Howbeit the sun shone cheerfully over the Bar the next morning and the next; the breath of life and activity was in the air; the settlement never had been more prosperous, and the yield from the opened placers on the drained river-bed that week was enormous. The Brothers Wayne were said to be “rolling in gold.” It was thought to be consistent with Madison Wayne's nature that there was no trace of good fortune in his face or manner—rather that he had become more nervous, restless, and gloomy. This was attributed to the joylessness of avarice as contrasted with the spendthrift gayety of the more liberal Arthur, and he was feared and RESPECTED as a miser. His long, solitary walks around the promontory, his incessant watchfulness, his reticence when questioned, were all recognized as the indications of a man whose soul was absorbed in money-getting. The reverence they failed to yield to his religious isolation they were willing to freely accord to his financial abstraction. But Mr. McGee was not so deceived. Overtaking him one day under the fringe of willows, he characteristically chided him with absenting himself from Mrs. McGee and her house since their last interview.
“I reckon you did not harbor malice in your Christianity,” he said; “but it looks mighty like ez if ye was throwing off on Safie and me on account of what I said.”
In vain Madison gloomily and almost sternly protested.
McGee looked him all over with his clear measuring eye, and for some minutes was singularly silent. At last he said slowly: “I've been thinkin' suthin' o' goin' down to 'Frisco, and I'd be a heap easier in my mind ef you'd promise to look arter Safie now and then.”
“You surely are not going to leave her here ALONE?” said Wayne roughly.
“Why not?”
For an instant Wayne hesitated. Then he burst out. “For a hundred reasons! If she ever wanted your protection, before, she surely does now. Do you suppose the Bar is any less heathen or more regenerated than it was when you thought it necessary to guard her with your revolver? Man! It is a hundred times worse than then! The new claims have filled it with spying adventurers—with wolves like Hamlin and his friends—idolaters who would set up Baal and Ashteroth here—and fill your tents with the curses of Sodom!”
Perhaps it was owing to the Scriptural phrasing, perhaps it was from some unusual authority of the man's manner, but a look of approving relief and admiration came into McGee's clear eyes.
“And YOU'RE just the man to tackle 'em,” he said, clapping his hand on Wayne's shoulder. “That's your gait—keep it up! But,” he added, in a lower voice, “me and my revolver are played out.” There was a strangeness in the tone that arrested Wayne's attention. “Yes,” continued McGee, stroking his beard slowly, “men like me has their day, and revolvers has theirs; the world turns round and the Bar fills up, and this yer river changes its course—and it's all in the day's work. You understand what I mean—you follow me? And if anything should happen to me—not that it's like to; but it's in the way o' men—I want you to look arter Safie. It ain't every woman ez has two men, ez like and unlike, to guard her. You follow me—you understand what I mean, don't you?” With these words he parted somewhat abruptly from Wayne, turning into the steep path to the promontory crest and leaving his companion lost in gloomy abstraction. The next day Alexander McGee had departed on a business trip to San Francisco.
In his present frame of mind, with his new responsibility and the carrying out of a plan which he had vaguely conceived might remove the terrible idea that had taken possession of him, Madison Wayne was even relieved when his brother also announced his intention of going to Angel's for a few days.
For since his memorable interview with McGee he had been convinced that Safie had been clandestinely visited by some one. Whether it was the thoughtless and momentary indiscretion of a willful woman, or the sequel to some deliberately planned intrigue, did not concern him so much as the falsity of his own position, and the conniving lie by which he had saved her and her lover. That at this crucial moment he had failed to “testify” to guilt and wickedness; that he firmly believed—such is the inordinate vanity of the religious zealot—that he had denied Him in his effort to shield HER; and that he had broken faith with the husband who had entrusted to him the custody of his wife's honor, seemed to him more terrible than her faithlessness. In his first horror he had dreaded to see her, lest her very confession—he knew her reckless frankness towards himself—should reveal to him the extent of his complicity. But since then, and during her husband's absence, he had convinced himself that it was his duty to wrestle and strive with her weak spirit, to implore her to reveal her new intrigue to her husband, and then he would help her to sue for his forgiveness. It was a part of the inconsistency of his religious convictions; in his human passion he was perfectly unselfish, and had already forgiven her the offense against himself. He would see her at once!
But it happened to be a quiet, intense night, with the tremulous opulence of a full moon that threw quivering shafts of light like summer lightning over the blue river, and laid a wonderful carpet of intricate lace along the path that wound through the willows to the crest. There was the dry, stimulating dust and spice of heated pines from below; the languorous odors of syringa; the faint, feminine smell of southernwood, and the infinite mystery of silence. This silence was at times softly broken with the tender inarticulate whisper of falling leaves, broken sighs from the tree-tops, and the languid stretching of wakened and unclasping boughs. Madison Wayne had not, alas! taken into account this subtle conspiracy of Night and Nature, and as he climbed higher, his steps began to falter with new and strange sensations. The rigidity of purpose which had guided the hard religious convictions that always sustained him, began to relax. A tender sympathy stole over him; a loving mercy to himself as well as others stole into his heart. He thought of HER as she had nestled at his side, hand in hand, upon the moonlit veranda of her father's house, before his hard convictions had chilled and affrighted her. He thought of her fresh simplicity, and what had seemed to him her wonderful girlish beauty, and lo! in a quick turn of the path he stood breathless and tremulous before the house. The moonbeams lay tenderly upon the peaceful eaves; the long blossoms of the Madeira vine seemed sleeping also. The pink flush of the Cherokee rose in the unreal light had become chastely white.
But he was evidently too late for an interview. The windows were blank in the white light; only one—her bedroom—showed a light behind the lowered muslin blind. Her draped shadow once or twice passed across it. He was turning away with soft steps and even bated breath when suddenly he stopped. The exaggerated but unmistakable shadow of a man stood beside her on the blind.
With a fierce leap as of a maniac, he was at the door, pounding, rattling, and uttering hoarse and furious outcries. Even through his fury he heard quickened footsteps—her light, reckless, half-hysterical laugh—a bound upon the staircase—the hurried unbolting and opening of distant doors, as the lighter one with which he was struggling at last yielded to his blind rage, and threw him crashing into the sitting-room. The back door was wide open. He could hear the rustling and crackling of twigs and branches in different directions down the hillside, where the fugitives had separated as they escaped. And yet he stood there for an instant, dazed and wondering, “What next?”
His eyes fell upon McGee's rifle standing upright in the corner. It was a clean, beautiful, precise weapon, even to the unprofessional eye, its long, laminated hexagonal barrel taking a tenderer blue in the moonlight. He snatched it up. It was capped and loaded. Without a pause he dashed down the hill.
Only one thought was in his mind now—the crudest, simplest duty. He was there in McGee's place; he should do what McGee would do. God had abandoned him, but McGee's rifle remained.
