THE LOYALTY OF JIM
THE LOYALTY OF JIM
If it must be my lot to dream out a life of insubstantial visions, that were well. But it appeared not unreasonable that I should keep at least one ponderable dog by me, as an emblem of something I had missed through one too many shuffle of the cards before this big game began. Yet Miss Lansdale had clearly resolved to deprive my dreaming of even this slight support of realness. I tried always to remember, in her behalf, that she did not know the circumstances, and she herself very soon discovered that she did not know Jim. The assaults she made upon his fidelity proved her to be past-mistress of tactics and strategy. No possible approach to his heart did she leave untried. She flattered and petted, lured, cajoled, entreated; she menaced, commanded, stormed, raged. Drawing inspiration from a siege celebrated in antiquity, she sought to secrete her forces—not in a horse of wood, but within the frames of numerous fowl, picked to the bone but shredded over so temptingly with fugitive succulence as to have made a dog of feelings less fine her slave for life.
It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy Durgin, been "baffled and beaten at every turn," that I could get into communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked man. Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have won him so utterly. And thereafter I found it often practicable to associate with her on terms of apparent equality.
She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim into her boat,—fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the landscape? Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had succeeded in teaching him.
With something of a swagger,—she swaggered in a rather starchy white dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,—she had enticed him to the water's edge, so that I must have been nervous but for knowing the dog through and through.
Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation. Seated in the boat, oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim, noting, with one paw already in the boat, that I was not to be of the party, turned quickly from her and came to me with his head down. His informing and well-feathered tail signalled to Miss Lansdale that she seemed to have forgotten herself.
At that moment, I think, the woman abandoned all her preposterous hopes; then, too, I think, she learned the last and bitterest lesson which great fighters must learn, to embellish defeat with an air of urbane acceptance. Miss Lansdale relaxed—she melted before my eyes to an aspect that no victor who knew his business could afford to despise.
I clambered in. Jim followed, remarking amiably to the woman as he passed her on his way to the bow of the boat, "Ithoughtyou couldn't have meantthat!"
And Defeat rowed Jim and me; rowed us past the feathered marge of green islands quite as if nothing had happened. But I knew ithadhappened, for Miss Lansdale was so nearly human that I presently found myself thinking "Miss Kate" of her. She not only answered questions, but, what amazed me far more, she condescended to ask them now and then. To an observer we might have seemed to be holding speech of an actual friendliness—speech of the water and the day; of herself and the dog and a little of me.
At length, as I caught an overhanging willow to rest her arms a moment, I felt bold enough to venture words about this assumption of amity which was so becoming in her. I even confessed that she was reminding me of certain distinguished but truly amiable personages who are commonly to be found in the side-show adjacent to the main tent. "Particularly of the wild man," I said, to be more specific, for my listener seemed at once to crave details.
"There is a powerfully painted banner swelling in the breeze outside, you know. It shows the wild man in all his untamed ferocity, in his native jungle, armed with a simple but rather promising club. A dozen intrepid tars from a British man-of-war—to be seen in the offing—are in the act of casting a net over him. It's an exciting picture, I assure you, Miss Lansdale. The net looks flimsy, and the wild person is not only enraged but very muscular—"
"I fail to see," she interrupted, with a slight lapse into what I may call her first, or Lansdale, manner.
"Of course you fail! You have to go inside to see," I explained kindly. "But it only costs a dime, which is little enough—the hired enthusiast, indeed, stationed just outside the entrance, reminds us over and over again that it is only 'the tenth part of a dollar,' and he sometimes adds that 'it will neither make nor break nor set a man up in business.' He is a flagrant optimist in small money matters, ever looking on the bright side."
"Inside?" suggested my listener, with some impatience. I had regretted my beginning and had meant to shirk a finish if she would let me; but it seemed I must go on.
"Well, inside there's a hand-organ going all the time, you know—"
"The wild man?" she insisted, like a child looking ahead for the real meat of the story one is telling it.
