CHAPTER VIIIIt was a morning in late September that Elise and Rutledge went for their last canoe ride on the mighty river. Mrs. Phillips and her daughters were to leave for home on an early afternoon train, and Mrs. Rutledge and Evans for Montreal an hour later.It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter's advance agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty master.The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature.It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of Elise as an invigorating draught. She was soen rapportwith the morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the day.The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature's quickening heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise's charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man. She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have its origin in some vague unmanly weakness—and weakness in a man she despised.She had talked to him of a score of things since they had embarked, passing rapidly from one to another in order to keep him away from the one subject he seemed attracted to from any point of the conversational compass. At the moment she had been so clearly impressed with his almost feminine gracefulness the conversation was taking a dangerous swerve, she thought; and for a minute she was at a loss how to divert the course of language from the matter nearest his heart. In a blind effort to do so she unthinkingly challenged him to prove his sterner strength which she had never seen put to the test."It's easy going here, isn't it?" she said. "What a pity we couldn't have one visit to the island before we go away.""Do you wish to go there?" asked Rutledge."I would like to," she replied, "but of course we cannot attempt it without an experienced canoe-man. It is about time for us to return; don't you think so?""That depends on whether you really want to go to the island," returned Rutledge, who was quick to see and resent the intimation that he was not equal to the business of putting her across the racing water between them and the small cluster of trees and shrubs growing among a misshapen pile of rocks nearly across the river."I am told no one but these half-breed guides have ever tried the passage," he continued. "Not because it is so very dangerous, I suppose, but because it is too small to attract visitors to try the rough water.""They can get to it easily from the other side, can't they? It seems so near to that," said Elise."No. Jacques tells me that the narrow water on the other side runs like a race-horse, and has many rocks to smash the canoe. Even going from this side I would prefer to leave you here, Miss Phillips, and of course that would make the visit without inducement to me.""You allow your carefulness of me and your politeness to me to reason you out of the danger," said Elise, without any sinister purpose; but Rutledge recalled Helen Phillips' words about Elise and heroes, and became uncomfortable."I used them to reason you out of the danger," he replied. "If the argument does not appeal to you I am ready for your orders.""Then let's go over," said Elise, prompted half by the challenge in his eyes and half by her subconscious desire to see him vindicate his feminine grace."I admit I am a coward," Rutledge remarked as he turned the canoe toward the island."Oh, if you confess to being afraid!" said Elise in mingled surprise and pity. "I certainly cannot insist. Let's return to the hotel.""You mistake me," Rutledge replied as he sent the light craft on toward the rapids. "My cowardice is in permitting you to bully me into carrying you into some danger. I should have the courage to refuse.""You would have me believe in your courage, then, whether you choose danger or avoid it. That is artful," Elise rejoined.The word "artful" nettled Rutledge, and he put his resentment into the strokes which sent the canoe forward. If Elise Phillips could believe of him that he would attempt to establish a reputation for courage by a trick of words, words would be inadequate, of course, to defend him from the imputation. There was no chance now to convince her, he thought, save to try the passage. So, despising the weakness which would not let him point the canoe homeward, he set his strength against the increasing current, and soon lost thought of the argument in the zest of sparring with the river.Elise became absorbedly interested in the contest and in his handling of the boat. The interest of both became more and more intense as the water began to slap the canoe viciously and toss them with careless strength. A wave rolling over a sunken rock rushed upon them with a gurgle and swash and passed under the canoe with a heave and splash that tilted them uncomfortably and threw a hatful of water over the side. Another came with a more impatient toss, and Elise crouched upon the seat to preserve her equilibrium. Rutledge looked round at her face, which was unsmiling but without fear, and asked:"Shall we go back?""No," the girl answered.They soon found that the water was swifter than they had judged it from the shore, and that they had not put across far enough up-stream to make the island easily. They were nearing it, but the current was becoming boisterous and they were drifting faster and faster down-stream. Swifter water and rougher met the canoe at every paddle-stroke. Rutledge with his back to Elise dropped on one knee in the water in the canoe bottom and gave every energy to his work. If Elise had not been with him he would have liked nothing better.As for the girl, she would not insist on this wild ride again, but, being in, she was having many thrills of pleasure. Rutledge's manner gave her confidence that they would reach the island, but with how much discomfiture she was as yet uncertain. She was drenched with water from the slapping waves and the swiftly flying paddle, which was Rutledge's only weapon against the wrath of the river. She saw in his resolute efforts that their situation was at least serious if not dangerous, and she hardly took her eyes from him; but with her closest scrutiny she did not detect the slightest indecision or apprehension.Only once did fear come to her, and that but for a moment. The struggle was now quick and furious. They were in the mad whirl of crushing water that tore alongside the island and was ripped and ground among the bullying rocks. She heard Rutledge stifle a cry as he sent the canoe out with a back-stroke that almost threw her overboard, and the rioting current slammed them past a jagged vicious-looking rock just under the river's surface which would have smashed their cockle-shell to splinters. When she looked down upon it as they were shot past she thought for an instant of death and dead men's bones. Then—"Out! Quick—now!" yelled Rutledge, as with a strength that seemed as much of will as of muscle, he shoved the canoe's nose up against the island and held it for a moment against the fury of the water.Elise rose at his sharp command and leaped lightly out upon a bare rock, giving the canoe a back kick which sent it swinging around broad across the current. As it swung off Rutledge, seeing no favourable place below him to make another landing, quickly gave his end of the boat a cant toward the island, dropped the paddle in the canoe, grabbed the mooring chain and jumped for the land. He jumped and alighted unsteadily but without further mishap than so far capsizing the canoe that it shipped enough water to more than half submerge it and threaten to sink it. With his effort to draw it up on the rock and save it from sinking entirely, the water in the canoe rushed to the outer end, sending that completely under and floating the paddle out and away. He yanked the canoe up on the island and, turning, looked straight into Elise's eyes for ten seconds without speaking."Why don't you say it?" the young woman asked with amused defiance."Say what?" inquired Rutledge."What you are dying to tell me.""I love you," answered Rutledge simply."Oh! You—you—impudent—you horrible!" cried Elise with a gasp. "To presume I would invite you to tell me—that! How dare you!""I dare anything for you," said Rutledge. "I love you and—""Stop! Not another word on that subject—lest your presumption become unbearable! You know very well, Mr. Stupidity, that I expected you to say 'I told you so.'""I have told you—so—your—exp—""Stop, I say! I will not listen to another word. Your persistence is almost—insulting!""Insulting!" said Rutledge in amazement. "Then pardon me and I'll not offend again;" and he turned to take a look at the fast-riding paddle as it turned and flashed far down the river.Elise was glad of the chance to gather her wits together and prepare a defence against this abrupt