In a few minutes' downward plunging he had reached the river bank. The tranquil silver surface quivered and glittered before him. He saw what he knew he would see, the black target of a man's head above it, making for the Bar. He took deliberate aim and fired. There was no echo to that sharp detonation; a distant dog barked, there was a slight whisper in the trees beside him, that was all! But the head of the man was no longer visible, and the liquid silver filmed over again, without a speck or stain.
He shouldered the rifle, and with the automatic action of men in great crises returned slowly and deliberately to the house and carefully replaced the rifle in its old position. He had no concern for the miserable woman who had fled; had she appeared before him at the moment, he would not have noticed her. Yet a strange instinct—it seemed to him the vaguest curiosity—made him ascend the stairs and enter her chamber. The candle was still burning on the table with that awful unconsciousness and simplicity of detail which makes the scene of real tragedy so terrible. Beside it lay a belt and leather pouch. Madison Wayne suddenly dashed forward and seized it, with a wild, inarticulate cry; staggered, fell over the chair, rose to his feet, blindly groped his way down the staircase, burst into the road, and, hugging the pouch to his bosom, fled like a madman down the hill.
The body of Arthur Wayne was picked up two days later a dozen miles down the river. Nothing could be more evident and prosaic than the manner in which he had met his fate. His body was only partly clothed, and the money pouch and belt, which had been securely locked next his skin, after the fashion of all miners, was gone. He was known to have left the Bar with a considerable sum of money; he was undoubtedly dogged, robbed, and murdered during his journey on the river bank by the desperadoes who were beginning to infest the vicinity. The grief and agony of his only brother, sole survivor of that fraternal and religious partnership so well known to the camp, although shown only by a grim and speechless melancholy,—broken by unintelligible outbursts of religious raving,—was so real, that it affected even the callous camp. But scarcely had it regained its feverish distraction, before it was thrilled by another sensation. Alexander McGee had fallen from the deck of a Sacramento steamboat in the Straits of Carquinez, and his body had been swept out to sea. The news had apparently been first to reach the ears of his devoted wife, for when the camp—at this lapse of the old prohibition—climbed to her bower with their rude consolations, the house was found locked and deserted. The fateful influence of the promontory had again prevailed, the grim record of its seclusion was once more unbroken.
For with it, too, drooped and faded the fortunes of the Bar. Madison Wayne sold out his claim, endowed the church at the Cross Roads with the proceeds, and the pulpit with his grim, hopeless, denunciatory presence. The first rains brought a freshet to the Bar. The river leaped the light barriers that had taken the place of Wayne's peaceful engines, and regained the old channel. The curse that the Rev. Madison Wayne had launched on this riverside Sodom seemed to have been fulfilled. But even this brought no satisfaction to the gloomy prophet, for it was presently known that he had abandoned his terror-stricken flock to take the circuit as revivalist preacher and camp-meeting exhorter, in the rudest and most lawless of gatherings. Desperate ruffians writhed at his feet in impotent terror or more impotent rage; murderers and thieves listened to him with blanched faces and set teeth, restrained only by a more awful fear. Over and over again he took his life with his Bible into his own hands when he rose above the excited multitude; he was shot at, he was rail-ridden, he was deported, but never silenced. And so, sweeping over the country, carrying fear and frenzy with him, scouting life and mercy, and crushing alike the guilty and innocent, he came one Sabbath to a rocky crest of the Sierras—the last tattered and frayed and soiled fringe of civilization on the opened tract of a great highway. And here he was to “testify,” as was his wont.
But not as he expected. For as he stood up on a boulder above the thirty or forty men sitting or lying upon other rocks and boulders around him, on the craggy mountain shelf where they had gathered, a man also rose, elbowed past them, and with a hurried impulse tried to descend the declivity. But a cry was suddenly heard from others, quick and clamoring, which called the whole assembly to its feet, and it was seen that the fugitive had in some blundering way fallen from the precipice.
He was brought up cruelly maimed and mangled, his ribs crushed, and one lung perforated, but still breathing and conscious. He had asked to see the preacher. Death impending, and even then struggling with his breath, made this request imperative. Madison Wayne stopped the service, and stalked grimly and inflexibly to where the dying man lay. But there he started.
“McGee!” he said breathlessly.
“Send these men away,” said McGee faintly. “I've got suthin' to tell you.”
The men drew back without a word. “You thought I was dead,” said McGee, with eyes still undimmed and marvelously clear. “I orter bin, but it don't need no doctor to say it ain't far off now. I left the Bar to get killed; I tried to in a row, but the fellows were skeert to close with me, thinkin' I'd shoot. My reputation was agin me, there! You follow me? You understand what I mean?”
Kneeling beside him now and grasping both his hands, the changed and horror-stricken Wayne gasped, “But”—
“Hold on! I jumped off the Sacramento boat—I was goin' down the third time—they thought on the boat I was gone—they think so now! But a passin' fisherman dived for me. I grappled him—he was clear grit and would have gone down with me, but I couldn't let him die too—havin' so to speak no cause. You follow me—you understand me? I let him save me. But it was all the same, for when I got to 'Frisco I read as how I was drowned. And then I reckoned it was all right, and I wandered HERE, where I wasn't known—until I saw you.”
“But why should you want to die?” said Wayne, almost fiercely. “What right have you to die while others—double-dyed and blood-stained, are condemned to live, 'testify,' and suffer?”
The dying man feebly waved a deprecation with his maimed hand, and even smiled faintly. “I knew you'd say that. I knew what you'd think about it, but it's all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I was in the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the man who had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin' her, as you did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I was makin' YOU suffer and breakin' HER heart—for all she tried to be gentle and gay.”
“Great God in heaven! Will you stop!” said Wayne, springing to his feet in agony. A frightened look—the first that any one had ever seen in the clear eyes of the Bell-ringer of Angel's—passed over them, and he murmured tremulously: “All right—I'm stoppin'!”
So, too, was his heart, for the wonderful eyes were now slowly glazing. Yet he rallied once more—coming up again the third time as it seemed to Wayne—and his lips moved slowly. The preacher threw himself despairingly on the ground beside him.
“Speak, brother! For God's sake, speak!”
It was his last whisper—so faint it might have been the first of his freed soul. But he only said:—
“You're—followin'—me? You—understand—what—I—mean?”