"I'm getting to him as fast as I consistently can. The wild man sits tamely in a cheap chair on a platform, with a row of his photographs spread charmingly at his feet. Of course you are certain at once that he is no longer wild. You know that a wild man whose spirit had not been utterly broken would never sit there and listen to that hand-organ eight hours every day except Sunday. The fluent and polished gentleman in charge—who has a dyed mustache—assures us that we have nothing to fear from this 'once ferocious monster of the tropic jungle, with his bestial craving for human flesh,' but that seems a mere matter of form, with the hand-organ going in our ears—"
"Really," Miss Lansdale began—or tried to.
"One moment, please! The scholarly person goes on to relate the circumstances of the wild person's capture—substantially as depicted upon the canvas outside—and winds up with: 'After being brought to this country in chains he was reclaimed from his savage estate, was given a good English education, and can now converse intelligently upon all the leading topics of the day. Step up, ladies and gentlemen' he concludes, with a rather pointed delicacy, 'and you will find him ready and willing to answer all proper questions.'"
Miss Lansdale dropped her oars into the water, dully, I thought. I released the willow that had moored us, but I persisted.
"And he alwaysdoesanswer all proper questions, just as the gentleman said he would. Doubtless an improper question would be to ask him if he weren't born tame on our own soil, of reputable New England parents; but I don't know. I have always conducted myself in his presence as a gentleman must, with the result that he has never failed to be chatty. He is a trifle condescending, to be sure; he does not forget the difference in our stations, but he does not permit himself to study me with eyes of blank indifference, nor is he reticent to the verge of hostility. Of course he feels indifferent to me,—nothing else could be expected,—but his captors have taught him to be gracious in public. And, really, Miss Lansdale, you seemed strangely tame and broken to-day yourself. You have not only received a good English education, but you answer all proper questions with a condescension hardly more marked than that of the wild person's. I can only pray you won't resume a manner that will inevitably recall him to me to your own disadvantage."
She rowed in silence against the gentle current, but she lifted her eyes to me with a look that was not all Lansdale. There was Peavey in it. And she smiled. I had seen her smile before, but never before had she seen me at those times. That she should now smile for and at me seemed to be a circumstance little short of epoch-making.
I cannot affirm that there was even one moment of that curiously short afternoon when she became wholly and frankly a Peavey. But more than once did this felicity seem to impend, and I suspected that she might even have been more graciously endowed than with a mere Peavey capacity in general. I believed that if she chose, she might almost become a Miss Caroline Peavey. This occurred to me when she said:—
"I only brought you along for your dog."
It was, of course, quite like a Lansdale to do that; but much liker a Peavey to tell it, with that brief poise of the opened eyes upon one's own.
"Don't hold it against Jim," I pleaded. "It's my fault. I'm obliged to be most careful about his associates. I've brought him up on a system."
"Indeed? It would be interesting to know why you object—" she bridled with a challenge almost Miss Caroline in its flippancy.
"Well, for one thing, I have to make sure that he doesn't become worldly. Lots of good dogs are spoiled that way. And I've succeeded very well, thus far. To this moment he believes everything is true that ought to be true; or, if not, that something 'just as good' is true, as the people in drug stores tell one."
"And you are afraid of me—that I'll—"
"One can't be too careful about dogs, especially one that believes as much as that one does. Frankly, Iamafraid of you. You have such a knowing way of fighting off moments that might become Peavey."
"I don't quite understand—"
"Of course you don't, but that's of little consequence—to Jim. He doesn't understand either. But you see he has a fine faith now that the world is all Peavey—he learned it from me. Of course, Iknowbetter, but I pretend not to, and often I can fool myself for half an hour at a time. And of course I shouldn't care to have that dog find out that this apparently Peavey world—flawlessly Peavey—has a streak of Lansdale running through it—that it has even its moments of curious, hard suspicion, of distrust, of downright disbelief in all the good things,—in short, its Miss Katherine Lansdale moments, if you will pardon that hastily contrived metaphor."
