is a sort of stairway yonder by that old tree," she answered, pointing with her hand. "It is badly dilapidated, but we can climb it easily."
Somewhere, not very far away, they heard the booming of General DeKay's and Mr. Noble's guns. The sport must have been fine, for the shooting was rapid.
They found the stair—a zig-zag flight of crazy steps, leading up to the plateau above. In order to reach its foot, they had to stoop and creep under the low-hanging boughs of a tree. Reynolds took hold of her arm to help her. On a sudden impulse she freed herself from him. A thrill had come with his touch, and something like fear took momentary possession of her. She fled nimbly up the steps ahead of him, as if she meant to escape him entirely. He scarcely noticed her start and her haste, for some vines and tangled branches hindered him and disturbed his vision. When she emerged into the sunlight of the level space on the bluff, Mrs. Ransom stopped, ashamed of her foolish flight, and turned about just in time to look straight into the eyes of Reynolds, as he was surmounting the topmost steps.
"I beat you climbing," she exclaimed, her voice shaking a little from the effect of her exertion.
"I feared you had left me for good and all," he replied; "but how pale you are! Was your effort too violent? Are you ill?"
"Not at all," she responded, the negative phrase peculiar to the Southern people falling with a sort of breathless readiness from her lips. "Am I really pale?"
"Perhaps not," he said, seeing the rosy light coming into her cheeks again. "I only imagined it; but it is a difficult place to climb, and you came up like a bird. You shouldn't take such risks: it is dangerous."
He looked about for the ruin. A tall, heavy chimney-stack rising above a tangled mass of wild vines and trees answered his inquiry.
"Come this way," she said, leading on; "there is a path, further up the slope, that goes round to the entrance."
He followed her quick movements, and soon she stopped before an arched doorway in the old semi-circular transom of which a few pieces of stained glass still remained. On either hand stood fragments of stuccoed pillars all festooned with vines. She paused but for a moment, then went under the arch and passed from roofless room to roofless room with the swift, certain step of one quite familiar with the place. Every where the ivy and wild grape vines had draped the crumbling walls and heaps of rubbish, so that, in places, bowers as fanciful as those of fairy-land, made a sweet crepuscular gloom, though the foliage was mostly gone. He tried to reach her side, but her quick turns and elusive movements kept her all the time just ahead of him, and her sweet voice came back to him, as if tossed to him over her shoulder, luring him on and on, in and out through the labyrinth of rooms. Once she stopped for the merest moment to look out, through a ragged opening which had once been a window, down upon the placid face of the river. He came close to her and bent low to gaze over her shoulder. She felt his breath on her neck.
"How lovely!" he murmured, in that deep, rich voice which always vibrated so strangely in her ears. His moment had come.
"Lovely," she echoed, and slipped away, like some shy, wild thing afeard of its own voice.
Reynolds was burning with a desire to speak to her of his love, and she, hardly knowing why, felt a sweet dread of him. She tripped along through what had been a broad hall and turned into an open space where some of the walls had crumbled into a great heap around the base of the stack of chimneys. Here it was that suddenly a man, wild-eyed, shaggy-headed, ragged and gaunt, sprang up before her in a menacing attitude with a heavy pistol in his hand. She gave one little chirruping scream, threw up her arms and sank in a crumpled heap to the ground. Reynolds sprang forward with a loud ejaculation. His movement had all the appearance of a furious attack upon the startled ruffian, who, in sheer self-defense, as he thought, raised the pistol and fired. Reynolds felt the blow and the dull pang of the bullet in his right shoulder. The man did not fire again, but turned and fled through the nearest opening. It was all so sudden, the whole thing happening within the space of half a minute, that no one of the actors had time to get more than a glimpse of the situation before the act was ended. The ruffian, as was afterward ascertained, was a condemned murderer who had escaped from jail just the night before he was to have been hanged. No doubt he was lying asleep when the approach of Mrs. Ransom startled him, and thinking it was an attempt to recapture him, he had fired and fled. The sound of the shot roused Mrs. Ransom from her half swoon and she leaped to her feet. Reynolds put forth his hand and touched her on the arm.
"Be calm—don't get scared, I can protect you," he said, but he could not see her. A cloud was in his eyes and a reeling sensation in his brain.
She looked up into his face and saw how deathly white it was.
"Are you hurt?" she quaveringly asked, taking a step nearer him.
He mumbled some unintelligible answer, felt blindly about in the air with his hands, staggered, gasped hoarsely, and fell at full length upon the ground, face-downward, arms outspread, and lay quite still. Suddenly, to Mrs. Ransom, the silence of the place became awful, dense, impenetrable. She screamed, but her voice seemed not to go a yard from her lips. She stood for a moment with clenched hands, her face pinched and thin, her eyes fixed upon the prostrate form of Reynolds; then she threw herself down beside him and tried with all her might to turn him so that she could see his features; but he was so heavy and she so weak that her effort was vain. She called for help until her voice became thick with hoarseness.
"Oh, is he dead?" she wailed, "is he dead? Oh, won't some one come! Must he die now! Oh, and I love him so—love him so!"