The vast dining-room of the Crustacean Hotel at Greyport, U. S., was empty and desolate. It was so early in the morning that there was a bedroom deshabille in the tucked-up skirts and bare legs of the little oval breakfast-tables as they had just been left by the dusting servants. The most stirring of travelers was yet abed, the most enterprising of first-train catchers had not yet come down; there was a breath of midsummer sleep still in the air; through the half-opened windows that seemed to be yawning, the pinkish blue Atlantic beyond heaved gently and slumberously, and drowsy early bathers crept into it as to bed. Yet as I entered the room I saw that one of the little tables in the corner was in reality occupied by a very small and very extraordinary child. Seated in a high chair, attended by a dreamily abstracted nurse on one side, an utterly perfunctory negro waiter on the other, and an incongruous assortment of disregarded viands before him, he was taking—or, rather, declining—his solitary breakfast. He appeared to be a pale, frail, but rather pretty boy, with a singularly pathetic combination of infant delicacy of outline and maturity of expression. His heavily fringed eyes expressed an already weary and discontented intelligence, and his willful, resolute little mouth was, I fancied, marked with lines of pain at either corner. He struck me as not only being physically dyspeptic, but as morally loathing his attendants and surroundings.
My entrance did not disturb the waiter, with whom I had no financial relations; he simply concealed an exaggerated yawn professionally behind his napkin until my own servitor should appear. The nurse slightly awoke from her abstraction, shoved the child mechanically,—as if starting up some clogged machinery,—said, “Eat your breakfast, Johnnyboy,” and subsided into her dream. I think the child had at first some faint hope of me, and when my waiter appeared with my breakfast he betrayed some interest in my selection, with a view of possible later appropriation, but, as my repast was simple, that hope died out of his infant mind. Then there was a silence, broken at last by the languid voice of the nurse:—
“Try some milk then—nice milk.”
“No! No mik! Mik makes me sick—mik does!”
In spite of the hurried infantine accent the protest was so emphatic, and, above all, fraught with such pent-up reproach and disgust, that I turned about sympathetically. But Johnnyboy had already thrown down his spoon, slipped from his high chair, and was marching out of the room as fast as his little sandals would carry him, with indignation bristling in every line of the crisp bows of his sash.
I, however, gathered from Mr. Johnson, my waiter, that the unfortunate child owned a fashionable father and mother, one or two blocks of houses in New York, and a villa at Greyport, which he consistently and intelligently despised. That he had imperiously brought his parents here on account of his health, and had demanded that he should breakfast alone in the big dining-room. That, however, he was not happy. “Nuffin peahs to agree wid him, Sah, but he doan' cry, and he speaks his mind, Sah; he speaks his mind.”
Unfortunately, I did not keep Johnnyboy's secret, but related the scene I had witnessed to some of the lighter-hearted Crustaceans of either sex, with the result that his alliterative protest became a sort of catchword among them, and that for the next few mornings he had a large audience of early breakfasters, who fondly hoped for a repetition of his performance. I think that Johnnyboy for the time enjoyed this companionship, yet without the least affectation or self-consciousness—so long as it was unobtrusive. It so chanced, however, that the Rev. Mr. Belcher, a gentleman with bovine lightness of touch, and a singular misunderstanding of childhood, chose to presume upon his paternal functions. Approaching the high chair in which Johnnyboy was dyspeptically reflecting, with a ponderous wink at the other guests, and a fat thumb and forefinger on Johnnyboy's table, he leaned over him, and with slow, elephantine playfulness said:—
“And so, my dear young friend, I understand that 'mik makes you sick—mik does.'”
Anything approaching to the absolute likeness of this imitation of Johnnyboy's accents it is impossible to conceive. Possibly Johnnyboy felt it. But he simply lifted his lovely lashes, and said with great distinctness:—
“Mik don't—you devil!”
After this, closely as it had knitted us together, Johnnyboy's morning presence was mysteriously withdrawn. It was later pointed out to us by Mr. Belcher, upon the veranda, that, although Wealth had its privileges, it was held in trust for the welfare of Mankind, and that the children of the Rich could not too early learn the advantages of Self-restraint and the vanity of a mere gratification of the Senses. Early and frequent morning ablutions, brisk morning toweling, half of a Graham biscuit in a teacup of milk, exercise with the dumb-bells, and a little rough-and-tumble play in a straw hat, check apron, and overalls would eventually improve that stamina necessary for his future Position, and repress a dangerous cerebral activity and tendency to give way to—He suddenly stopped, coughed, and absolutely looked embarrassed. Johnnyboy, a moving cloud of white pique, silk, and embroidery, had just turned the corner of the veranda. He did not speak, but as he passed raised his blue-veined lids to the orator. The look of ineffable scorn and superiority in those beautiful eyes surpassed anything I had ever seen. At the next veranda column he paused, and, with his baby thumbs inserted in his silk sash, again regarded him under his half-dropped lashes as if he were some curious animal, and then passed on. But Belcher was silenced for the second time.
I think I have said enough to show that Johnnyboy was hopelessly worshiped by an impressible and illogical sex. I say HOPELESSLY, for he slipped equally from the proudest silken lap and the humblest one of calico, and carried his eyelashes and small aches elsewhere. I think that a secret fear of his alarming frankness, and his steady rejection of the various tempting cates they offered him, had much to do with their passion. “It won't hurt you, dear,” said Miss Circe, “and it's so awfully nice. See!” she continued, putting one of the delicacies in her own pretty mouth with every assumption of delight. “It's SO good!” Johnnyboy rested his elbows on her knees, and watched her with a grieved and commiserating superiority. “Bimeby, you'll have pains in youse tommick, and you'll be tookt to bed,” he said sadly, “and then you'll—have to dit up and”—But as it was found necessary here to repress further details, he escaped other temptation.
Two hours later, as Miss Circe was seated in the drawing-room with her usual circle of enthusiastic admirers around her, Johnnyboy—who was issued from his room for circulation, two or three times a day, as a genteel advertisement of his parents—floated into the apartment in a new dress and a serious demeanor. Sidling up to Miss Circe he laid a phial—evidently his own pet medicine—on her lap, said, “For youse tommikake to-night,” and vanished. Yet I have reason to believe that this slight evidence of unusual remembrance on Johnnyboy's part more than compensated for its publicity, and for a few days Miss Circe was quite “set up” by it.
It was through some sympathy of this kind that I first gained Johnnyboy's good graces. I had been presented with a small pocket case of homoeopathic medicines, and one day on the beach I took out one of the tiny phials and, dropping two or three of the still tinier pellets in my hand, swallowed them. To my embarrassment, a small hand presently grasped my trouser-leg. I looked down; it was Johnnyboy, in a new and ravishing smuggler suit, with his questioning eyes fixed on mine.
“Howjer do dat?”
“Eh?”
“Wajer do dat for?”
“That?—Oh, that's medicine. I've got a headache.”
He searched the inmost depths of my soul with his wonderful eyes. Then, after a pause, he held out his baby palm.
“You kin give Johnny some.”
“But you haven't got headache—have you?”
“Me alluz has.”
“Not ALWAYS.”
He nodded his head rapidly. Then added slowly, and with great elaboration, “Et mo'nins, et affernoons, et nights, 'nd mo'nins adain. 'N et becker” (i. e., breakfast).