Perceiving that further concealment would be unavailing, I added quite openly: "Now, young woman, you see that I know your secret. I felt it in the dark of our first meeting; it has since become plainer,—too plain. You know too much—far more than is good for either Jim or me to know. You can't believe enough—all those things that Jim and I have found it best to believe. I myself always fear that I shall be led into ways of unbelief in your presence. That is why I can't trust Jim with you alone, and why I could hardly trust myself there without Jim's sustaining looks—that is why, in fact, that I shall try to shun you in all but your approximately Peavey moments. I trust now that this shall be the last time I must ever speak bitterly in your presence. You are sufficiently warned."
While I spoke she had ceased rowing, and we drifted with the current. A long time we drifted, and I rejoiced to see that I had taunted Miss Lansdale into something like interest. I saw that she was uncertain as to the degree of seriousness I had meant my words to convey. Once she began as if they were wholly serious, and once again as if they had been wholly unserious. If she at last appeared to suspect that she must effect a compromise, I dare say she was as nearly correct as I could have put her with any words I knew.
"But you had that dog from the first," she at length decided to say, clearly in self-defence, "and still you are worried and obliged to guard him from evil companions."
"You confess," I exclaimed in triumph.
"You had him as a puppy. Could you have expected so much of him if he had run wild, in a world where any number of good dogs learn unbelief, where they are shocked into it, all in a moment?"
"I didn't have myself from the first," I reminded her, "and I believe only a few trifles less than Jim does. I know that robins ascend without visible means, for example, if you run at them; but I believe it's good to run at them just the same, even more enjoyable than if they sat still to be caught."
"We were speaking of dogs," said Miss Lansdale. "At any rate Jim hadyoufrom the first."
"Let us keep to dogs, then," I answered. "Meantime, if you listen to me, you'll soon be in deep water, when we've both lost the taste for adventure. This current will take us over the dam in about seven minutes, I should judge."
She fell to the oars again with a dreaming face, in which Lansdale and the other were so well blended that it was indeed the face of visions that had long been coming to me.
"You remind me again of the wild gentleman," I said, after a long look at her, a look which she was good enough to let me see that she observed.
"Et ego in Arcadia vixi—and I, too, was netted in my native jungle."
I saw that she, too, essayed the feat of being both light and serious without letting the seam show.
"I mean about pictures," I explained. "The gentlemanly curator of the side-show always says of the wild man thoughtfully, 'Ibelievehe has a few photographs for sale.' He is always right—the wild man does have them, though I should not care to say that they're worth the money; that depends upon one's tastes, of course—by the way, Miss Lansdale, I have long had a picture of you."
"Has mother—"
"No—long before I became a fellow-slave with Clem—long before there was a juvenile mother or even a Clem in Little Arcady."
"May I ask how you got it?"
"Certainly you may! I don't know."
"May I see it?" I thought she felt a deeper interest than she cared to reveal.
"Unfortunately, no. If you only could see it, you would see that it is almost a perfect likeness—perhaps a bit more Little Miss than you could be now—but it's unmistakably true."
"I lost such a picture once," she said with a fall of her eyes. "Where is the one you have?"
"Sometimes it's behind my eyes and sometimes it is out before them."
"Nonsense!"
"To be sure! Only Jim and I, trained and hardened in the ways of belief, are equal to a feat of that sort."
"I see no merit in believing that."
"I don't know that there is, especially—not in believing this particular thing, but the power for belief in general which it implies—you see I am unprejudiced."
"Why should you want to believe it?"
I should have known, without catching the glint of her eyes under the hat brim, that a Peavey spoke there.
"If you could see the thing once, you'd understand," I said, an answer, of course, fit only for a Peavey.
"At all events, you'll not keep it long." The words were Peavey enough, but the voice was rather curiously Lansdale.
"I have made as little effort to keep it as I did to acquire it," I said, "but it stays on, and I've a notion it will stay on as long as Jim and I are uncorrupted. But it shan't inconvenience you," I added brightly, in time to forestall an imminent other "Nonsense!"
Being thus neatly thwarted, she looked over my shoulder and bent to her oars, for we had again drifted toward the troubled waters of the dam.
"I warned you—if you listened to me," I reminded her.
"Oh, I've not been listening—only thinking."
"Of course, and you were disbelieving. It's high time you put us ashore. I want to believe, and I want not to be drowned. So does Jim,—bothof 'em."