method of wooing. Indeed she was on the defensive against her own heart. One fact alone, however, would justify her deliberation: that she was not certain of her own mind. Friendship may halt and consider, admiration may sit in judgment; but love that questions, or is of two minds, or hesitates, is not love.She turned away from him and the river to give attention to this new problem which was of more immediate interest to her than the question of how they were to get away from the island. Rutledge came to her after awhile."Miss Phillips," he said, "I have the honour to report that, while we are prisoners on this island now, our imprisonment will not be lengthy. Fortunately I saw Jacques on the other side of the river and made him understand, I think, that we have lost our paddle. At any rate he put off toward the hotel at great speed, and will be down with another canoe I hope before you become tired of your island." And he added, as if to relieve the tense situation: "While we wait I shall be glad to show you over the premises and to talk about anything that you may prefer to discuss."Elise could not tell from the formal manner of Rutledge's words whether he was really offended or humourously stilted in his speech. She could be as coldly polite as any occasion demanded; but, believing that she had effectually put an end to his love-making for the day, she met his formality of manner in her naturally charming and friendly spirit."Sit down here then, and tell me where you learned to handle a canoe. I did not know canoeing was a Southern sport.""It is not," Rutledge said, taking the place she gave him at her feet. "I was never in a canoe till I came here this summer.""Now, Mr. Rutledge, don't ask too much of credulity. One surely cannot become skilful without practice.""I did not mean that I have never been on the water before," said Rutledge; "but in my country we do not have these curved and graceful canoes. We navigate our rivers with the primitive dugout or pirogue. I have used one of those on my father's Pacolet plantation since I was a boy. The dugout is made by hollowing out a section of a tree. That makes the strongest and best boat, for it never leaks or gets smashed up. It is very narrow and shallow, however, and it takes some skill to handle it in a flood.""Were you ever in a flood?—a worse flood than this?" asked Elise."Yes. When our little rivers get up they are as bad as this or worse. I have seen them worse. During the great flood on the Pacolet some years ago, when railroad bridges, mill dams, saw-mills, cotton mills, houses, barns, cotton bales, lumber, cattle, men, women and children were all engulfed in one watery burial, the little river was for six hours a monster—a demon.""Tell me about that," Elise said; and to entertain her Rutledge told her at length the story of that cataclysm of piedmont South Carolina. He went into the details without which such description is only awful, not interesting. Many were the incidents of heroism and hairbreadth escapes and unspeakable calamity which he related; and he told the stories with such vividness of portraiture, dramatic fire and touches of pathos that, with the roar of many waters actually pounding upon her ear-drums, Elise could close her eyes and see the scenes he depicted.In looking upon the pictures he drew with such living interest she found herself straining her tight-shut eyes in search of his figure among the throng that lined the river-bank or fought the awful flood. Time after time as he described an act of heroic courage in words that burned and glowed and crackled with the fire that could stir only an eye-witness or an actor in the unstudied drama he was reproducing, she would clothe the hero with Rutledge's form, identify his distinctive gestures and movement and catch even the tones of his voice as it shouted against the booming of the waters: but with studied regularity and distinctness Rutledge at some point in every story, incidentally and apparently unconsciously, would make it plain that the hero of that incident was a person other than himself.He might have told her, indeed, many things to his own credit: especially of a desperate ride and struggle in one of those dugouts which he had volunteered to make in order to prevent an old negro man adrift on a cabin-top from going over Pacolet Dam Number 3, where so many unfortunates went down and came not up again; but at no time could Elise infer from his speech that he was the hero of his own story. Her word "artful" still rankled in his memory, and he swore to his own soul that she should never, never hear him utter a word that might show he possessed or claimed to possess courage.The only method by which Elise could deduce from his words the conclusion that Rutledge was of courageous heart was that courage seemed such a commonplace virtue among the people of his section that he probably possessed his share of it. Her curiosity was finally aroused to know whether by any artifice she might induce him to tell of his own exploits, which his very reticence persuaded her must be many and interesting, and she brought all her powers into play to draw him out: but to no purpose. She refrained from any direct appeal to him in fear that a personal touch might turn the conversation along dangerous lines; and Rutledge, having been properly rebuked, waited for some intimation of permission before presuming to discuss other than impersonal themes.While indeed it only confirmed her woman's intuition, Elise was unconsciously happier because of Rutledge's blunt statement of his love, for it made certain a fact that was not displeasing to her. Yet she would hold him at arm's length, for she could with sincerity bid him neither hope nor despair. The glamour of her day-dreams made the reading of her heart's message uncertain. Rutledge had not the glittering accessories that attended the wooer of her visions; and yet as he talked to her she was mentally placing him in every picture her mind drew of the future, and was impressed that whether in the soft scenes where knightly gallantry and grace wait upon fair women, or in the stern dramas where bitter strength of mind and heart and body is poured out in libation to the god of grinding conflict, he, in every scene, looked all that became a man.Rutledge's flow of narrative and Elise's absent-minded reverie were broken in upon by the hail of Jacques, who was approaching them from almost directly up-stream. His canoe was doing a grapevine dance as he pushed it yet farther across the river and dropped rapidly down to a landing on the far side of the island."Sacre! Wrong side!" he exclaimed when he came across and saw where Rutledge had pulled his canoe out of the water. "Here I lose two canoe sometime. How you mek him land?"Rutledge did not answer the question but set about getting his canoe across the island to the point designated by Jacques as the place for leaving it. He had no desire to stay longer since all hope of furthertête-à-têtewith Elise was gone; and in a few minutes they were ready to embark."No hard pull, but kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," said Jacques in explaining the course by which they were to return, the which was plainly beset with numberless rocks and shoals."Sweem out seex times befor I lairn road," he added as a comforting proof of the thoroughness of his knowledge. The return was a simple matter of dropping off from the far side of the island, floating down a few rods, and then picking along through the rocks across the river as the canoe gathered speed down-stream."Miss Phillips," Rutledge said when they were ready, "perhaps you had better take ship with Jacques. He knows the road."Their rescuer looked pleased at the honour, and turned to pull his canoe within easier reach."No, thank you," she said to Rutledge. "I prefer to go with you."Rutledge caught his breath at the loyalty and the caress in her voice, and ungratefully wished Jacques at the bottom of the river. He handed her into his canoe with a tenderness that was eloquent; and Jacques, seeing through the game which robbed him of the graceful young woman for a passenger, put off just ahead of them, saying:"I go fairst. Follow me shairp."It was no easy task to follow that canoe; and Elise, as she watched the precision with which Rutledge used the "kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," was convinced that such skill had not gone to waste at the Pacolet flood. As she looked at him when the rough water was past and he was sending the canoe up the river with even swing again, graceful as before, her eyes had a light in them that would have gladdened his heart to see.They landed near the hotel and hurried straight to it upon Elise's plea that she was late and must hurry to dress for her train. Rutledge walked beside her down the long hall of the hotel, and at the foot of the stairway, feeling that opportunity was slipping past him, he stopped her short with—"Your answer, Elise! In heaven's name, your answer!"Elise was again startled by his abruptness, and her unrestrained heart's impulse sent a look of tenderness to her eyes that would have crowned Rutledge's life with all happiness, had not that glamour of her daydreams, fateful, insistent, overclouded and banished it in a moment. She looked at him confusedly a moment more, then took a quick step away from him, hesitated, and, turning quickly, said:"There is no answer,"—and fled up the stairs.Rutledge turned away dazed by the reply to his heart's question. "There is no answer!"