There was no doubt it was the truth. Those eyes did not seem to be in the habit of lying. After all, the medicine could not hurt him. His nurse was at a little distance gazing absently at the sea. I sat down on a bench, and dropped a few of the pellets into his palm. He ate them seriously, and then turned around and backed—after the well-known appealing fashion of childhood—against my knees. I understood the movement—although it was unlike my idea of Johnnyboy. However, I raised him to my lap—with the sensation of lifting a dozen lace-edged handkerchiefs, and with very little more effort—where he sat silently for a moment, with his sandals crossed pensively before him.
“Wouldn't you like to go and play with those children?” I asked, pointing to a group of noisy sand levelers not far away.
“No!” After a pause, “You wouldn't neither.”
“Why?”
“Hediks.”
“But,” I said, “perhaps if you went and played with them and ran up and down as they do, you wouldn't have headache.”
Johnnyboy did not answer for a moment; then there was a perceptible gentle movement of his small frame. I confess I felt brutally like Belcher. He was getting down.
Once down he faced me, lifted his frank eyes, said, “Do way and play den,” smoothed down his smuggler frock, and rejoined his nurse.
But although Johnnyboy afterwards forgave my moral defection, he did not seem to have forgotten my practical medical ministration, and our brief interview had a surprising result. From that moment he confounded his parents and doctors by resolutely and positively refusing to take any more of their pills, tonics, or drops. Whether from a sense of loyalty to me, or whether he was not yet convinced of the efficacy of homoeopathy, he did not suggest a substitute, declare his preferences, or even give his reasons, but firmly and peremptorily declined his present treatment. And, to everybody's astonishment, he did not seem a bit the worse for it.
Still he was not strong, and his continual aversion to childish sports and youthful exercise provoked the easy criticism of that large part of humanity who are ready to confound cause and effect, and such brief moments as the Sluysdaels could spare him from their fashionable duties were made miserable to them by gratuitous suggestions and plans for their child's improvement. It was noticeable, however, that few of them were ever offered to Johnnyboy personally. He had a singularly direct way of dealing with them, and a precision of statement that was embarrassing.
One afternoon, Jack Bracy drove up to the veranda of the Crustacean with a smart buggy and spirited thoroughbred for Miss Circe's especial driving, and his own saddle-horse on which he was to accompany her. Jack had dismounted, a groom held his saddle-horse until the young lady should appear, and he himself stood at the head of the thoroughbred. As Johnnyboy, leaning against the railing, was regarding the turnout with ill-concealed disdain, Jack, in the pride of his triumph over his rivals, good-humoredly offered to put him in the buggy, and allow him to take the reins. Johnnyboy did not reply.
“Come along!” continued Jack, “it will do you a heap of good! It's better than lazing there like a girl! Rouse up, old man!”
“Me don't like that geegee,” said Johnnyboy calmly. “He's a silly fool.”
“You're afraid,” said Jack.
Johnnyboy lifted his proud lashes, and toddled to the steps. Jack received him in his arms, swung him into the seat, and placed the slim yellow reins in his baby hands.
“Now you feel like a man, and not like a girl!” said Jack. “Eh, what? Oh, I beg your pardon.”
For Miss Circe had appeared—had absolutely been obliged to wait a whole half-minute unobserved—and now stood there a dazzling but pouting apparition. In eagerly turning to receive her, Jack's foot slipped on the step, and he fell. The thoroughbred started, gave a sickening plunge forward, and was off! But so, too, was Jack, the next moment, on his own horse, and before Miss Circe's screams had died away.
For two blocks on Ocean Avenue, passersby that afternoon saw a strange vision. A galloping horse careering before a light buggy, in which a small child, seated upright, was grasping the tightened reins. But so erect and composed was the little face and figure—albeit as white as its own frock—that for an instant they did not grasp its awful significance. Those further along, however, read the whole awful story in the drawn face and blazing eyes of Jack Bracy as he, at last, swung into the Avenue. For Jack had the brains as well as the nerve of your true hero, and, knowing the dangerous stimulus of a stern chase to a frightened horse, had kept a side road until it branched into the Avenue. So furious had been his pace, and so correct his calculation, that he ranged alongside of the runaway even as it passed, grasped the reins, and, in half a block, pulled up on even wheels.
“I never saw such pluck in a mite like that,” he whispered afterwards to his anxious auditory. “He never dropped those ribbons, by G—, until I got alongside, and then he just hopped down and said, as short and cool as you please, 'Dank you!'”
“Me didn't,” uttered a small voice reproachfully.
“Didn't you, dear! What DID you say then, darling?” exclaimed a sympathizing chorus.
“Me said: 'Damn you!' Me don't like silly fool geegees. Silly fool geegees make me sick—silly fool geegees do!”
Nevertheless, in spite of this incident, the attempts at Johnnyboy's physical reformation still went on. More than that, it was argued by some complacent casuists that the pluck displayed by the child was the actual result of this somewhat heroic method of taking exercise, and NOT an inherent manliness distinct from his physical tastes. So he was made to run when he didn't want to—to dance when he frankly loathed his partners—to play at games that he despised. His books and pictures were taken away; he was hurried past hoardings and theatrical posters that engaged his fancy; the public was warned against telling him fairy tales, except those constructed on strictly hygienic principles. His fastidious cleanliness was rebuked, and his best frocks taken away—albeit at a terrible sacrifice of his parents' vanity—to suit the theories of his critics. How long this might have continued is not known—for the theory and practice were suddenly arrested by another sensation.
One morning a children's picnic party was given on a rocky point only accessible at certain states of the tide, whither they were taken in a small boat under the charge of a few hotel servants, and, possibly as part of his heroic treatment, Johnnyboy, who was included in the party, was not allowed to be attended by his regular nurse.
Whether this circumstance added to his general disgust of the whole affair, and his unwillingness to go, I cannot say, but it is to be regretted, since the omission deprived Johnnyboy of any impartial witness to what subsequently occurred. That he was somewhat roughly handled by several of the larger children appeared to be beyond doubt, although there was conflicting evidence as to the sequel. Enough that at noon screams were heard in the direction of certain detached rocks on the point, and the whole party proceeding thither found three of the larger boys on the rocks, alone and cut off by the tide, having been left there, as they alleged, by Johnnyboy, WHO HAD RUN AWAY WITH THE BOAT. They subsequently admitted that THEY had first taken the boat and brought Johnnyboy with them, “just to frighten him,” but they adhered to the rest. And certainly Johnnyboy and the boat were nowhere to be found. The shore was communicated with, the alarm was given, the telegraph, up and down the coast trilled with excitement, other boats were manned—consternation prevailed.