It was as if her grieving words called him back from lifelessness, for he moaned, sighed deeply, and by a violent struggle turned himself on his side with his face toward her. He opened his eyes and looked inquiringly at her for a time, then he closed them with a weak, tremulous motion of the lids. She clasped his head in her arms, and summoning all her strength, lifted it upon her lap. The blood was beginning to ooze through his saturated clothes and trickle on the ground beside him. It almost crazed her to see this, but she was as powerless as a child to help him. She could but bend over him, and, brushing the dark heavy hair back from his forehead, where cold beads of sweat had risen, kiss him again and again in the ecstasy of her excitement. He was not unconscious now, but he was limp and nerveless, his immense vitality slowly gathering itself for the effort to recover equilibrium. Faint almost unto death as he was, he felt the thrill her kisses sent throughout his frame, and he did not note the pain of his ugly wound.
"Oh, you must not die, you must not die!" she wailed, in a sobbing voice. "Open your eyes for my sake, John—for my sake, do you hear, for I love you so!"
He heard every word, but he could not open his eyes or move his lips, though slowly and surely his strength was coming back, despite the rapid loss of blood.
The pistol ball was a very large one and it had made a bad, almost fatal wound, having passed through his shoulder and a part of his chest, barely missing the lung. The shock had had a paralyzing effect, causing the insensibility from which he was rallying.
It was a striking picture they made grouped against the dark back-ground of the old wall, with the dim light falling over them. If a broken spear and a cloven helmet had rested hard by, it would have served well for a tableau of medieval days, a lady nursing the head of her fallen knight within the crumbling ruins of some battered castle.
"Whydidwe ever come here! Oh, love, my own love, open your eyes! Speak to me: say you will not die, you will not die!"
Her words, so insistent, so despairing and so passionate, filled his consciousness with an all-satisfying sense of happiness. He could scarcely understand why she should not be willing to let him lie quietly and listen to her, for he had not recovered himself sufficiently to be able to grasp the reality of her suffering or of his own condition.
"Speak to me, speak to me," she kept reiterating, until at last, like one freeing himself reluctantly from a sweet dream, he moved his lips, making no sound at first, but presently saying:
"Where are you, Agnes?"
His voice was so strange and so low that she could not catch his words. She bowed her head so that her face almost touched his.
"What is it—what did you say?" she tenderly asked.
He put up his left hand and swept it over her cheek and down along her shoulder. Then, as his wound began to pain him, he groaned in a suppressed way.
"What ails me? What—ah, the shot—he hit me, I know—I remember now," he said, beginning to gather strength. "Let me sit up."
With a strong effort he raised himself to a sitting posture and smiled feebly.
"I have called and called, but no one will come. What shall we do?" she cried, wringing her hands and gazing helplessly at him. "Oh, why did we ever come here?"
"Be calm, darling," he said, looking fondly at her, the wan smile on his face growing more intense. "I will show you that I am a man worthy of your love." Then he arose and stood up, tall and beautiful in his strength, before her, seeming to defy his wound and its pain, though his face was pale as death.
"Come," he added, "let us go to the boat and return to the house. Come, I am strong now, and I love you, Agnes, my own little woman—come with me."
He caught her with his unhurt arm and drew her hard against his side. With a swift, firm tread he went with her down to the landing, never faltering or wavering until he had fixed himself in the stern of the boat and directed her how to paddle out to the middle of the stream.
All this time he had been losing blood and his pain had been excruciating. He had made a grand effort, and now the reaction came with a power that he could not resist. He sank back with his head resting on his arm and lay there as white and lifeless as if dead. She thought him dead, and sat there numb and motionless, letting the boat drift with the gentle current. Every thing about her appeared shadowy, misty, unreal. Her heart scarcely beat. Why was it that, in the midst of this awful trial, there came to her mind a vivid memory of the short romance of her married life down on the old plantation by Mariana? Some of those days were dreamily happy ones with her wild boy husband—the days before discontent and trouble came. Why would the reckless blue eyes and curling, yellow hair waver before her, between the strong, pallid features of this man whom she now loved with such fervor?
Slowly the boat drifted on in the sunlight, between the reed-covered banks, bearing its strange load down toward the DeKay place. It was a dark touch with which to end so charming an idyl as the past few days had been; but life in the South favors the tragic and the melodramatic: it is the life of passion and of sudden changes.
One day, while Reynolds was gone to General DeKay's, White came home from Birmingham perfectly sober and with no gambling story to tell. Milly met him at the gate, as usual, with the same pitiful look of patient inquiry in her eyes. He chucked her under the chin and in an uncommonly cheery voice said:
"He air comin' home right away soon, Milly, I hev hearn from 'im straight. Go an' drive up the steer fer me, won't ye? I want er haul er jag er pine-knots purty soon."
"I don't b'lieve he air a comin', no sich a thing. I dremp he wer' married, an' thet's a sign o' death. How d'ye know he air a comin'?" She spoke almost pettishly, looking fixedly at her father, whose pale eyes wandered aimlessly from object to object.