—as if he were a "Buttons" who had carried to her ladyship an inconsequential message which deserved no reply. He could not get his mind to comprehend the import of it; and he was walking back down the hallway with a vexed frown upon his face trying to untangle his thoughts, when Helen Phillips passed him and, seeing him in such a mood after his parting ride with Elise, prodded him with—"None but heroes need apply, Mr. Rutledge. I warned you."Rutledge passed on with an irritated shrug of the shoulders; and Helen, laughing, ran to tease Elise for a history of the morning's ride and the reason "why Mr. Rutledge is so grumpy." Little satisfaction did she get from Elise, however, for that young woman evinced as much of reticence as Rutledge had shown of irritation."I told him none but heroes need apply," laughed Helen."What do you know of heroes?" asked Elise with a snap.CHAPTER IXWithin a week after Evans Rutledge and Elise Phillips parted at the St. Lawrence resort, the newspapers told the people that at a Saratoga restaurant Colonel Phillips and his wife and daughter, and Doctor Martin, a negro of national reputation, had sat down to dine together. It was soon after this that one evening, at his home in Cleveland, Ohio, Colonel Phillips happened upon a mixed quartette (all negroes) who had been brought over from New York to sing at a sacred concert in one of the fashionable churches, but who could not obtain what they considered a respectable lodging-place. With characteristic impulsiveness the Colonel, who heard of it, invited the two men and two women up to his house and entertained them overnight.On those occasions Mrs. Phillips had shown unmistakable opposition to the acts of her liege lord. Elise had more than seconded her mother in haughty indignation; though with her superb training in obedience she could not be openly rebellious. When he had brought the quartette into his home Mr. Phillips could not fail to see the pain in his wife's eyes as she asked:"Was that necessary?""Why, can you not see," he replied with some hot feeling in his tones, "that it was the only thing to be done? They are very respectable people, all of them. They are intelligent and well-bred, as you can see. Why should the simple matter of colour alone keep me from doing what I just as quickly might have done for a white man?"The unconscious humour of this way of putting it did not reach Mrs. Phillips, and the Colonel's tone and manner, not his words, kept her silent when he had finished. She could not quarrel with him; and he thought he had answered her reason, though he admitted inwardly that her prejudices were unconverted. Nevertheless he did not open the discussion again.Helen, however, naturally siding with her father, did not hesitate to bring it up repeatedly, and youthfully to descant at length and with some elaboration of ideas on the propriety and admirableness of her father's act. Mrs. Phillips, with the sole purpose of preserving parental discipline and not wishing even slightly to encourage insubordination, had very little to say to Helen about it; while Elise answered all the younger girl's effusions with sniffs of disdain.* * * * *These incidents and Elise's womanly perversity and curiosity really gave Evans Rutledge a great opportunity if he only could have read the portents of circumstance and calculated to a nicety the eccentricity of a woman's heart. The entertainment of negro guests at the mansion of an aspirant for the presidency was given wide publicity by the press and was the subject of universal though temporary notice by newspapers and editorial writers of every class. Rutledge, in his capacity as Washington representative of a half-dozen newspapers over the country, contributed his share to the general chorus of comment.When Elise read in a Cleveland paper a clipping accredited to "Evans Rutledge in Chicago American," she suddenly became desirous of seeing that young man again. The sentiments, stripped of the tartness in their expression and a seeming lack of appreciation of her distinguished father's dignity, were so in accord with hers that she was startled at the exact coincidence of thought—while still resentful of the free and fierce criticism.Resentment and thoughts of coincidences were pushed out of her mind, however, by the question, "Would he tell me again he loves me?" This was both a personal and a sentimental question and was therefore of chief interest to her woman's mind. Not that she had a whit more of love for him than upon that last day upon the St. Lawrence—oh, no; but his love for her? his willingness to avow it? was it still hers? was it ever hers really?—for not a word or a line had he addressed to her since the day they fought the river. She would confess to a slight curiosity and desire to meet him when she should go to Washington on that promised visit to Lola DeVale.Rutledge assuredly had escaped none of the untoward influences which the Phillips-negro incidents might have had upon his love for Elise. His good mother religiously attended to the duty of impressing upon him the disgraceful horrors of those affairs. She found no words forceful enough properly to characterize them, though she applied herself with each new day to the task. What might have been the result if her son's heart had been inclined to fight for the love of Elise of course cannot be known. His mother's philippics effected nothing, for the good reason that he had lost hope of winning Elise before the negro incidents occurred, and the personal turn his mother gave them was only tiresome to him. Elise's last words to him, "There is no answer," had put their affair beyond the effect of anything of that sort. She had not only refused him, but had flouted him, treated him with contempt: yes, had said to him in effect that his proffer of love was not worth even a negative answer. He had gone over every incident of their association, and, with a lover's carefulness of detail, had considered and weighed her every word and look and gesture; and, with a lover's proverbial blundering, had found as a fact the only thing that was not true.* * * * *When Elise came to Washington on her visit Rutledge knew of course that she was in town, and he kept his eyes open for her. His pride would not let him call upon her, for he had meditated upon her treatment of him till his grievance had been magnified many fold and his view had become so distorted that in all her acts he saw only a purpose to play with his heart. Yet, he wished to see her, wished very much to see her—doubtless for the same reason that a bankrupt will look in upon "the pit" that has gulfed his fortune.They met unexpectedly at Senator Ruffin's, where only time was given them to shake hands in a non-committal manner before Mrs. Ruffin sent them in to dinner together. If each had spoken the thoughts in the heart a perfect understanding would have brought peace and friendship at least, but no words were spoken from the heart. All of their conversational sparring was of the brain purely. They fenced with commonplaces for some little time, each on guard. Rutledge, without a thought of Doctor Martin or the negro quartette, formed all of his speeches for the ear of a woman who had mocked his love; while Elise talked only for the man who had written the article in theChicago American. She saw the change in his manner, in his polite aloofness, his insincere, careless pleasantries."It is delightfully kind of you, Miss Phillips, to come over and give Washington some of those thrills with which you have favoured Cleveland.""What is the answer?" asked Elise blankly."My meaning is no riddle surely," said Rutledge. "The Cleveland newspaper reporters have taught us to believe that you are the centre of interest in that city and that, as one signing himself 'Q' wrote in yesterday'sJournal,—something to the effect that you radiate a sort of three-syllable waves which make the younger men to thrill and the old beaux to take a new lease on life. When I read that, I could see a lot of small boys