She pointed the boat to our landing, and as she leaned her narrow shoulders far back she shot me; one swift look. But I could see much farther into the water that floated us.
THE CASE OF FATTY BUDLOW
THE CASE OF FATTY BUDLOW
Lest Miss Katharine Lansdale seem unduly formidable, I should, perhaps, say that I appeared to be alone in finding her so. Little Arcadians of my own sex younger than myself—and, if I may suggest it, less discerning—were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw. Miss Lansdale's mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets. But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country. Socially and industrially, one might say, she did not fit the scheme of things as the town had been taught to conceive it. Whereas, her daughter was a person readily to be understood in all parts of the world where men have eyes—as well by the homekeeping as by the travelled. Eustace Eubanks, more or less a man of the world by virtue of that adventurous trip to the Holy Land, understood her at one glance, as did Arthur Updyke, who had fared abroad to the college of pharmacy and knew things. But she was also lucid as crystal to G. Brown and Creston Fancett, whose knowledge of the outside world was somewhat affected by their experience of it, which was nothing. To all seven of the ages was this woman comprehensible. Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in the beef under his hand had been passed.
In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously—to borrow a phrase from theArgus—"by each and all who had the good fortune to be present," for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times. She was incontestably feminine. She gave the woman-call. That she seemed to give it against her wish,—without intention,—that I was alone in detecting this, were trifles beside the point. Masculine Little Arcady cared not that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit—cared naught for this so long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call in its true note wheresoever she fared.
And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to masculine Little Arcady—with one negligible exception—she seemed to try perversely not to be so. She was amazingly gracious to it—still with one exception. She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth. She affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to please. She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue of romance.
It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.
The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each recurring crisis. For testimony in the present instance, I need only adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale but a scant half-dozen times. This came to me in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.
Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in a peaceful and orderly family. She sought to know if I could not prevent her boy from "making a fool of himself." It was never her way to bother with many words when she knew the right few.
With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring. It was a rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat. The dominant line of the composition I saw to be—
"When love lights night to be its day."
"When love lights night to be its day."
I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had read. She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough. But an emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms, however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself for the ordeal.
"I can't think," she began, "where the boylearnedsuch things!"
I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely self-taught under certain circumstances.
"Such shameless, brazen things!" she persisted. "We have always beensocareful of Euty—striving to keep him—well, wholesome and pure, you understand, Major Blake."
"There are always dangers," I said, but only because she had stopped speaking, and not in any hope of instructing her.
"If only we can keep him from making a fool of himself—"
"It seems rather late," I said, this time with profound conviction. "See there!"
Upon the margin of that captured sheet Eustace had exposed, as it were, the very secret mechanics of his passion. There were written tentative rhymes, one under another, as "Kate—mate—Fate—late"—and eke an unblushing "sate." Also had he, in the frenzy of his poetic rapture, divined and indicated the technical affinities existing among words like "bliss," "kiss," and "miss."
Interference, however delicately managed, seemed hopeless after that, and I said as much. But I added: "Of course, if you let him alone, he may come back to his better self. Perhaps the young lady herself may prove to be your ally."
"Indeed not! She has set out deliberately to ensnare my poor Euty," said the mother, with an incisive drawing in of her expressively thin lips. "I knew it the very first evening I saw them together."
"Mightn't it have been sheer trifling on her part ?" I suggested.
"Can you imagine that young womandaringto trifle with Eustace Eubanks?" she demanded.
I could, as a matter of fact; but as her query seemed to repel such a disclosure, I lied.
"True," I said, "she would never dare. I didn't think of that."
"Withallher frivolity and lightness of manner and fondness for dress, she must have some sense of fitness—"
"She must, indeed!"
"She could not gothatfar!"
"Certainlynot!"
"Even if shedoeswear too many ribbons and laces and fancy furbelows, with never a common-sense shoe to her foot!"
"Even if shedoes" I assented warmly.
And thus we were compelled to leave it. In view of those verses I could suggest no plan for relief, and my one poor morsel of encouragement had been stonily rejected.