"I seed Mr. Noble, thet banker down ther': he hev come back. He said ter me, says he, 'The Colonel, he an' Mr. Moreting air comin' nex' week,' thet's what he says ter me."
Milly let her eyes fall and began digging in the ground with the toe of one of her shoes.
"Thet young lady, thet Miss Noble down ther', hes she kem back?" she presently asked.
"La, yes, she hev," quickly replied White. "Bless yer life, yes, she kem with 'er pap. Oh, yes, she kem too, she did."
"What meks John stay so long?"
"Oh, him? w'y he's a havin' a stavin' ole time er shootin' quails an' a drinkin' er fine liquor an' er smokin' good seegairs. Don't yer go to blamin' him fer stayin' awhile down ther': hit air a good place ter be at, yer better think."
"Seems like he mought never come," she murmured, and there were tears in her eyes as she started to go and fetch the ox.
White went into the house and shut the door.
"I hev a bad secret to tell ye," he said to his wife, "an' I don't wan't yer ter let Milly know airy breath about it, nuther."
"Well, less yer what it air."
"Ye won't tell Milly?"
"Nairy word."
"Sarting an' sure?"
"Yes."
"Well, the Colonel he air shot."
"Shot?"
"He air."
"Shot?"
"He air, sarting."
"Goodness! an' who tole ye?"
"Thet banker, down ther' at town, Mr. Noble, he tole me. Hit wer' a feller 'at broke jail 'at done hit, a outdacious murderer, down yer at some other town, 'at wer a goin' ter be hung, an' some friend of his'n helped 'im ter break jail an' give 'im a pistol, an' he put out through the country. Hit seems, f'om what thet banker down yer says, 'at the Colonel were a galivantin' off to some lonesome ole house wi' a widder 'oman, 'an thet feller he wer in ther an' jes' shot 'im down."
"Goodness alive! Hit didn't kill 'im? The Colonel he hain't dead?"
"No, not dead, but he air bad off. He air laid up in bed. He hev got a hole through 'im."
Mrs. White began filling her pipe with great energy, her husband following her example. There was a space of silence, then he said:
"We hev got ter lie ter Milly fer all that's out. Hit'll never do fer her ter know it 'at the Colonel's hurt. She'd go 'stracted."
"She mought jest as well. Hit air no use er foolin', he's not goin' ter hev 'er."
"Hev her! Hevher! w'at upon the airth are ye talkin' 'bout?"
"She loves 'im."
"Milly?Shelove?Shelovehim?"
"Ye-es, she-e lo-ove hi-im!" drawled Mrs. White in a high key, wagging her head with each word.
White looked at her in utter consternation.
"Thet leetle silly gal lovehim? W'y she air no more'n a tom-tit er a hominy-bird ter be a lovin' the Colonel. Shorely she hain't gone an' been no sich a dang fool es thet!"
"She hev."
"How d'ye know?"
"Hain't I got no eyes, ner years?"
"Ye hev, sarting, an' a tongue."
"Now, smarty! Ye think ye've said somethin'!"
"Beg parding. But this yer stuff 'bout love, hit air a bad thing. I commence ter see into some er Milly's cur'us notions, ef thet air's the case. But dang ef I b'lieve sech a thing."
"Well, hit air the case, an' there's more ter come. Ye hain't hearn the wo'st part."
"An' what d'ye mean by thet?"
"I mean a heap, thet's w'at I mean."
"A heap er what?"
"Ef ye'll promerse me on yer wordy honor ter keep still tell I say at ye may go free, I'll tell yer w'at."
"I promerse, sarting."
"On yer wordy honor?"
"Yes."
"I'm erfeard ye'll go ter bein' a fool an' makin' a fuss 'fore I whant ye to. 'Cause ye see, hit mayn't be es bad es it mought."
As Mrs. White said this, White looked searchingly into her face, and what he saw there caused him to move uneasily and puff his tobacco smoke nervously.
"What is this yer what yer a hintin' at, anyhow?" he demanded, almost fiercely.
"I hain't erbleeged ter tell ye, an' I'll jest never do hit er tall, ef yer a goin' to be er fool an' high-rantin' aroun' like er eejet er somethin'."
"Didn't I promerse ye? Hain't thet enough? Ef hit tain't, what d'ye want me to do?"
"W'y I whant ye ter never say er word ter nobody 'bout w'at I tell ye, tell I say so, not a single word, nor do a thing 'bout hit of any kind. Do ye promerse?"
"Yes."
"On yer sacurd wordy honor?"
"Yes, dang it all, go on!"
"Now I'r a goin' ter tell ye somethin' at air orful, an' I don't know w'at to do erbout hit. But 'member, yer promersed me."
"Yes."
"Ye'll keep right still, an' never say a word, er do a single thing erbout hit?"
"Yes, I tole ye thet, long ago, 'bout a dozen times. Go on, an' say what yer a goin' to."
They were looking at each other, as people do who are about to experience some grave domestic crisis, Mrs. White's sallow face had suddenly taken on a hot flush, and her eyes looked worried and hollow.
"I d'know hardly how ter say hit with my mouth," she falteringly began. "I wush I never hed a been born'd, no how!"
Tears came into her eyes and her lips quivered.