crowding around an electric machine, all wanting to get a touch of the current but fearful of being knocked endways.""Now diagnose the form of your dementia," said the girl. "You not only read but youbelievethe statements of the penny-a-liners. Your case is hopeless.""I must read somewhat of such things—to know my craft. I must believe somewhat of them—to respect my craft.""Is either knowledge or respect necessary, Mr. Rutledge? The craft is admitted; but I had thought the purpose of all this craft was the penny-a-line,—not knowledge or truth—which are not only incidental but often unwelcome. Why read or believe the line after the cent has been paid?""You are unmerciful to us, Miss Phillips. It is true every news item of interest has its money value for a newspaper man, but you must understand that we try to use them honestly and say no more than we feel—often far less than we feel."Rutledge's manner was serious when he had finished; and Elise, feeling sure that the same incident was in his mind as in hers, had it on her tongue's end to reply with spirit and point, when he continued lightly:"But that is shop. It is good of you to come over now and gradually accustom us to those Q-waves instead of giving us the sudden full current when Colonel Phillips rents the White House. You will not care if some few become immune before that time, for there will be no end of rash youths to get tangled up with the wires."Elise had not been a woman if Rutledge's impersonal "we" and "us" and suggestion of persons immune to her charms had not piqued her. He need not put his change of heart so bluntly, she thought. Yet what incensed her was not the loss of his love, but that that love had been so poor and frail a thing."I am glad you guarantee a full supply of the raw material, Mr. Rutledge. It is a very interesting study, I think, to watch the effect of the—current—on youths of different temperaments: on the black-haired, black-eyed one who raves and swears his love—to two women in the same month; or the light-haired, blue-eyed one who laughs both while the current is on and when it is off; or the red-headed lover who will not take 'no' for an answer; or the gray-eyed, brown-haired man who would appear indifferent while his heart is consuming with a passion that changes not even when hope is gone. I will depend on you to see that they all come along, Mr. Rutledge—even to that young Congressman over there who is so devoted to Lola," she added in an undertone, "if he can be persuaded to change his court.""Oh, he will come. His present devotion does not signify. There is nothing true but Heaven," Rutledge replied, not to be outdone in cynicism by this young woman who had quite taken his breath away with her impromptu classification of lovers. His own hair was black and his eyes, like hers, were gray; and he saw she was making sport of him under both categories and yet betraying not her real thought in the slightest degree."Beware, Mr. Rutledge. Only woman may change her mind. Men must not usurp our prerogative.""True," said Rutledge; "but a man does not know his mind or his heart either till he's forty. He is not responsible for the guesses he makes before that time. After that, he knows only what he doesnotwant which is much; and, if undisturbed, can enjoy a negative consistency and content.""I may not defend the sex against such an able and typical representative," said Elise as the diners arose.Neither of these wholesome-minded young people had any taste for such a fictitious basis of conversation; but each was on the defensive against the supposed attitude of the other, and the moment their thoughts went outside conventional platitudes they were given an unnatural and cynical twist. Both felt a sense of relief when the evening was past. But despite this condition, which prevailed during Elise's visit, Rutledge could not put away the desire to see as much of her as an assumption of indifference would permit, if only with the unformulated hope that he might catch unawares if but for a moment the unstudied good camaraderie and congenial spirit which had won his heart on the St. Lawrence. But the sensitive consciousness of one or the other ever had been present to exorcise the natural spirit from their conversations.Rutledge lived bravely up to his ideas of what a proper pride demanded of him, but his assumption of indifference was sorely tried from their first meeting at Senator Ruffin's. The mischief began with Elise's offhand little discourse on the colour of eyes and hair as indicia of the traits and fates of lovers—particularly with her statement that a red-headed man will not take a woman's "no" for an answer. The point in that which irritated the cuticle of Mr. Rutledge's indifference was that Mr. Second Lieutenant Morgan had a head of flame.Now man—natural man—usually has the intelligence to know when a thing is beyond his reach, and the philosophy to content himself without it. He rejoices also in his neighbour's successes. But natural man, with all his intelligence and all his philosophy and all his brotherly love, cannot look with patience or self-deceit upon another's success or probable success where he himself, striving, has failed. In the whole realm of human experience there are exceptions to this rule perhaps; but in the tropical province of Love there is none. There a man may conclude that the woman he wants would not be good for him, even perforce may decide he loves her not: but the merest suggestion of another man as a probable winner will surely bring his decision up for review—and always to overrule it. So with Rutledge: from the moment of Elise's unstudied remark he conceded to his own heart that his indifference was the veriest sham and pretence—while still a pretence necessary to his self-respect.CHAPTER XHayward Graham, with an honourable discharge from the service of the United States buttoned up in his blouse, was taking a look at Washington before going back to re-enlist. He liked the army life, with all its restrictions; and having by his intelligence and aptitude attained the highest non-commissioned rank, he was optimistic enough to believe he could win a commission before another term of enlistment expired. In this hope he was not without a fair idea of the obstacle which his colour placed in the path of his ambition; but in weighing his chances he counted much on the friendliness of the newly inaugurated executive for the negro race generally, and most of all on the President's according his deserts to a man who had saved his life. He would keep his identity in that respect a secret till the time was ripe, so that the President's sense of obligation, if it existed, might not be dulled by the granting of any premature favours—and then he would see whether gratitude would make a man do justice.He had more than a month yet in which to re-enlist without loss of rank or pay, and his visit to Washington was intended to be short, as he had several other little picnics planned with which to fill out his vacation. He had been there ten days or more and he had walked and looked and lounged till he was thoroughly tired of the city and was decided to leave on the morrow.But that last afternoon he saw Helen Phillips. Her carriage was driven slowly across the sidewalk in front of him to enter the White House grounds. The sudden quickening of his pulses at sight of her was unaccountable to him. His gaze followed her as she went away from him, and for the first time in months he remembered in dumb pain he was a negro. He tried to separate the thought of his blood from his thought of the young woman, and to put the first and its unpleasantness out of his mind while he enjoyed the latter and its association with his college victory and his patriotic enthusiasms: but he could not think of her without that indefinable and subconscious heartache.When he came to his lodgings and opened up the afternoon paper, the only item among all the notes of interest that had the power to catch or hold his thought for a moment was a brief statement to the effect that the veteran White House coachman was dead. Hayward sat and turned this over in his mind a few minutes and then asked himself "Why not?"Next morning he applied for the vacant position of coachman to the President. With the purpose to conceal his identity during his little adventure, as he thought of it, he gave only his Christian names: John Hayward. With similar purpose he had dressed himself in civilian clothes; but these could not conceal his magnificent lines, and, though another employee had been given the dead coachman's place, Hayward's fine appearance was so much in his favour that he was engaged as footman on trial. This was really better suited to his wishes than the other. He had not foregone his army ambition in a night, but neither had he been able to resist the temptation to spend a short time—the remainder of his furlough at least—where he could see something of the young woman who was so closely associated in his mind with the events in his life that were worth while.Hayward was not in love with Helen Phillips in any sense—at least not in the ordinary sense; for that undefined pain, a dumb monitor of the impossible, kept him hedged away from that. On the other hand, to his mite of natural feeling of inferiority was added the respect for rank and dignity which his army life had hammered into him; and his attitude toward her was the devotion which a loyalist peasant soldier might have for the daughter of his king. He wished to be near her, to serve her; and he counted himself fortunate that this opportunity had come to him.