Eustace went the mad pace. So did Arthur Updyke. It was rather to be expected of Arthur, however. His duties at the City Drug Store seemed to encourage a debonair lightness of conduct. He treated his blond ringlets assiduously from the stock of pomades; he was as fastidious about his fingernails as we might expect one to be in an environment of manicure implements and nail beautifiers; it was his privilege to make free with the varied assortment of perfumes—a privilege he forewent in no degree; his taste in tooth-powders was widely respected; and in moments of leisure, while he leaned upon a showcase awaiting custom, he was wont to draw a slender comb from an upper waistcoat pocket and pass it delicately through his small but perfect mustache. Naturally enough, it was said by the ladies of Little Arcady that Arthur's attentions were never serious,—"except them he pays to himself!" Aunt Delia McCormick would often add, for that excellent woman was not above playing venomously with familiar words.
Also did G. Brown and Creston Fancett go the same mad pace. These four were filled with distrust of one another, but as they composed our male quartette, they would gather late on summer nights and conduct themselves in a manner to make me wish that old Azariah Prouse's peculiar belief as to house structure might have included a sound-proof fence about his premises. For, on the insufficient stretch of lawn between that house and my own, the four rivals sang serenades.
"She sleeps—my lady sleeps," they sang, with a volume that seemed bound to insure their inaccuracy as to the lady, and which assuredly left them in the wrong as to her mother's attorney—if their song meant in the least to report conditions at large. As this was, however, the one occasion when they felt that none of the four had any advantage over his fellows, they made the most of it. Then, in the dead of night, I would be very sorry that I had not counselled the mother of Eustace Eubanks to send him around the world on a slow sailing ship; for it was his voice, even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most difficult.
On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with many adorers less timid, who made nothing of snatching a hair ribbon. But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but awkward boy, still holding aloof—still adoring from some remote background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips as she talked—almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from her boot tops. This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I myself had deliberately produced it.
Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was so little menacing that I called her "Miss Katharine" on the spot. But my business was with the child.
"Lucy," I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, "there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you're not watching him—you catch him at it—but he never comes near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood."
"He has nice hair," said my woman child.
"Oh, hehas!Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or anything like that—the name the boys call him by, you know?"
"Fatty—Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean. Do you know him, Uncle Maje?"
"Better than any boy in the world! Haven't I been telling you about him?"
"Once he brought a bag of candy to school, and I thought he was coming up to hand it to me, but he turned red in the face and stuffed it right into his pocket."
"He meant to give it to you, really—he bought it for you—but he couldn't when the time came."
"Oh, did he tell you?"
"It wasn't necessary for him to tell me. I know that boy, I tell you, through and through. Lucy, do you think you could encourage him a little, now and then—be sociable with him—not enough to hurt, of course? You don't know how he'd appreciate the least kindness. He might remember it all his life."
"I might pat his hair—he has such nice hair—if he wouldn't know it—but of course he would know it, and when he looks at you, he is so queer—"
"Yes, I know; I suppose it is hopeless. Couldn't you even ask him to write in your autograph album?"
"Y-e-s—I could, only he'd be sure to write something funny like 'In Memory's wood-box let me be a stick.' He always does write something witty, and I don't much care for ridiculous things in my album; I'm being careful with it."
"Well, if he's as witty asthatin your album, it will be to mask a bleeding heart. I happen to know that in a former existence he was never even asked to write, though he always hoped he might be."
"I'm sorry if you like him, Uncle Maje, but I'm positive that Fatty Budlow is not a boy I couldeverfeel deeply for. I don't believe our acquaintance will even ripen into friendship," and she looked with profound eyes into the wondrous, opening future.
"Of course it won't," I said. "I might have known that. He will continue through the ages to be an impossible boy. Miss Lansdale feels the same way about him. Poor Fatty or Horsehead or whatever they call him stands off and glares at her, and can't say his lesson when he catches her eye—only he seldom does catch it, because she's so busy with other boys of more spirit who crowd about her and snatch hair ribbons and sing 'My lady sleeps' until no one else can."