But that afternoon the captain of the “Saucy Jane,” mackerel fisher, lying off the point, perceived a derelict “Whitehall” boat drifting lazily towards the Gulf Stream. On boarding it he was chagrined to find the expected flotsam already in the possession of a very small child, who received him with a scornful reticence as regarded himself and his intentions, and some objurgation of a person or persons unknown. It was Johnnyboy. But whether he had attempted the destruction of the three other boys by “marooning” them upon the rocks—as their parents firmly believed—or whether he had himself withdrawn from their company simply because he did not like them, was never known. Any further attempt to improve his education by the roughing gregarious process was, however, abandoned. The very critics who had counseled it now clamored for restraint and perfect isolation. It was ably pointed out by the Rev. Mr. Belcher that the autocratic habits begotten by wealth and pampering should be restricted, and all intercourse with their possessor promptly withheld.
But the season presently passed with much of this and other criticism, and the Sluysdaels passed too, carrying Johnnyboy and his small aches and long eyelashes beyond these Crustacean voices, where it was to be hoped there was peace. I did not hear of him again for five years, and then, oddly enough, from the lips of Mr. Belcher on the deck of a transatlantic steamer, as he was being wafted to Europe for his recreation by the prayers and purses of a grateful and enduring flock. “Master John Jacob Astor Sluysdael,” said Mr. Belcher, speaking slowly, with great precision of retrospect, “was taken from his private governess—I may say by my advice—and sent to an admirable school in New York, fashioned upon the English system of Eton and Harrow, and conducted by English masters from Oxford and Cambridge. Here—I may also say at my suggestion—he was subjected to the wholesome discipline equally of his schoolmates and his masters; in fact, sir, as you are probably aware, the most perfect democracy that we have yet known, in which the mere accidents of wealth, position, luxury, effeminacy, physical degeneration, and over-civilized stimulation, are not recognized. He was put into compulsory cricket, football, and rounders. As an undersized boy he was subjected to that ingenious preparation for future mastership by the pupillary state of servitude known, I think, as 'fagging.' His physical inertia was stimulated and quickened, and his intellectual precocity repressed, from time to time, by the exuberant playfulness of his fellow-students, which occasionally took the form of forced ablutions and corporal discomfort, and was called, I am told, 'hazing.' It is but fair to state that our young friend had some singular mental endowments, which, however, were promptly checked to repress the vanity and presumption that would follow.” The Rev. Mr. Belcher paused, closed his eyes resignedly, and added, “Of course, you know the rest.”
“Indeed, I do not,” I said anxiously.
“A most deplorable affair—indeed, a most shocking incident! It was hushed up, I believe, on account of the position of his parents.” He glanced furtively around, and in a lower and more impressive voice said, “I am not myself a believer in heredity, and I am not personally aware that there was a MURDERER among the Sluysdael ancestry, but it seems that this monstrous child, in some clandestine way, possessed himself of a huge bowie-knife, sir, and on one of those occasions actually rushed furiously at the larger boys—his innocent play-fellows—and absolutely forced them to flee in fear of their lives. More than that, sir, a LOADED REVOLVER was found in his desk, and he boldly and shamelessly avowed his intention to eviscerate, or—to use his own revolting language—'to cut the heart out' of the first one who again 'laid a finger on him.'” He paused again, and, joining his two hands together with the fingers pointing to the deck, breathed hard and said, “His instantaneous withdrawal from the school was a matter of public necessity. He was afterwards taken, in the charge of a private tutor, to Europe, where, I trust, we shall NOT meet.”
I could not resist saying cheerfully that, at least, Johnnyboy had for a short time made it lively for the big boys.
The Rev. Mr. Belcher rose slowly, but painfully, said with a deeply grieved expression, “I don't think that I entirely follow you,” and moved gently away.
The changes of youth are apt to be more bewildering than those of age, and a decade scarcely perceptible in an old civilization often means utter revolution to the new. It did not seem strange to me, therefore, on meeting Jack Bracy twelve years after, to find that he had forgotten Miss Circe, or that SHE had married, and was living unhappily with a middle-aged adventurer by the name of Jason, who was reputed to have had domestic relations elsewhere. But although subjugated and exorcised, she at least was reminiscent. To my inquiries about the Sluysdaels, she answered with a slight return of her old vivacity:—
“Ah, yes, dear fellow, he was one of my greatest admirers.”
“He was about four years old when you knew him, wasn't he?” suggested Jason meanly. “Yes, they usually WERE young, but so kind of you to recollect them. Young Sluysdael,” he continued, turning to me, “is—but of course you know that disgraceful story.”
I felt that I could stand this no longer. “Yes,” I said indignantly, “I know all about the school, and I don't call his conduct disgraceful either.”
Jason stared. “I don't know what you mean about the school,” he returned. “I am speaking of his stepfather.”
“His STEPFATHER!”
“Yes; his father, Van Buren Sluysdael, died, you know—a year after they left Greyport. The widow was left all the money in trust for Johnny, except about twenty-five hundred a year which he was in receipt of as a separate income, even as a boy. Well, a glib-tongued parson, a fellow by the name of Belcher, got round the widow—she was a desperate fool—and, by Jove! made her marry him. He made ducks and drakes of not only her money, but Johnny's too, and had to skip to Spain to avoid the trustees. And Johnny—for the Sluysdaels are all fools or lunatics—made over his whole separate income to that wretched, fashionable fool of a mother, and went into a stockbroker's office as a clerk.”
“And walks to business before eight every morning, and they say even takes down the shutters and sweeps out,” broke in Circe impulsively. “Works like a slave all day, wears out his old clothes, has given up his clubs and amusements, and shuns society.”
“But how about his health?” I asked. “Is he better and stronger?”
“I don't know,” said Circe, “but he LOOKS as beautiful as Endymion.”
At his bank, in Wall Street, Bracy that afternoon confirmed all that Jason had told me of young Sluysdael. “But his temper?” I asked. “You remember his temper—surely.”
“He's as sweet as a lamb, never quarrels, never whines, never alludes to his lost fortune, and is never put out. For a youngster, he's the most popular man in the street. Shall we nip round and see him?”
“By all means.”
“Come. It isn't far.”
A few steps down the crowded street we dived into a den of plate-glass windows, of scraps of paper, of rattling, ticking machines, more voluble and excited than the careworn, abstracted men who leaned over them. But “Johnnyboy”—I started at the familiar name again—was not there. He was at luncheon.
“Let us join him,” I said, as we gained the street again and turned mechanically into Delmonico's.
“Not there,” said Bracy with a laugh. “You forget! That's not Johnnyboy's gait just now. Come here.” He was descending a few steps that led to a humble cake-shop. As we entered I noticed a young fellow standing before the plain wooden counter with a cake of gingerbread in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. His profile was before me; I at once recognized the long lashes. But the happy, boyish, careless laugh that greeted Bracy, as he presented me, was a revelation.
Yet he was pleased to remember me. And then—it may have been embarrassment that led me to such tactlessness, but as I glanced at him and the glass of milk he was holding, I could not help reminding him of the first words I had ever heard him utter.