—And a superb footman he made, having every aptitude and manner both of mind and body for form and show; and being relieved of any humiliation of spirit by his secret feeling that he had set himself to guard and serve a crown princess.A superb footman he made—and a new-rich Pittsburger offered him double wages to enter his service. The sneer with which Hayward told him that he was not working for money ever will be a riddle to that Pittsburg brain.A superb footman he made; and with the added distinction of the President's livery he always drew attention and comment. The veteran Senator Ruffin was entertaining a few friends with reminiscences once when Hayward passed. One of the party said: "Look at that footman. Phillips has a fine eye for form, hasn't he?""Yes," Senator Ruffin answered, "if he saw him before he employed him, which he very likely did not."But do you know," he went on, "I never see that nigger but I think of John Hayward of whose last speech in Congress I was telling some of you yesterday. The nigger has his figure and carriage, even the set and toss of his head, about everything save his colour. The first time I saw him get down from the Phillips' carriage I thought of John Hayward, who is dead these fifty years."There was a man for you, gentlemen. No more knightly spirit was ever carried in a kinglier figure of a man. He was just out of college when I was a boy, but I can remember that even then John Hayward was a toast and a young man of mark down in Carolina. Our fathers' plantations adjoined, and he was the first man that ever stirred in my boyish heart the sentiment of hero-worship. The Haywards were men of note in my State in that day as in this, and young John Hayward's future was as brilliant and well-assured as wealth, fine family, abounding talent, high purpose and personal force of character could make it."—"But we lost him. A former half-Spanish, half-devil overseer on his father's plantation, who had been discharged because of his cruelty and general wickedness, had bought a small farm near the elder Hayward's place, and was trying to establish himself as a land and slave holder. This overseer came back from one of his periodical trips bringing with him one of the likeliest mulatto girls, as I remember it now, that I ever saw. All the neighbours knew he could have no good purpose in buying her, for he needed no house-girl to keep dressed up in calico as he began to keep her. It was but a few days before reports of his terrible cruelty to her began to be circulated by both negroes and white people, who heard her screams as he whipped her day and night."Late one afternoon, a week perhaps after he had brought her home, John Hayward and Dick Whitaker were riding through the overseer's farm and heard the girl scream. John, who was acquainted with the situation, said, 'Come on, Dick, let's go up and stop that;' and put his horse at the little gate and was pounding on the overseer's door before Dick could reply."The sound of blows ceased and the overseer came and opened the door, revealing the girl crouched down on the floor moaning and sobbing. When the slave-driver saw it was John his eyes snapped in wrath."'What do you want?' he demanded."'I want you to quit whipping that nigger,' said John."'You go to hell,' retorted the overseer. 'I'll whip my slaves whenever they won't work like I—'"'Oh, master, I work, I work,' protested the girl to John."'Shut up! you—' began the overseer."'Yes, I know you work,' said John to the girl; and he turned to the man, 'and I know—everybody knows—what your purpose is, you fiend! My God, it is crime enough for such as you to own the bodies of women without your tearing their souls!'"'Get off my land, damn you!' ordered the overseer; and then, as if to show his contempt for Hayward and Whitaker, he turned again to begin flogging the cowering girl, saying: 'She's my property, and the law gives me the right to make her obey!'"'Stop!' thundered John, laying his hand on his pistol as the slave-driver raised his arm to strike. 'You son of hell! The man who puts the weight of his hand on a woman, even his wife, to make her obey his passions, deserves to die!'"Whitaker said it was all over before he could slide from his horse. The overseer struck the girl a vicious cut as John was speaking, and his whip was descending again when John's pistol flashed and the brute dropped to the floor with a ball through his brain...."
CHAPTER VIII
It was a morning in late September that Elise and Rutledge went for their last canoe ride on the mighty river. Mrs. Phillips and her daughters were to leave for home on an early afternoon train, and Mrs. Rutledge and Evans for Montreal an hour later.
It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter's advance agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty master.
The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature.
It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of Elise as an invigorating draught. She was soen rapportwith the morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the day.
The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature's quickening heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise's charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man. She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have its origin in some vague unmanly weakness—and weakness in a man she despised.
She had talked to him of a score of things since they had embarked, passing rapidly from one to another in order to keep him away from the one subject he seemed attracted to from any point of the conversational compass. At the moment she had been so clearly impressed with his almost feminine gracefulness the conversation was taking a dangerous swerve, she thought; and for a minute she was at a loss how to divert the course of language from the matter nearest his heart. In a blind effort to do so she unthinkingly challenged him to prove his sterner strength which she had never seen put to the test.
"It's easy going here, isn't it?" she said. "What a pity we couldn't have one visit to the island before we go away."
"Do you wish to go there?" asked Rutledge.
"I would like to," she replied, "but of course we cannot attempt it without an experienced canoe-man. It is about time for us to return; don't you think so?"
"That depends on whether you really want to go to the island," returned Rutledge, who was quick to see and resent the intimation that he was not equal to the business of putting her across the racing water between them and the small cluster of trees and shrubs growing among a misshapen pile of rocks nearly across the river.
"I am told no one but these half-breed guides have ever tried the passage," he continued. "Not because it is so very dangerous, I suppose, but because it is too small to attract visitors to try the rough water."
"They can get to it easily from the other side, can't they? It seems so near to that," said Elise.
"No. Jacques tells me that the narrow water on the other side runs like a race-horse, and has many rocks to smash the canoe. Even going from this side I would prefer to leave you here, Miss Phillips, and of course that would make the visit without inducement to me."
"You allow your carefulness of me and your politeness to me to reason you out of the danger," said Elise, without any sinister purpose; but Rutledge recalled Helen Phillips' words about Elise and heroes, and became uncomfortable.
"I used them to reason you out of the danger," he replied. "If the argument does not appeal to you I am ready for your orders."
"Then let's go over," said Elise, prompted half by the challenge in his eyes and half by her subconscious desire to see him vindicate his feminine grace.
"I admit I am a coward," Rutledge remarked as he turned the canoe toward the island.
"Oh, if you confess to being afraid!" said Elise in mingled surprise and pity. "I certainly cannot insist. Let's return to the hotel."