"Do you know Fatty Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel was simply idiotic.
"Of course she knows him," I said; "she knows he would give his right hand for her, which is a good deal under the circumstances, and she very properly despises him for it. She'd take her picture away from him if she could."
"She wouldn't," said Miss Lansdale, with a gesture of her foot that disconcerted me.
"Miss Kate," I said, "I have lived my life in terror of seeing one of those squashy green worms meet a fearful disaster in my presence. Would you mind—"
With a fillip of the bronzed toe she sent the amazed worm into a country that must have been utterly strange to it,
"She'd take it back quickly enough if she knew what he makes of it," I said, returning to the picture; "if she knew that he had kept it ever since he learned that agriculture, mining, and ship-building are principal industries—only at first it had two long yellow braids, and tassels dangling from its boot tops."
"My mother had beautiful long golden hair," said the woman child, adding simply, "papa says mine is just like it."
Miss Lansdale regarded me narrowly.
"You get me all mixed up," she said.
"I like to. You're heady then—like your mother's punch when it's 'all mixed up.'"
"I must put in more ice," remarked Miss Lansdale, calmly.
"Fatty Budlow is so serious," said the woman child, suspecting that the talk had drifted away from her.
"It's his curse," I admitted. "If he weren't an A No. 1 dreamer, he'd be too serious to live, but be goes dreaming and maundering along—dreaming that things are about as he would like to have them. He sees your face and Miss Lansdale's, and then they get mixed up in a queer way, and Miss Kate's face comes out of the picture with such a look in the eyes that a man of ordinary spirit would call her 'Little Miss' right off without ever stopping to think; but of course this Fatty or Horsehead or whatever it is can't say it right out, so he says it to himself about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand times a day, as nearly as he can reckon—he always was weak in arithmetic."
"You might let him write inyourautograph album," said the woman child, brightly, to Miss Lansdale.
"I know what he'd write if he got the chance," I added incitingly. But it did not avail. Miss Lansdale remained incurious and merely said, "Long golden braids," as one trying to picture them.
"And later a little row of curls over each ear, and a tiny chain with a locket around the neck. I had a picture once—"
"You have had many pictures."
"Yes—two are many if you've had nothing else."
But she was now regarding the woman child with a curious, close look, almost troubled in its intensity.
"Do you look like your mother?" she asked.
"Papa says I do, and Uncle Maje thinks so too. She was very pretty," This came with an unconscious placidity.
"She looks almost as her mother's picture did," I said.
When the child had gone, Miss Lansdale searched my face long before speaking. She seemed to hesitate for words, and at length to speak of other matters than those which might have perplexed her.
"Why did they call you 'Horsehead'?" she asked almost kindly.
"I never asked. It seemed to be a common understanding. Doubtless there was good reason for it, as good as there is for calling Budlow 'Fatty.'"
"What did you do?" she asked again.
"I went to the war with what I could take—nothing but a picture."
"And you lost that?"
"Yes—under peculiar circumstances. It seemed a kind thing to do at the time."
"And you came back with—"
"With yours, Little Miss!"
Some excitement throbbed between us so that I had involuntarily emphasized my words. Briefly her eyes clung to mine, and very slowly we relaxed from that look.
"I only wanted to say," she began presently, "that I shall have to believe your absurd tale of my picture being with you before you saw me. Something makes me credit it—a strange little notion that I have carried that child's picture in my own mind."
"We are even, then," I answered, "only you are thinking more things than you say. That isn't fair."
But she only nodded her head inscrutably.
A LITTLE MYSTERY IS SOLVED
A LITTLE MYSTERY IS SOLVED
The significance of Miss Lansdale's manner, rather than her words, ran through my darkened thoughts like a thread as I played the game that night. After a third defeat this thread seemed to guide me to daylight from a tortuously winding cavern. At first the thing was of an amazing simplicity.
In a far room was a chest filled with forgotten odds and ends that had come back with me years before. I ran to it, and from under bundles of letters, old family trinkets, a canteen, a pair of rusty pistols, and other such matters, I brought forth an ambrotype—the kind that was mounted in a black case of pressed rubber and closed with a spring.