White leaned over close to her, taking the pipe from his mouth, and said in a low, hoarse voice:
"What air the matter, wife?"
"Oh, a heap, a heap air the matter!" she sobbed.
White put his hand on her shoulder and brought his ear close to her lips.
"Tell me now, I want er know," he gently and gravely urged.
She whispered something in a rapid, sobbing way. Not more than a dozen words, but White's face shriveled as if with a great heat. He drew back from her and glared like a wild beast. Not a sound came from his writhing lips. His thin jaws quivered.
"'Member yer sacurd wordy honor," said the woman. "Ye promersed me, ye know."
He got up and tramped aimlessly around the room. Presently he took down his long flint-lock rifle from its rack over the door, and blew into its muzzle.
"Ye'll not brek yer wordy honor?" she insisted.
He put the gun back and came and sat down by her again. Just then Milly opened the door and entered the room carrying her coarse sun-bonnet in her hand. The exercise of fetching the ox down from his browsing place on the mountain side had put a bright color in her cheeks, and the wind had been tossing her pale, straw-gold hair so that it hung in elfish tangles about her neck and shoulders. She scarcely glanced at her father and mother.
"I hitched 'im out ther'," she said, referring to the ox, and passing on into the kitchen, went by that round-about way into Reynolds' room. She was very sly, but they heard her moving about, and knew she was once more re-arranging his things.
They looked at each other with something of that hopeless, dazed expression often observed in the eyes of the lower animals when hurt to death. Milly had left the outer door open and the cool mountain air poured in, rustling vaguely such loose articles as its current could stir.
Little more was said between the man and his wife, for there seemed nothing to say. A cloud had settled over their compressed, barren lives. Nothing in their natures was ready or flexible. They stared at fate, as they stared at each other, with the hopelessness of utter bewilderment.
Days went by, days of that languid, cloudless weather which comes to those mountains in early February, and the little household of the cabin went through the dry, spiritless round of duties, as if some spell had fallen upon them. True there was no marked visible change in their way of life; that was impossible. The limitations of human action nowhere else are set with such rigid immutability as they are, and perhaps always will be, in those cramped, unfertile, almost barren mountain regions of the South. No advance, no retrogression (save where here and there a railroad brings its little whisky centers), all is stagnant, dull, dry, hopeless poverty. Illiteracy, sterility, and that stubborn conservatism which is born of them, rest like an atmosphere around those poor people. They move and breathe and are stolidly content.
When a month had passed and Reynolds had not come, Milly, who had been kept in ignorance of the true state of affairs, began to show stronger signs of disappointment. She was restless and anxious, wandering about the house or leaning upon the gate, silent, sad-eyed, expectant and hopeless by turns, a source of deep trouble to her parents.
Now and then White attempted to cheer her up, but the words seemed to come dead and meaningless from his dry lips when he would say:
"He air a havin' a outdacious good time down ther', he air, an' he don't like ter quit off yet. Jest ye wait a day er two an' 'en ye'll see 'm a comin' up yer, Milly, a comin' up yer——" his voice would most usually fail him, but he would go on: "Yes, he air comin' back purty soon, when he hev hed all the shootin' he ken git."
Such statements, reiterated so often, lost a large part of their reassuring power, but Milly liked to hear them, and they were the best that he could do.
The day following that on which Reynolds received his wound brought letters to Moreton from his home in England, with intelligence of the sudden death of his father, and a request for him to come at once. This summons was so urgent and peremptory that nothing short of immediate departure could be thought of. So he went; but not without Cordelia's promise to become his wife, and not before he had reached a full understanding with Mr. Noble on the subject. It was hard for him to break away from the sweet meshes in which he was entangled, and hard for him to leave Reynolds lying there pale and emaciated, with little more than the breath of life in him; but he could not stay. He promised to come back within two months, little thinking at the time that he would never see Birmingham again, or at best for some years to come. But so it was. When he reached England he found that the best interests of his father's estate required the sale of the American property, and that he would have to give his entire attention to the home affairs.
Soon after Moreton's departure Mr. Noble, following the fashion of thrifty Americans, seized upon a most favorable offer and changed his place of abode to New York City, where he became the chief of a strong banking establishment in which he had hitherto held a subordinate interest. So that by the time that Reynolds was beginning to gather strength and to forge well past the point of danger from his hurt, he was left alone with the DeKay household. No invalid ever had more careful nursing or had thrown around him more charming influences. General DeKay gave his entire time and attention to ministering to the needs of his guest, appearing to feel that, in some way, as a host, he had been careless and thus to blame for the almost fatal misfortune to one of his party. He had formed a great liking for Reynolds, beginning no doubt with the young man's excellent shooting in the first day's sport, and made stronger by the manly qualities and magnetic influence he possessed in a marked degree; and this liking shaped itself during Reynolds' illness into an attachment very rarely engendered between men.