He tossed off the glass, colored slightly, as I thought, and said with a light laugh:—
“I suppose I have changed a good deal since then, sir.”
I looked at his demure and resolute mouth, and wondered if he had.
The good American barque Skyscraper was swinging at her moorings in the Clyde, off Bannock, ready for sea. But that good American barque—although owned in Baltimore—had not a plank of American timber in her hulk, nor a native American in her crew, and even her nautical “goodness” had been called into serious question by divers of that crew during her voyage, and answered more or less inconclusively with belaying-pins, marlin-spikes, and ropes' ends at the hands of an Irish-American captain and a Dutch and Danish mate. So much so, that the mysterious powers of the American consul at St. Kentigern had been evoked to punish mutiny on the one hand, and battery and starvation on the other; both equally attested by manifestly false witness and subornation on each side. In the exercise of his functions the consul had opened and shut some jail doors, and otherwise effected the usual sullen and deceitful compromise, and his flag was now flying, on a final visit, from the stern sheets of a smart boat alongside. It was with a feeling of relief at the end of the interview that he at last lifted his head above an atmosphere of perjury and bilge-water and came on deck. The sun and wind were ruffling and glinting on the broadening river beyond the “measured mile”; a few gulls were wavering and dipping near the lee scuppers, and the sound of Sabbath bells, mellowed by a distance that secured immunity of conscience, came peacefully to his ear.
“Now that job's over ye'll be takin' a partin' dhrink,” suggested the captain.
The consul thought not. Certain incidents of “the job” were fresh in his memory, and he proposed to limit himself to his strict duty.
“You have some passengers, I see,” he said, pointing to a group of two men and a young girl, who had apparently just come aboard.
“Only wan; an engineer going out to Rio. Them's just his friends seein' him off, I'm thinkin',” returned the captain, surveying them somewhat contemptuously.
The consul was a little disturbed. He wondered if the passenger knew anything of the quality and reputation of the ship to which he was entrusting his fortunes. But he was only a PASSENGER, and the consul's functions—like those of the aloft-sitting cherub of nautical song—were restricted exclusively to looking after “Poor Jack.” However, he asked a few further questions, eliciting the fact that the stranger had already visited the ship with letters from the eminently respectable consignees at St. Kentigern, and contented himself with lingering near them. The young girl was accompanied by her father, a respectably rigid-looking middle-class tradesman, who, however, seemed to be more interested in the novelty of his surroundings than in the movements of his daughter and their departing friend. So it chanced that the consul re-entered the cabin—ostensibly in search of a missing glove, but really with the intention of seeing how the passenger was bestowed—just behind them. But to his great embarrassment he at once perceived that, owing to the obscurity of the apartment, they had not noticed him, and before he could withdraw, the man had passed his arm around the young girl's half stiffened, yet half yielding figure.
“Only one, Ailsa,” he pleaded in a slow, serious voice, pathetic from the very absence of any youthful passion in it; “just one now. It'll be gey lang before we meet again. Ye'll not refuse me now.”
The young girl's lips seemed to murmur some protest that, however, was lost in the beginning of a long and silent kiss.
The consul slipped out softly. His smile had died away. That unlooked-for touch of human weakness seemed to purify the stuffy and evil-reeking cabin, and the recollection of its brutal past to drop with a deck-load of iniquity behind him to the bottom of the Clyde. It is to be feared that in his unofficial moments he was inclined to be sentimental, and it seemed to him that the good ship Skyscraper henceforward carried an innocent freight not mentioned in her manifest, and that a gentle, ever-smiling figure, not entered on her books, had invisibly taken a place at her wheel.
But he was recalled to himself by a slight altercation on deck. The young girl and the passenger had just returned from the cabin. The consul, after a discreetly careless pause, had lifted his eyes to the young girl's face, and saw that it was singularly pretty in color and outline, but perfectly self-composed and serenely unconscious. And he was a little troubled to observe that the passenger was a middle-aged man, whose hard features were already considerably worn with trial and experience.
Both he and the girl were listening with sympathizing but cautious interest to her father's contention with the boatman who had brought them from shore, and who was now inclined to demand an extra fee for returning with them. The boatman alleged that he had been detained beyond “kirk time,” and that this imperiling of his salvation could only be compensated by another shilling. To the consul's surprise, this extraordinary argument was recognized by the father, who, however, contented himself by simply contending that it had not been stipulated in the bargain. The issue was, therefore, limited, and the discussion progressed slowly and deliberately, with a certain calm dignity and argumentative satisfaction on both sides that exalted the subject, though it irritated the captain.
“If ye accept the premisses that I've just laid down, that it's a contract”—-began the boatman.
“Dry up! and haul off,” said the captain.
“One moment,” interposed the consul, with a rapid glance at the slight trouble in the young girl's face. Turning to the father, he went on: “Will you allow me to offer you and your daughter a seat in my boat?”
It was an unlooked-for and tempting proposal. The boatman was lazily lying on his oars, secure in self-righteousness and the conscious possession of the only available boat to shore; on the other hand, the smart gig of the consul, with its four oars, was not only a providential escape from a difficulty, but even to some extent a quasi-official endorsement of his contention. Yet he hesitated.
“It'll be costin' ye no more?” he said interrogatively, glancing at the consul's boat crew, “or ye'll be askin' me a fair proportion.”
“It will be the gentleman's own boat,” said the girl, with a certain shy assurance, “and he'll be paying his boatmen by the day.”
The consul hastened to explain that their passage would involve no additional expense to anybody, and added, tactfully, that he was glad to enable them to oppose extortion.
“Ay, but it's a preencipel,” said the father proudly, “and I'm pleased, sir, to see ye recognize it.”
He proceeded to help his daughter into the boat without any further leave-taking of the passenger, to the consul's great surprise, and with only a parting nod from the young girl. It was as if this momentous incident were a sufficient reason for the absence of any further trivial sentiment.
Unfortunately the father chose to add an exordium for the benefit of the astonished boatsman still lying on his oars.
“Let this be a lesson to ye, ma frien', when ye're ower sure! Ye'll ne'er say a herrin' is dry until it be reestit an' reekit.”
“Ay,” said the boatman, with a lazy, significant glance at the consul, “it wull be a lesson to me not to trust to a lassie's GANGIN' jo, when thair's anither yin comin'.”
“Give way,” said the consul sharply.
Yet his was the only irritated face in the boat as the men bent over their oars. The young girl and her father looked placidly at the receding ship, and waved their hands to the grave, resigned face over the taffrail. The consul examined them more attentively. The father's face showed intelligence and a certain probity in its otherwise commonplace features. The young girl had more distinction, with, perhaps, more delicacy of outline than of texture. Her hair was dark, with a burnished copper tint at its roots, and eyes that had the same burnished metallic lustre in their brown pupils. Both sat respectfully erect, as if anxious to record the fact that the boat was not their own to take their ease in; and both were silently reserved, answering briefly to the consul's remarks as if to indicate the formality of their presence there. But a distant railway whistle startled them into emotion.