But even as I held the thing, flushed with my discovery, another recollection cooled me, and the structure of my discovery tumbled as quickly as it had built itself. Little Miss had found her own picture when she foundhim. Her mother had told me this definitely. It had been clutched in his hands, and she, after a look, had tenderly replaced it to stay with his dust forever. This I had forgotten at first, in my eagerness for light.
I pressed the spring that brought the face to my eyes, knowing it would not be her face. Close to the light I studied it; the face of a girl, eighteen or so, with dreaming eyes that looked beyond me. It could not be Miss Lansdale, and yet it was strangely like her—like the Little Miss she must once have been.
But one mystery at least was now plain—the mystery of my own mind picture. I had not looked at this thing for ten years, but its lines had stayed with me, and this was the face of my dreaming, carried so long after its source had been forgotten. The face of this picture had naturally enough changed to seem like the face of Miss Lansdale after I had seen her.
Perhaps it was the face of a Peavey; there was at least a family resemblance; that would explain the likeness to Miss Kate. This was not much, but it was enough to sleep on.
As I left the house the following morning, Miss Lansdale, her skirts pinned up, was among her roses with a watering pot and a busy pair of scissors.
As I approached her I had something to say, but it was, for an interval, driven from my lips.
"Promise me," I said instead, "never to wear a common-sense shoe."
She stared at me with brows a trifle raised.
"Of course it will displease Mrs. Eubanks, but there is still a better reason for it."
The brows went farther up at this until they were hardly to be detected under the broad rim of her garden hat.
Her answer was icy, even for an "Indeed?"—quite in her best Lansdale manner.
"Yes, 'indeed!'" I retorted somewhat rudely, "but never mind—it's not of the least consequence. What I meant to say was this—about those pictures of people, you remember."
"I remember perfectly, and I've concluded that it's all nonsense—all of it, you understand."
"That's queer—so have I." Had I been a third person and an observer, I would doubtless have sworn that Miss Lansdale was more surprised than pleased by this remark of mine.
"I haven't had your picture at all," I went on; "it was a picture of some one else, and I hadn't thought to look at it for a long time—had forgotten it utterly, in fact. That's how I came to think I knew your face before I knew you."
"I told you it was nonsense!" and she snipped off a rose with a kind of miniature brusqueness.
"But you shall see that I had some reason. If you find time to-day, step into my library and look at the picture. It's on the mantel, and the door is open. It may be some one you know, though I doubt even that."
With this I brazenly snatched a pink rose from those within her arm.
"You see Fatty Budlow is coming on," I remarked of this bit of boldness.
"Let him come—he shan't findmein the way." This with an effort to seem significant.
"Oh, not atall!" I assured her politely, and with equal subtlety, I believe.
Had I known that this was the last time I should ever look upon Miss Katharine Lansdale, I might have looked longer. She was well worth seeing for sundry other reasons than her need for common-sense shoes. But those last times pass so often without our suspecting them! And it was, indeed, my good fortune never to see her again. For never again was she to rise, even at her highest, above Miss Kate.
She was even so low as Little Miss when I found her on my porch that afternoon—a troubled Little Miss, so drooping, so queerly drawn about the eyes, so weak of mouth, so altogether stricken that I was shot through at sight of her.
"I waited here—to speak alone—you are late to-day."
I was early, but if she had waited, she would of course not know this.
"What has happened, Miss Kate?"
"Come here."
Through my opened door I followed her quick step.
"You were jesting about that this morning,"—she pointed to the picture, propped open against a book on the mantel; and then, with an effort to steady her voice,—"you were jesting, and of course you didn't know—but you shouldn't have jested."
"Can it be you, Miss Kate—can it really be you?"
"It is, it is—couldn't you see? Tell me quickly—don't, don't jest again!"
"Be sure I shall not. Sit down."
But she stood still, with an arm extended to the picture, and again implored me: "See—I'm waiting. Where—how—did you get it?"
"Sit down," I said; and this time she obeyed with a little cry of impatience.