"You mistake me," Rutledge replied as he sent the light craft on toward the rapids. "My cowardice is in permitting you to bully me into carrying you into some danger. I should have the courage to refuse."
"You would have me believe in your courage, then, whether you choose danger or avoid it. That is artful," Elise rejoined.
The word "artful" nettled Rutledge, and he put his resentment into the strokes which sent the canoe forward. If Elise Phillips could believe of him that he would attempt to establish a reputation for courage by a trick of words, words would be inadequate, of course, to defend him from the imputation. There was no chance now to convince her, he thought, save to try the passage. So, despising the weakness which would not let him point the canoe homeward, he set his strength against the increasing current, and soon lost thought of the argument in the zest of sparring with the river.
Elise became absorbedly interested in the contest and in his handling of the boat. The interest of both became more and more intense as the water began to slap the canoe viciously and toss them with careless strength. A wave rolling over a sunken rock rushed upon them with a gurgle and swash and passed under the canoe with a heave and splash that tilted them uncomfortably and threw a hatful of water over the side. Another came with a more impatient toss, and Elise crouched upon the seat to preserve her equilibrium. Rutledge looked round at her face, which was unsmiling but without fear, and asked:
"Shall we go back?"
"No," the girl answered.
They soon found that the water was swifter than they had judged it from the shore, and that they had not put across far enough up-stream to make the island easily. They were nearing it, but the current was becoming boisterous and they were drifting faster and faster down-stream. Swifter water and rougher met the canoe at every paddle-stroke. Rutledge with his back to Elise dropped on one knee in the water in the canoe bottom and gave every energy to his work. If Elise had not been with him he would have liked nothing better.
As for the girl, she would not insist on this wild ride again, but, being in, she was having many thrills of pleasure. Rutledge's manner gave her confidence that they would reach the island, but with how much discomfiture she was as yet uncertain. She was drenched with water from the slapping waves and the swiftly flying paddle, which was Rutledge's only weapon against the wrath of the river. She saw in his resolute efforts that their situation was at least serious if not dangerous, and she hardly took her eyes from him; but with her closest scrutiny she did not detect the slightest indecision or apprehension.
Only once did fear come to her, and that but for a moment. The struggle was now quick and furious. They were in the mad whirl of crushing water that tore alongside the island and was ripped and ground among the bullying rocks. She heard Rutledge stifle a cry as he sent the canoe out with a back-stroke that almost threw her overboard, and the rioting current slammed them past a jagged vicious-looking rock just under the river's surface which would have smashed their cockle-shell to splinters. When she looked down upon it as they were shot past she thought for an instant of death and dead men's bones. Then—
"Out! Quick—now!" yelled Rutledge, as with a strength that seemed as much of will as of muscle, he shoved the canoe's nose up against the island and held it for a moment against the fury of the water.
Elise rose at his sharp command and leaped lightly out upon a bare rock, giving the canoe a back kick which sent it swinging around broad across the current. As it swung off Rutledge, seeing no favourable place below him to make another landing, quickly gave his end of the boat a cant toward the island, dropped the paddle in the canoe, grabbed the mooring chain and jumped for the land. He jumped and alighted unsteadily but without further mishap than so far capsizing the canoe that it shipped enough water to more than half submerge it and threaten to sink it. With his effort to draw it up on the rock and save it from sinking entirely, the water in the canoe rushed to the outer end, sending that completely under and floating the paddle out and away. He yanked the canoe up on the island and, turning, looked straight into Elise's eyes for ten seconds without speaking.
"Why don't you say it?" the young woman asked with amused defiance.
"Say what?" inquired Rutledge.
"What you are dying to tell me."
"I love you," answered Rutledge simply.
"Oh! You—you—impudent—you horrible!" cried Elise with a gasp. "To presume I would invite you to tell me—that! How dare you!"
"I dare anything for you," said Rutledge. "I love you and—"
"Stop! Not another word on that subject—lest your presumption become unbearable! You know very well, Mr. Stupidity, that I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"
"I have told you—so—your—exp—"
"Stop, I say! I will not listen to another word. Your persistence is almost—insulting!"
"Insulting!" said Rutledge in amazement. "Then pardon me and I'll not offend again;" and he turned to take a look at the fast-riding paddle as it turned and flashed far down the river.
Elise was glad of the chance to gather her wits together and prepare a defence against this abrupt method of wooing. Indeed she was on the defensive against her own heart. One fact alone, however, would justify her deliberation: that she was not certain of her own mind. Friendship may halt and consider, admiration may sit in judgment; but love that questions, or is of two minds, or hesitates, is not love.
She turned away from him and the river to give attention to this new problem which was of more immediate interest to her than the question of how they were to get away from the island. Rutledge came to her after awhile.
"Miss Phillips," he said, "I have the honour to report that, while we are prisoners on this island now, our imprisonment will not be lengthy. Fortunately I saw Jacques on the other side of the river and made him understand, I think, that we have lost our paddle. At any rate he put off toward the hotel at great speed, and will be down with another canoe I hope before you become tired of your island." And he added, as if to relieve the tense situation: "While we wait I shall be glad to show you over the premises and to talk about anything that you may prefer to discuss."
Elise could not tell from the formal manner of Rutledge's words whether he was really offended or humourously stilted in his speech. She could be as coldly polite as any occasion demanded; but, believing that she had effectually put an end to his love-making for the day, she met his formality of manner in her naturally charming and friendly spirit.
"Sit down here then, and tell me where you learned to handle a canoe. I did not know canoeing was a Southern sport."
"It is not," Rutledge said, taking the place she gave him at her feet. "I was never in a canoe till I came here this summer."
"Now, Mr. Rutledge, don't ask too much of credulity. One surely cannot become skilful without practice."
"I did not mean that I have never been on the water before," said Rutledge; "but in my country we do not have these curved and graceful canoes. We navigate our rivers with the primitive dugout or pirogue. I have used one of those on my father's Pacolet plantation since I was a boy. The dugout is made by hollowing out a section of a tree. That makes the strongest and best boat, for it never leaks or gets smashed up. It is very narrow and shallow, however, and it takes some skill to handle it in a flood."
"Were you ever in a flood?—a worse flood than this?" asked Elise.
"Yes. When our little rivers get up they are as bad as this or worse. I have seen them worse. During the great flood on the Pacolet some years ago, when railroad bridges, mill dams, saw-mills, cotton mills, houses, barns, cotton bales, lumber, cattle, men, women and children were all engulfed in one watery burial, the little river was for six hours a monster—a demon."
"Tell me about that," Elise said; and to entertain her Rutledge told her at length the story of that cataclysm of piedmont South Carolina. He went into the details without which such description is only awful, not interesting. Many were the incidents of heroism and hairbreadth escapes and unspeakable calamity which he related; and he told the stories with such vividness of portraiture, dramatic fire and touches of pathos that, with the roar of many waters actually pounding upon her ear-drums, Elise could close her eyes and see the scenes he depicted.