Mrs. Ransom, after the first great shock of the adventure had spent its force, exhibited a quiet courage and fortitude in strong contrast to her girlish weakness up at the ruin. She was tireless in her efforts, hopeful, even when the doctors doubted, and cheerful when every one else appeared ready to despair. She seemed to rely, with perfect confidence, on Reynolds' power to overcome the effect of the hurt, and when his enormous vitality began to assert itself, she went about the house with a gentle smile on her lips and a serene light in her beautiful eyes that told how her heart rejoiced. To know that he was under the same roof with her and that he loved her and that he was getting well, filled her with a contentment little short of perfect happiness. She was not an intellectual woman, as the phrase goes; she knew little of the world's philosophies and sophistries, but she was a true woman, full of feminine sentiment, cleverness and earnestness: shy, wary, elusive, and yet outright and artless, at times, as any child. Her beauty was of that rarer Southern type which is the opposite, in most features, of the fiery, passionate, voluptuous, tropical model which has been unjustly copied into art and literature as the representative one.
Beauty that shrinks from self-advertisement and delights in blooming in a sheltered place where the light is never over-strong, secretes such essence and fragrance, takes on such modest and delicate color, and holds about it an atmosphere so subtly individual, that it is not within the power of brush or pen to portray it so easily and effectually as it may that other and coarser and possibly more vital sort. It is this beauty that a pink ribbon to-day or a bunch of violets to-morrow, or any other simple bit of adornment, seems so perfectly suited to as to appear a part of the wearer. If Agnes Ransom was rather below the best womanly stature, the casual observer would not have noticed it, for her bearing was high and her development strikingly balanced, or rather, so evenly balanced as not to be striking, and her movements had the smoothness and rhythm of a perfect lyric. She was a woman whose love would be of lasting value to a true man, and to love whom would generate nothing lawless or short-lived in the masculine nature. If Cleopatra stands as one type of eastern beauty and passion, Ruth stands as another. A woman like Agnes Ransom may be taken as representing very fairly a certain class of Southern women who carry about with them, even in old age, a girlishness and simplicity, combined with a shyness and exclusiveness often mistaken for either prudery or unfriendliness. Plantation life is, to an extent, a lonely one in a climate where it is possible and pleasing to spend much time out of doors, and where all the influences of out-door nature tend to generate repose. One can not but observe what seems to be the effect of these influences in determining the physical and mental contour of the Southern girl. She is slender, well developed, lithe, graceful, rather inclined to repose, not strikingly intellectual, has strong domestic inclinations and bears about with her an air of provincial innocency and naïveté that has a marked flavor of the isolation and the freedom of the plantation. Mrs. Ransom had been very little in city society; a winter in New Orleans and a few visits to Savannah limiting her experience beyond that obtained from a residence in the dreamy, isolated little old place of her birth, Pensacola. She was not a Catholic, but the rudiments of her education had been obtained in a convent, and something of that demure quietness and quaintness of manner characteristic of the nun had remained with her. No doubt her short and trying married experience had modified her charms of person and character to an interesting extent, adding an inexpressible value to her beauty. A trace of lingering sadness, slight but always present, gave a mild emphasis to the purity of her face and the low music of her voice. Such a woman could not fail to touch the heart of a fervid and passionate man like Reynolds, whose whole nature had been introverted for years, and whose life had been so long repressed and stagnant.
During the half delirium of his fever, while the inflammation of his wound was at its worst, he lay and watched her come and go, his heated vision making an angel of her about whose ethereally lovely form halos and rainbow colors played fantastic tricks. Sometimes the apparition was double, and then one of the angels took the form of poor little Milly White, whose haunting, hungry face flashed with a heavenly light. But as he grew stronger and the fever left him, it was Agnes Ransom, the pale, sweet, earnest little woman, that controlled his every thought. He was content to lie there and patiently wait on nature's slow work so long as she hovered near. He felt securely fixed in her love. Every word, that in the stress of agony, she had uttered up there in the ruin, lay like some divine germ in his heart, growing and strengthening with every moment. He did not seek to have her say more and he said little himself. When she fetched flowers from the out-door conservatory, grand cream-white and blush camellias, roses, jasmine and violets, and arranged them on the odd little mahogany table by his bedside, he would whisper some tender phrase of thanks and love, and then she would sit by the window and read aloud to him some forgotten romance, such as is to be found in every ancient Southern library. Happy invalid! to have such balm for his wound! And so the days of his convalescence drew by, not in pain and fretfulness and impatience, but freighted with the richest gifts of love. He was like one in some favored nook of fairy land, realizing the tenderest visions of dreams.
One day, near the first of March, when he had grown able to sit propped up on a sofa by a window, whence he could look out over the broad landscape to where the sky came down to the tufted woods, or turn his eyes upon short silvery bits of the river, he said to her:
"I shall soon be able to go away. I feel my strength coming back with every breath."
She looked up from the needlework that she chanced just then to have in hand, and, with one of her slow, sweet smiles, shook her head.
"You must not begin to hurry. You must be patient, ever so patient. A moment of haste might cause a month of trouble. You can not afford to run any risks."
"Oh, I am patient," he replied. "I really find myself dreading to get well, selfish wretch that I am. Do you observe that I never take into consideration the immense trouble I am causing all of you? I think of nothing but the charmed life I am living—the sweet comforts I am receiving."