"I'll try to bring it back," I said. "It was that day Sheridan hurried back to find his army broken—all but beaten. Just at dark there was a last charge—a charge that was met. I went down in it, hearing yells and a spitting fire, but feeling only numbness. When I woke up the firing was far off. Near me I could hear a voice, the voice of a young man, I thought, wounded like myself. I first took him for one of our men. But his talk undeceived me. It was the talk of your men, and sorrowful talk. He was badly hurt; he knew that. But he was sure of life. He couldn't die there like a brute. He had to go back and he would go back alive and well; for God was a gentleman, whatever else He was, and above practical jokes of that sort. Then he seemed to know he was losing strength, and he cried out for a picture, as if he must at least have that before he went. Weak as he was, he tried to turn on his side to search for it. 'It was here a moment ago,' he would say; 'I had it once,' and he tried to turn again, still crying out for it,—he must not die without it. It hurt me to hear his voice break, and I made out to roll near him to help him search. 'We'll find it,' I told him, and he thanked me for my help. 'Look for a square hard case,' he said eagerly. 'It must be here; I had it after I fell down.' Together we searched the rough ground over in the dark as well as we could. I was glad enough to help him. I had a picture like that of my own that I shouldn't have liked to lose. But we were clumsy searchers, and he seemed to lose hope as he lost strength. Again he cried out for that picture, but now it was a despairing cry, and it hurt me. Under the darkness I reached my one good hand up and took my own picture from its place. So many of us carried pictures over our hearts in those days. I pretended then to search once more, telling him to have courage, and then I said, 'Is this it?' He fumbled for it, and his hand caught it quickly up under his chin. He was so glad. He thanked me for finding it, and then he lay still, panting. After a while—we both wanted water—I crawled away to where I heard a running stream. It must have been farther than I thought, and I couldn't be quick because so much of me was numb and had to be dragged. But I reached the water and filled a canteen I had found on the way. As soon as I could manage it I went back to him with the water, but I must have been gone a long time. He wasn't there. But as I crawled near where he had lain, I put my hand on a little square case such as I had given him. I thought it must be mine. I lost consciousness again. When I awoke two hospital stewards carried me on a stretcher, and a field surgeon walked beside us. I still had the picture, and not for many days did I know that it wasn't my own. After that I forgot it—but I've already told you of that."
Her eyes had not quitted my face while I spoke, though they were glistening; her mouth had weakened more than once, and a piteous little "Oh!" would come from her lips. When I had finished she looked away from me, dropping her eyes to the floor, leaning forward intently, her hands shut between her knees. For a long time she remained so, forgetting me. But at last I could hear her breathe and could see the increasing rise and fall of it, so that I feared a crisis. But none came. Again she mastered herself and even managed a smile for me, though it was a poor thing.
"I've told you all, Miss Kate."
"Yes—I'm unfair, but you have a right to know. I found that picture—your picture, when they brought him in. His hands were clenched about it. They said he had pleaded to hold it and made them promise not to take it from him—ever. I was left alone, and I dared to take it, just for a moment. Something in the design of the cover puzzled me. I had meant to put it right back, and after I had looked at it there was only one thing to do—to put it back."
"They said you found your own picture, or I might have suspected."
"They had reason to say it—I never told."
"Of course you never told, Miss Kate!" I seemed to learn a great deal of her from that. She had carried her wound secretly through all those years.
"Poor Little Miss!" I said in spite of myself, and at this quite unexpectedly there befell what I had hoped we might both be spared.
I might not soothe her as I would have wished, so I busied myself in the next room until she called to me. She was putting what touches she could to her eyes with a small and sadly bedraggled handkerchief.
"There is a better reason for telling no one now," she said, "so we must destroy this. Mother might see it."
My grate contained its summer accumulation of waste paper. She laid the picture on this and I lighted the pyre.
"Your mother will see your eyes," I said.
"She has seen them so before." And she gave me her hand, which I kissed.
"Poor Little Miss!" I said, still holding it.
"Not poor now—you have given me back so much. I can believe again—I can believe almost as much as Jim."
But I released her hand. Though her eyes had not quitted mine, their look was one of utter friendliness.