In looking upon the pictures he drew with such living interest she found herself straining her tight-shut eyes in search of his figure among the throng that lined the river-bank or fought the awful flood. Time after time as he described an act of heroic courage in words that burned and glowed and crackled with the fire that could stir only an eye-witness or an actor in the unstudied drama he was reproducing, she would clothe the hero with Rutledge's form, identify his distinctive gestures and movement and catch even the tones of his voice as it shouted against the booming of the waters: but with studied regularity and distinctness Rutledge at some point in every story, incidentally and apparently unconsciously, would make it plain that the hero of that incident was a person other than himself.
He might have told her, indeed, many things to his own credit: especially of a desperate ride and struggle in one of those dugouts which he had volunteered to make in order to prevent an old negro man adrift on a cabin-top from going over Pacolet Dam Number 3, where so many unfortunates went down and came not up again; but at no time could Elise infer from his speech that he was the hero of his own story. Her word "artful" still rankled in his memory, and he swore to his own soul that she should never, never hear him utter a word that might show he possessed or claimed to possess courage.
The only method by which Elise could deduce from his words the conclusion that Rutledge was of courageous heart was that courage seemed such a commonplace virtue among the people of his section that he probably possessed his share of it. Her curiosity was finally aroused to know whether by any artifice she might induce him to tell of his own exploits, which his very reticence persuaded her must be many and interesting, and she brought all her powers into play to draw him out: but to no purpose. She refrained from any direct appeal to him in fear that a personal touch might turn the conversation along dangerous lines; and Rutledge, having been properly rebuked, waited for some intimation of permission before presuming to discuss other than impersonal themes.
While indeed it only confirmed her woman's intuition, Elise was unconsciously happier because of Rutledge's blunt statement of his love, for it made certain a fact that was not displeasing to her. Yet she would hold him at arm's length, for she could with sincerity bid him neither hope nor despair. The glamour of her day-dreams made the reading of her heart's message uncertain. Rutledge had not the glittering accessories that attended the wooer of her visions; and yet as he talked to her she was mentally placing him in every picture her mind drew of the future, and was impressed that whether in the soft scenes where knightly gallantry and grace wait upon fair women, or in the stern dramas where bitter strength of mind and heart and body is poured out in libation to the god of grinding conflict, he, in every scene, looked all that became a man.
Rutledge's flow of narrative and Elise's absent-minded reverie were broken in upon by the hail of Jacques, who was approaching them from almost directly up-stream. His canoe was doing a grapevine dance as he pushed it yet farther across the river and dropped rapidly down to a landing on the far side of the island.
"Sacre! Wrong side!" he exclaimed when he came across and saw where Rutledge had pulled his canoe out of the water. "Here I lose two canoe sometime. How you mek him land?"
Rutledge did not answer the question but set about getting his canoe across the island to the point designated by Jacques as the place for leaving it. He had no desire to stay longer since all hope of furthertête-à-têtewith Elise was gone; and in a few minutes they were ready to embark.
"No hard pull, but kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," said Jacques in explaining the course by which they were to return, the which was plainly beset with numberless rocks and shoals.
"Sweem out seex times befor I lairn road," he added as a comforting proof of the thoroughness of his knowledge. The return was a simple matter of dropping off from the far side of the island, floating down a few rods, and then picking along through the rocks across the river as the canoe gathered speed down-stream.
"Miss Phillips," Rutledge said when they were ready, "perhaps you had better take ship with Jacques. He knows the road."
Their rescuer looked pleased at the honour, and turned to pull his canoe within easier reach.
"No, thank you," she said to Rutledge. "I prefer to go with you."
Rutledge caught his breath at the loyalty and the caress in her voice, and ungratefully wished Jacques at the bottom of the river. He handed her into his canoe with a tenderness that was eloquent; and Jacques, seeing through the game which robbed him of the graceful young woman for a passenger, put off just ahead of them, saying:
"I go fairst. Follow me shairp."
It was no easy task to follow that canoe; and Elise, as she watched the precision with which Rutledge used the "kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," was convinced that such skill had not gone to waste at the Pacolet flood. As she looked at him when the rough water was past and he was sending the canoe up the river with even swing again, graceful as before, her eyes had a light in them that would have gladdened his heart to see.
They landed near the hotel and hurried straight to it upon Elise's plea that she was late and must hurry to dress for her train. Rutledge walked beside her down the long hall of the hotel, and at the foot of the stairway, feeling that opportunity was slipping past him, he stopped her short with—
"Your answer, Elise! In heaven's name, your answer!"
Elise was again startled by his abruptness, and her unrestrained heart's impulse sent a look of tenderness to her eyes that would have crowned Rutledge's life with all happiness, had not that glamour of her daydreams, fateful, insistent, overclouded and banished it in a moment. She looked at him confusedly a moment more, then took a quick step away from him, hesitated, and, turning quickly, said:
"There is no answer,"—and fled up the stairs.
Rutledge turned away dazed by the reply to his heart's question. "There is no answer!"—as if he were a "Buttons" who had carried to her ladyship an inconsequential message which deserved no reply. He could not get his mind to comprehend the import of it; and he was walking back down the hallway with a vexed frown upon his face trying to untangle his thoughts, when Helen Phillips passed him and, seeing him in such a mood after his parting ride with Elise, prodded him with—
"None but heroes need apply, Mr. Rutledge. I warned you."
Rutledge passed on with an irritated shrug of the shoulders; and Helen, laughing, ran to tease Elise for a history of the morning's ride and the reason "why Mr. Rutledge is so grumpy." Little satisfaction did she get from Elise, however, for that young woman evinced as much of reticence as Rutledge had shown of irritation.
"I told him none but heroes need apply," laughed Helen.
"What do you know of heroes?" asked Elise with a snap.
CHAPTER IX
Within a week after Evans Rutledge and Elise Phillips parted at the St. Lawrence resort, the newspapers told the people that at a Saratoga restaurant Colonel Phillips and his wife and daughter, and Doctor Martin, a negro of national reputation, had sat down to dine together. It was soon after this that one evening, at his home in Cleveland, Ohio, Colonel Phillips happened upon a mixed quartette (all negroes) who had been brought over from New York to sing at a sacred concert in one of the fashionable churches, but who could not obtain what they considered a respectable lodging-place. With characteristic impulsiveness the Colonel, who heard of it, invited the two men and two women up to his house and entertained them overnight.
On those occasions Mrs. Phillips had shown unmistakable opposition to the acts of her liege lord. Elise had more than seconded her mother in haughty indignation; though with her superb training in obedience she could not be openly rebellious. When he had brought the quartette into his home Mr. Phillips could not fail to see the pain in his wife's eyes as she asked:
"Was that necessary?"