“We've lost the train, father!” said the young girl.
The consul followed the direction of her anxious eyes; the train was just quitting the station at Bannock.
“If ye had not lingered below with Jamie, we'd have been away in time, ay, and in our own boat,” said the father, with marked severity.
The consul glanced quickly at the girl. But her face betrayed no consciousness, except of their present disappointment.
“There's an excursion boat coming round the Point,” he said, pointing to the black smoke trail of a steamer at the entrance of a loch, “and it will be returning to St. Kentigern shortly. If you like, we'll pull over and put you aboard.”
“Eh! but it's the Sabbath-breaker!” said the old man harshly.
The consul suddenly remembered that that was the name which the righteous St. Kentigerners had given to the solitary bold, bad pleasure-boat that defied their Sabbatical observances.
“Perhaps you won't find very pleasant company on board,” said the consul smiling; “but, then, you're not seeking THAT. And as you would be only using the boat to get back to your home, and not for Sunday recreation, I don't think your conscience should trouble you.”
“Ay, that's a fine argument, Mr. Consul, but I'm thinkin' it's none the less sopheestry for a' that,” said the father grimly. “No; if ye'll just land us yonder at Bannock pier, we'll be ay thankin' ye the same.”
“But what will you do there? There's no other train to-day.”
“Ay, we'll walk on a bit.”
The consul was silent. After a pause the young girl lifted her clear eyes, and with a half pathetic, half childish politeness, said: “We'll be doing very well—my father and me. You're far too kind.”
Nothing further was said as they began to thread their way between a few large ships and an ocean steamer at anchor, from whose decks a few Sunday-clothed mariners gazed down admiringly on the smart gig and the pretty girl in a Tam o' Shanter in its stern sheets. But here a new idea struck the consul. A cable's length ahead lay a yacht, owned by an American friend, and at her stern a steam launch swung to its painter. Without intimating his intention to his passengers he steered for it. “Bow!—way enough,” he called out as the boat glided under the yacht's counter, and, grasping the companion-ladder ropes, he leaped aboard. In a few hurried words he explained the situation to Mr. Robert Gray, her owner, and suggested that he should send the belated passengers to St. Kentigern by the launch. Gray assented with the easy good-nature of youth, wealth, and indolence, and lounged from his cabin to the side. The consul followed. Looking down upon the boat he could not help observing that his fair young passenger, sitting in her demure stillness at her father's side, made a very pretty picture. It was possible that “Bob Gray” had made the same observation, for he presently swung himself over the gangway into the gig, hat in hand. The launch could easily take them; in fact, he added unblushingly, it was even then getting up steam to go to St. Kentigern. Would they kindly come on board until it was ready? At an added word or two of explanation from the consul, the father accepted, preserving the same formal pride and stiffness, and the transfer was made. The consul, looking back as his gig swept round again towards Bannock pier, received their parting salutations, and the first smile he had seen on the face of his grave little passenger. He thought it very sweet and sad.
He did not return to the Consulate at St. Kentigern until the next day. But he was somewhat surprised to find Mr. Robert Gray awaiting him, and upon some business which the young millionaire could have easily deputed to his captain or steward. As he still lingered, the consul pleasantly referred to his generosity on the previous day, and hoped the passengers had given him no trouble.
“No,” said Gray with a slight simulation of carelessness. “In fact I came up with them myself. I had nothing to do; it was Sunday, you know.”
The consul lifted his eyebrows slightly.
“Yes, I saw them home,” continued Gray lightly. “In one of those by-streets not far from here; neat-looking house outside; inside, corkscrew stone staircase like a lighthouse; fourth floor, no lift, but SHE circled up like a swallow! Flat—sitting-room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen—mighty snug and shipshape and pretty as a pink. They OWN it too—fancy OWNING part of a house! Seems to be a way they have here in St. Kentigern.” He paused and then added: “Stayed there to a kind of high tea!”
“Indeed,” said the consul.
“Why not? The old man wanted to return my 'hospitality' and square the account! He wasn't going to lie under any obligation to a stranger, and, by Jove! he made it a special point of honor! A Spanish grandee couldn't have been more punctilious. And with an accent, Jerusalem! like a northeaster off the Banks! But the feed was in good taste, and he only a mathematical instrument maker, on about twelve hundred dollars a year!”
“You seem to know all about him,” said the consul smilingly.
“Not so much as he does about me,” returned Gray, with a half perplexed face; “for he saw enough to admonish me about my extravagance, and even to intimate that that rascal Saunderson, my steward, was imposing on me. SHE took me to task, too, for not laying the yacht up on Sunday that the men could go 'to kirk,' and for swearing at a bargeman who ran across our bows. It's their perfect simplicity and sincerity in all this that gets me! You'd have thought that the old man was my guardian, and the daughter my aunt.” After a pause he uttered a reminiscent laugh. “She thought we ate and drank too much on the yacht, and wondered what we could find to do all day. All this, you know, in the gentlest, caressing sort of voice, as if she was really concerned, like one's own sister. Well, not exactly like mine”—he interrupted himself grimly—“but, hang it all, you know what I mean. You know that our girls over there haven't got THAT trick of voice. Too much self-assertion, I reckon; things made too easy for them by us men. Habit of race, I dare say.” He laughed a little. “Why, I mislaid my glove when I was coming away, and it was as good as a play to hear her commiserating and sympathizing, and hunting for it as if it were a lost baby.”
“But you've seen Scotch girls before this,” said the consul. “There were Lady Glairn's daughters, whom you took on a cruise.”
“Yes, but the swell Scotch all imitate the English, as everybody else does, for the matter of that, our girls included; and they're all alike. Society makes 'em fit in together like tongued and grooved planks that will take any amount of holy-stoning and polish. It's like dropping into a dead calm, with every rope and spar that you know already reflected back from the smooth water upon you. It's mighty pretty, but it isn't getting on, you know.” After a pause he added: “I asked them to take a little holiday cruise with me.”
“And they declined,” interrupted the consul.
Gray glanced at him quickly.
“Well, yes; that's all right enough. They don't know me, you see, but they do know you; and the fact is, I was thinking that as you're our consul here, don't you see, and sort of responsible for me, you might say that it was all right, you know. Quite the customary thing with us over there. And you might say, generally, who I am.”
“I see,” said the consul deliberately. “Tell them you're Bob Gray, with more money and time than you know what to do with; that you have a fine taste for yachting and shooting and racing, and amusing yourself generally; that you find that THEY amuse you, and you would like your luxury and your dollars to stand as an equivalent to their independence and originality; that, being a good republican yourself, and recognizing no distinction of class, you don't care what this may mean to them, who are brought up differently; that after their cruise with you you don't care what life, what friends, or what jealousies they return to; that you know no ties, no responsibilities beyond the present, and that you are not a marrying man.”