"I really believe you are getting well," she said. "When you talk in that strain I know you are but trying to hide a longing for your mountain air and the freedom of your hermitage."
"You do me wrong," he responded, with an earnest resonance in his voice. "I am so content to be as I am that when I go to sleep I do not even dream of being well."
"I am glad of it, for the doctor says that a quiet mind is the best salve for a healing wound."
"You had better not convince me that the doctor is right, for I might be tempted to get restless in order to prolong my period of delicious convalescence. Beware, if you don't want me lolling in easy chairs or propped on cushions and pillows for you to minister to all the season."
"Oh, I shall know it if you begin to take on the air of a professional invalid, and shall discharge you at once," she exclaimed, with a light laugh. "You won't be interesting as a—a sham! I hate shams and deceits and hidden things of every sort."
He looked at her with such a sudden, though barely noticeable change of expression in his eyes, that her quick intuition told her of some serious thought that had leaped, unbidden and unwelcome, into his mind.
"Hidden things," he said, with a peculiar smile. "Hidden things are often much better hidden than disclosed, and it is a mercy to the world that secretiveness is one of the strongest elements of human nature."
"Perhaps so," she said, growing grave and thoughtful. "But it would be so much better if there were never any need to exercise one's secretive faculties."
"Oh, a dormant faculty would be contrary to the economy of nature. Even confession catches a precious fragrance from the transgression long hidden away. Conscience would not even be ornamental, much less useful, if it bore no treasure of sins known to it only." He spoke in an airy, idle manner, but there went with his tones a ring of something not quite pleasing.
"You shock me," she exclaimed, in perfect earnestness, a cloud gathering in her eyes. "I hope you do not believe in such ugly and dangerous doctrines."
Immediately he gathered in his straying thoughts and crushed down the memory that was nagging at his consciousness. He felt with sudden clearness how easily he might turn away from him the confiding earnestness of this sensitive woman, and attract from her instead the interest born of a doubtful sort of fascination.
"I don't believe in them," he smilingly answered. "I was merely giving rein to an idle whim of the moment. On the contrary, I believe in perfect frankness in all things. Confession and forgiveness are together the safety-valve of society, as they are chief among the Christian virtues."
"Yes," she said, with a sort of relief in her tone. "There is as much to ask as to grant in that law. I could not quite respect myself if I should deceive any one, and I should feel it a triumph of duty over the strongest bias of my nature if I should thoroughly forgive one who had willfully deceived me."
"But you would forgive such an one," he hastily exclaimed, looking almost eagerly into her eyes.
"I should feel it incumbent upon me to try with all my might," she responded.
"One who would deceive you in a matter of any moment," he observed, with a warmth and vehemence that fairly startled her, "would deserve never to know forgiveness. He would be a monster outside the limitations of the Christian code."
"You shouldn't say that," she replied, a pink spot appearing on either cheek. "It would be a great deal worse to deceive some one more ignorant and much weaker than I. I have had many opportunities, denied to a large number of young women. I ought to know better how to evade the evils of falsehood and deceit."
Reynolds did not speak for some minutes. A swell of the fragrant south wind came through the window, and the first mocking bird of the season was singing in a magnolia tree at the further angle of the house. The drowsy charm of spring's earliest stirrings hovered in the sky, the air, the far-spreading fields and the shimmering glimpses of water. Something like the warning of a distant, scarcely audible voice was ringing in his ears. Below his dreamy happiness he could feel the beginnings of a vague uneasiness.
"I know, I know," he presently said, and he did not realize the almost brutal directness of his words, "yours was a bitter and burning disappointment. You deserved every thing that you hoped for, nothing that you received."
Her face grew pale and flushed at once, so that the spot on either cheek shone like carmine on a milk-white ground. She looked helplessly at him with her lips slightly parted and her eyes beaming, as if through a haze.
"Oh, I have pained you!" he exclaimed, with such a penitent and sorrowful intonation that she made a weak effort to smile. "Forgive me," he went on rapidly. "I seem in an unfortunate groove to-day. You know I would not wound you for the world."
"It relieves me that you have said what you have," she replied, after a pause, "for it tells me that you know my past. I wanted you to know, and I could not tell you. I did not see how I ever could begin or how——"
"Let it pass, let it go by like the wind," he murmured; "the future is all ours, we will make it as pure and lovely as the sky yonder, won't we, love?"
She crossed her hands in her lap and smiled on him with tears in her eyes. How grand and beautiful he appeared to her, reclining there, with his stalwart limbs outstretched and his manly face beaming with love. It was a quick, uncontrollable impulse that caused her to say, with a tender tremor in her voice:
"I wanted you to know that I loved him and that if he were alive now I would still love him, notwithstanding all that has happened."
"Yes, yes, that is all right, all right," he quickly responded. "It is sweet of you to feel so; but he is—he is not alive, you know, and—"
"Sometimes I have dreamed that it is not true—that he is not dead, but may be living yet. I never could get the particulars, the country was in such turmoil and he was so far away. Somehow the thought has haunted me that some day he will come back."
A strange grim look settled on Reynolds' face.
"He will never come back," he said.