“Look here, I say, aren't you making a little too much of this?” said Gray stiffly.
The consul laughed. “I should be glad to know that I am.”
Gray rose. “We'll be dropping down the river to-morrow,” he said, with a return of his usual lightness, “and I reckon I'll be toddling down to the wharf. Good-bye, if I don't see you again.”
He passed out. As the consul glanced from the window he observed, however, that Mr. Gray was “toddling” in quite another direction than the wharf. For an instant he half regretted that he had not suggested, in some discreet way, the conclusion he had arrived at after witnessing the girl's parting with the middle-aged passenger the day before. But he reflected that this was something he had only accidentally overseen, and was the girl's own secret.
II.
When the summer had so waxed in its fullness that the smoke of factory chimneys drifted high, permitting glimpses of fairly blue sky; when the grass in St. Kentigern's proudest park took on a less sober green in the comfortable sun, and even in the thickest shade there was no chilliness, the good St. Kentigerners recognized that the season had arrived to go “down the river,” and that it was time for them to betake themselves, with rugs, mackintoshes, and umbrellas, to the breezy lochs and misty hillsides for which the neighborhood of St. Kentigern is justly famous. So when it came to pass that the blinds were down in the highest places, and the most exclusive pavements of St. Kentigern were echoless and desolate, the consul heroically tore himself from the weak delight of basking in the sunshine, and followed the others.
He soon found himself settled at the furthest end of a long narrow loch, made longer and narrower by the steep hillside of rock and heather which flanked its chilly surface on either side, and whose inequalities were lost in the firs and larches that filled ravine and chasm. The fragrant road which ran sinuously through their shadowy depths was invisible from the loch; no protuberance broke the seemingly sheer declivity; the even sky-line was indented in two places—one where it was cracked into a fanciful resemblance to a human profile, the other where it was curved like a bowl. Need it be said that one was distinctly recognized as the silhouette of a prehistoric giant, and that the other was his drinking-cup; need it be added that neither lent the slightest human suggestion to the solitude? A toy-like pier extending into the loch, midway from the barren shore, only heightened the desolation. And when the little steamboat that occasionally entered the loch took away a solitary passenger from the pier-head, the simplest parting was invested with a dreary loneliness that might have brought tears to the most hardened eye.
Still, when the shadow of either hillside was not reaching across the loch, the meridian sun, chancing upon this coy mirror, made the most of it. Then it was that, seen from above, it flashed like a falchion lying between the hills; then its reflected glory, striking up, transfigured the two acclivities, tipped the cold heather with fire, gladdened the funereal pines, and warmed the ascetic rocks. And it was in one of those rare, passionate intervals that the consul, riding along the wooded track and turning his eyes from their splendors, came upon a little house.
It had once been a sturdy cottage, with a grim endurance and inflexibility which even some later and lighter additions had softened rather than changed. On either side of the door, against the bleak whitewashed wall, two tall fuchsias relieved the rigid blankness with a show of color. The windows were prettily draped with curtains caught up with gay ribbons. In a stony pound-like enclosure there was some attempt at floral cultivation, but all quite recent. So, too, were a wicker garden seat, a bright Japanese umbrella, and a tropical hammock suspended between two arctic-looking bushes, which the rude and rigid forefathers of the hamlet would have probably resented.
He had just passed the house when a charming figure slipped across the road before him. To his surprise it was the young girl he had met a few months before on the Skyscraper. But the Tam o' Shanter was replaced by a little straw hat; and a light dress, summery in color and texture, but more in keeping with her rustic surroundings, seemed as grateful and rare as the sunshine. Without knowing why, he had an impression that it was of her own making—a gentle plagiarism of the style of her more fortunate sisters, but with a demure restraint all her own. As she recognized him a faint color came to her cheek, partly from surprise, partly from some association. To his delighted greeting she responded by informing him that her father had taken the cottage he had just passed, where they were spending a three weeks' vacation from his business. It was not so far from St. Kentigern but that he could run up for a day to look after the shop. Did the consul not think it was wise?
Quite ready to assent to any sagacity in those clear brown eyes, the consul thought it was. But was it not, like wisdom, sometimes lonely?
Ah! no. There was the loch and the hills and the heather; there were her flowers; did he not think they were growing well? and at the head of the loch there was the old tomb of the McHulishes, and some of the coffins were still to be seen.
Perhaps emboldened by the consul's smile, she added, with a more serious precision which was, however, lost in the sympathizing caress of her voice, “And would you not be getting off and coming in and resting a wee bit before you go further? It would be so good of you, and father would think it so kind. And he will be there now, if you're looking.”
The consul looked. The old man was standing in the doorway of the cottage, as respectably uncompromising as ever, with the slight concession to his rural surroundings of wearing a Tam o' Shanter and easy slippers. The consul dismounted and entered. The interior was simply, but tastefully furnished. It struck him that the Scotch prudence and economy, which practically excluded display and meretricious glitter, had reached the simplicity of the truest art and the most refined wealth. He felt he could understand Gray's enthusiasm, and by an odd association of ideas he found himself thinking of the resigned face of the lonely passenger on the Skyscraper.
“Have you heard any news of your friend who went to Rio?” he asked pleasantly, but without addressing himself particularly to either.
There was a perceptible pause; doubtless of deference to her father on the part of the young girl, and of the usual native conscientious caution on the part of the father, but neither betrayed any embarrassment or emotion. “No; he would not be writing yet,” she at length said simply, “he would be waiting until he was settled to his business. Jamie would be waiting until he could say how he was doing, father?” she appealed interrogatively to the old man.
“Ay, James Gow would not fash himself to write compliments and gossip till he knew his position and work,” corroborated the old man. “He'll not be going two thousand miles to send us what we can read in the 'St. Kentigern Herald.' But,” he added, suddenly, with a recall of cautiousness, “perhaps YOU will be hearing of the ship?”
“The consul will not be remembering what he hears of all the ships,” interposed the young girl, with the same gentle affectation of superior worldly knowledge which had before amused him. “We'll be wearying him, father,” and the subject dropped.
The consul, glancing around the room again, but always returning to the sweet and patient seriousness of the young girl's face and the grave decorum of her father, would have liked to ask another question, but it was presently anticipated; for when he had exhausted the current topics, in which both father and daughter displayed a quiet sagacity, and he had gathered a sufficient knowledge of their character to seem to justify Gray's enthusiasm, and was rising to take his leave, the young girl said timidly:—
“Would ye not let Bessie take your horse to the grass field over yonder, and yourself stay with us to dinner? It would be most kind, and you would meet a great friend of yours who will be here.”