"No," she replied, "I know he will not. It is foolish for me to allow the thought to enter my mind, but it will, and I can not drive it out."
"You must, Agnes, you must," he exclaimed with a rush of passion, "for my sake, love, for my sake."
She sat for a moment in silence, and then, as the tears welled up afresh in her tender eyes, she replied:
"You know how gladly I would, but I can not. It grows upon me since—since I have known you, and it will not be banished. Sometimes I find myself actually going to the door to look—"
"Hush! Oh, Agnes, I can not bear it," he cried, his face growing pale with extreme excitement. "My God! I shall have to tell you all."
"Tell me all?" she plaintively, inquiringly murmured, looking wonderingly at him, for something in his voice, his face, his manner had given to his words a mysterious power.
"Yes, I will tell you, though it drive me from you forever. I see that I must, that it is my duty." He paused and hesitated. "I know," he went on, "that I am rushing into the dark, but I trust you, Agnes, and I know you will do right—you will do no hasty thing. Remember, oh, remember how I love you."
"I can not understand—what is it you mean?—what—"
"No, you can not understand, but you will; it requires but a sentence." Again he faltered, and with his eyes fixed upon hers in a way that almost terrified her, seemed to be rapidly choosing his words before continuing.
"I am the man who fought with your husband, and—"
"No, no, no!" she exclaimed, holding her hands out toward him, her face ghastly.
"Yes," he resumed, "yes, it is so. He was to blame. He forced it upon me. I could not escape him. He would have killed me."
She let her hand fall in her lap and sat in a helpless, horrified attitude.
"You will hate me now, Agnes, but I have disclosed my secret and my dreadful duty is done. For the sake of my great love, say no bitter word."
She did not speak. How could she? Such a disclosure coming so suddenly and unexpectedly and from his lips, crushed her into that silence which is next to the silence of death.
He trembled now and his voice broke as he said:
"Do you see how hard it is? I refused to fight with him, because I did not believe in the practice of dueling, and then he forced an encounter in the street of San Antonio. I did every thing to avoid him, but I could not. I had to—to do what I did. Can you comprehend, Agnes?"
Still she remained speechless, motionless, bowed down and awfully pale.
"I don't want to make any unmanly excuses—I would spare him for your sake; but he was all in the wrong, and it would be——"
She stopped him with a quick gesture.
"I can not hear this now—I am too weak and excited. I must go. Excuse me. Imustgo." She arose almost with a spring and passed swiftly out of the room.
A feeling of desolation swept, like a breath of noisome air, through the breast of Reynolds. It was as if the whole world had become a desert and his life a dreary, void waste. And yet there was a sense of relief, as if a great load had been cast aside. A load indeed, but not all the load he carried. He tried in vain to feel that his whole duty was done. He hid his face in his hands, but he could not shut out the truth. His whole past life lay like a fiercely illuminated panorama under his inward gaze. Ah, by what a zig-zag path, through what torments, had been his course! And how he had always panted for happiness! Must it end here? He raised his head and smiled in a way that would have been terrible to see. He clenched his hands, his eyes flamed. All the melodramatic fierceness and fervor of the old South had come upon him. He was ready with desperate courage to fight all the world.
Mrs. Ransom kept her room for several days. The shock she had received from Reynolds' confession carried with it something more than the predicament might at first view imply. She had loved her husband with all that romantic fervor characteristic of girlhood in a warm climate. He was a handsome youth, bright, impulsive, brave, passionate, reckless, holding her to him by that strange fascination, which we all know but can not account for, exerted by the bad over the good. When he had appeared to desert her she was not surprised, and the news of his death by murder saddened without shocking her beyond endurance. With the lapse of time the effect of her trouble had softened and faded; but she had never ceased to remember with a warmth of devotion, more of the imagination than of the heart, perhaps, the lover and the husband of her romantic girlhood. To be sure it had grown to seem no more than a tender dream, that period of love and happiness ending in gloom, but its memory haunted her.
Reynolds had in some way thrilled her life with something more potent than that girlish adoration with which she had honored her boyish husband. His influence over her was so strange and so new to her experience, so sweet and yet so masterful, so overwhelming. His love had shown her how little she had ever known of love before, love in its highest and perfectest development.
But this dreadful discovery—this dark, strange confession, fell upon her just at the time when it could have the effect of darkening as with the shadow of both crime and death the whole of her life. It seemed a stroke of fate so malignant, so merciless, so far-reaching, so unutterably terrible.
Reynolds suffered, but not as she did. He was gloomy, impatient, restless, but his wound continued to heal rapidly and his bodily strength hourly increased. His physical constitution was so elastic and vigorous that nothing, it seemed, could long disturb its equilibrium. Mentally, however, he was a man of extremes, surging to the furthest stretch of the tether in whatever direction impelled. Now he was in the deepest pit of despondency. The whole light of life had gone out.
As if to render his state more dreary by contrast, the weather waxed with sudden fervor into all the golden splendor of a semi-tropical spring. A sprinkling of pale green tassels and tender leaflets appeared on certain deciduous trees, and the grasses peculiar to the region began to shoot up bright spikes in the warmer spots of the brown fallow fields. A dainty woody odor pervaded the air and the mocking birds and brown thrushes sang gayly in the old trees about the mansion. The sky assumed a hue of such rich, tender azure as is observed nowhere save in the low country in especially favorable weather. And the river (what stream is more beautiful than the Alabama?) seemed to go by with some rhythmic impulse but half repressed in its broad, almost silent current.
Left much alone during these days, Reynolds naturally enough indulged in retrospection; but his thoughts rarely went further back than to that tragedy in the far West which had let fall upon his life the almost insufferable shadow—a shadow rendered doubly dense by its effect upon his present prospects. Often his gloomy reflections stopped at the mountain cabin and lingered with its inmates. The face and form of Milly White, once so meaningless to him, were rapidly assuming a significance that would not be ignored. Even his deep passion for Agnes Ransom and the brooding dread of its hopelessness now, could not shut away the accusing, vaguely insistent eyes of the little mountain girl. The isolation of that lonely plantation house gave him no sense of separation from the sources of his trouble.
One day, it was quite early in the morning, Uncle Mono, the old negro musician, came along in the plat below the window of the room in which Reynolds sat, and chancing to glance up, doffed his dilapidated hat and said:
"Mo'nin', boss, how's ye comin' on dis mo'nin', sah?"
"Oh, very well, Uncle Mono, thank you," responded Reynolds, smiling mechanically down on the black, wrinkled face so queerly ornamented with its shocks of almost snow-white wool. "How is Uncle Mono?"
"Po'ly, boss, po'ly. Got some 'flictions in de spine ob de back, an' los' my ap'tite some. Ole dahkey no 'count no mo' no how. Done see all my bes' days long 'go, boss."
Mono had a long-handled hoe on his shoulder. He was a sturdy, well-fed looking old fellow, with any thing but unhappiness in his shrewd, deep-set eyes.
"What are you up to this morning, Mono?" Reynolds idly inquired, leaning at ease on the window-sill.
"Gwine ter plant some watermillions, boss; got some pow'ful good seed yah, got 'em outer a watermillion what wus a million fo' sho'. I allus hab a fine patch, boss, kase I neber plants no po' seed. Yo 'member de book say: 'Yo' reaps what yo' sow, an' ef yo' sows de win' yo' reaps de whirlwin' sho'.'"
"That is a true saying, Mono," said Reynolds. "It holds good in the matter of all kinds of crops."
"Now yo's a gittin' ter de marrer ob de subjec', boss. 'Tain't many young men see it dat way, do'. Dey mos'ly sow a little ob de win' jes' fo' ter see how it wo'k; but de way dey cotches hell fo' it at de end ob de row am cunnin' ter see. I knows all 'bout it, boss; I's ben dah,Ihas. 'Spec' you's ben poo'ty rapid, too, boss, yo' got de gallopin' cut o' de eye. I knows a rus'ler w'en I see 'im. Yo' no slow-goin' creeter, boss, yah! yah! yah! yah-h-h!" The old wretch chuckled and guffawed, as if his sayings had stirred his feelings boisterously. The active wrinkles in his face made it ludicrously expressive. Reynolds made no response.
"I kin tell w'en I see a young feller, whedder he like de spo't er sowin' a leetle win' an' kinder hanker fo' de 'citement ob de whirlwin'. Yo' no spring chicken, boss, yo's——"
"Be off, you old vagabond!" stormed General DeKay's military voice from somewhere among the shrubbery.
"Vag'bon', vag'bon', I's no vag'bon, no mo' 'n some white folks I knows ob," Uncle Mono muttered, very careful that the general should not hear him, and then shuffled away to plant his melon seeds.
The sort of flattery intended to be conveyed by the old negro's expressions fell with a peculiarly disagreeable effect upon the mind of Reynolds. It seemed quite devoid of the humor which Mono by his nods and winks and grimaces had meant to enforce. It had come like a direct, malignant, personal accusation, all the more disagreeable on account of its source. He gazed out across the little plat and through the tree-tops beyond toward the patches of blue sky, without noting any of the softness and beauty of the view. It chafed him immeasurably that he could see no escape from his tormenting situation. What was the use of struggling against the pressure? He felt all the verve and force of life slipping out. He was not weaker than most men whose passions are deep and turbulent and whose imagination is fervid and flexible. He passed easily from one extreme to another. He could not dally on the middle ground. Looking back now, he saw no good in all his past life, and looking forward he felt no expectation of good in the future. With his arm resting along the window-sill and his head drooping across it, he did not hear the light foot-fall on the floor. A hand was passed over his hair. When he turned Mrs. Ransom stood near him, with her sweet blue eyes bent with a measureless meaning of love upon him. He almost shrank from her at first, then he would have clasped her, but she eluded him and sat down in a chair beyond his reach.
"You are appearing so much better," she said, with a little constraint in her voice, but not disclosing any excitement. Her beautiful face was a trifle pale and there were faint, dusky lines under her eyes.
"Yes, I am nearly well, I hope," he replied, abetting her in the effort to make the occasion have a common-place appearance.