"Why, can you not see," he replied with some hot feeling in his tones, "that it was the only thing to be done? They are very respectable people, all of them. They are intelligent and well-bred, as you can see. Why should the simple matter of colour alone keep me from doing what I just as quickly might have done for a white man?"
The unconscious humour of this way of putting it did not reach Mrs. Phillips, and the Colonel's tone and manner, not his words, kept her silent when he had finished. She could not quarrel with him; and he thought he had answered her reason, though he admitted inwardly that her prejudices were unconverted. Nevertheless he did not open the discussion again.
Helen, however, naturally siding with her father, did not hesitate to bring it up repeatedly, and youthfully to descant at length and with some elaboration of ideas on the propriety and admirableness of her father's act. Mrs. Phillips, with the sole purpose of preserving parental discipline and not wishing even slightly to encourage insubordination, had very little to say to Helen about it; while Elise answered all the younger girl's effusions with sniffs of disdain.
* * * * *
These incidents and Elise's womanly perversity and curiosity really gave Evans Rutledge a great opportunity if he only could have read the portents of circumstance and calculated to a nicety the eccentricity of a woman's heart. The entertainment of negro guests at the mansion of an aspirant for the presidency was given wide publicity by the press and was the subject of universal though temporary notice by newspapers and editorial writers of every class. Rutledge, in his capacity as Washington representative of a half-dozen newspapers over the country, contributed his share to the general chorus of comment.
When Elise read in a Cleveland paper a clipping accredited to "Evans Rutledge in Chicago American," she suddenly became desirous of seeing that young man again. The sentiments, stripped of the tartness in their expression and a seeming lack of appreciation of her distinguished father's dignity, were so in accord with hers that she was startled at the exact coincidence of thought—while still resentful of the free and fierce criticism.
Resentment and thoughts of coincidences were pushed out of her mind, however, by the question, "Would he tell me again he loves me?" This was both a personal and a sentimental question and was therefore of chief interest to her woman's mind. Not that she had a whit more of love for him than upon that last day upon the St. Lawrence—oh, no; but his love for her? his willingness to avow it? was it still hers? was it ever hers really?—for not a word or a line had he addressed to her since the day they fought the river. She would confess to a slight curiosity and desire to meet him when she should go to Washington on that promised visit to Lola DeVale.
Rutledge assuredly had escaped none of the untoward influences which the Phillips-negro incidents might have had upon his love for Elise. His good mother religiously attended to the duty of impressing upon him the disgraceful horrors of those affairs. She found no words forceful enough properly to characterize them, though she applied herself with each new day to the task. What might have been the result if her son's heart had been inclined to fight for the love of Elise of course cannot be known. His mother's philippics effected nothing, for the good reason that he had lost hope of winning Elise before the negro incidents occurred, and the personal turn his mother gave them was only tiresome to him. Elise's last words to him, "There is no answer," had put their affair beyond the effect of anything of that sort. She had not only refused him, but had flouted him, treated him with contempt: yes, had said to him in effect that his proffer of love was not worth even a negative answer. He had gone over every incident of their association, and, with a lover's carefulness of detail, had considered and weighed her every word and look and gesture; and, with a lover's proverbial blundering, had found as a fact the only thing that was not true.
* * * * *
When Elise came to Washington on her visit Rutledge knew of course that she was in town, and he kept his eyes open for her. His pride would not let him call upon her, for he had meditated upon her treatment of him till his grievance had been magnified many fold and his view had become so distorted that in all her acts he saw only a purpose to play with his heart. Yet, he wished to see her, wished very much to see her—doubtless for the same reason that a bankrupt will look in upon "the pit" that has gulfed his fortune.
They met unexpectedly at Senator Ruffin's, where only time was given them to shake hands in a non-committal manner before Mrs. Ruffin sent them in to dinner together. If each had spoken the thoughts in the heart a perfect understanding would have brought peace and friendship at least, but no words were spoken from the heart. All of their conversational sparring was of the brain purely. They fenced with commonplaces for some little time, each on guard. Rutledge, without a thought of Doctor Martin or the negro quartette, formed all of his speeches for the ear of a woman who had mocked his love; while Elise talked only for the man who had written the article in theChicago American. She saw the change in his manner, in his polite aloofness, his insincere, careless pleasantries.
"It is delightfully kind of you, Miss Phillips, to come over and give Washington some of those thrills with which you have favoured Cleveland."
"What is the answer?" asked Elise blankly.
"My meaning is no riddle surely," said Rutledge. "The Cleveland newspaper reporters have taught us to believe that you are the centre of interest in that city and that, as one signing himself 'Q' wrote in yesterday'sJournal,—something to the effect that you radiate a sort of three-syllable waves which make the younger men to thrill and the old beaux to take a new lease on life. When I read that, I could see a lot of small boys crowding around an electric machine, all wanting to get a touch of the current but fearful of being knocked endways."
"Now diagnose the form of your dementia," said the girl. "You not only read but youbelievethe statements of the penny-a-liners. Your case is hopeless."
"I must read somewhat of such things—to know my craft. I must believe somewhat of them—to respect my craft."
"Is either knowledge or respect necessary, Mr. Rutledge? The craft is admitted; but I had thought the purpose of all this craft was the penny-a-line,—not knowledge or truth—which are not only incidental but often unwelcome. Why read or believe the line after the cent has been paid?"
"You are unmerciful to us, Miss Phillips. It is true every news item of interest has its money value for a newspaper man, but you must understand that we try to use them honestly and say no more than we feel—often far less than we feel."
Rutledge's manner was serious when he had finished; and Elise, feeling sure that the same incident was in his mind as in hers, had it on her tongue's end to reply with spirit and point, when he continued lightly:
"But that is shop. It is good of you to come over now and gradually accustom us to those Q-waves instead of giving us the sudden full current when Colonel Phillips rents the White House. You will not care if some few become immune before that time, for there will be no end of rash youths to get tangled up with the wires."
Elise had not been a woman if Rutledge's impersonal "we" and "us" and suggestion of persons immune to her charms had not piqued her. He need not put his change of heart so bluntly, she thought. Yet what incensed her was not the loss of his love, but that that love had been so poor and frail a thing.
"I am glad you guarantee a full supply of the raw material, Mr. Rutledge. It is a very interesting study, I think, to watch the effect of the—current—on youths of different temperaments: on the black-haired, black-eyed one who raves and swears his love—to two women in the same month; or the light-haired, blue-eyed one who laughs both while the current is on and when it is off; or the red-headed lover who will not take 'no' for an answer; or the gray-eyed, brown-haired man who would appear indifferent while his heart is consuming with a passion that changes not even when hope is gone. I will depend on you to see that they all come along, Mr. Rutledge—even to that young Congressman over there who is so devoted to Lola," she added in an undertone, "if he can be persuaded to change his court."
"Oh, he will come. His present devotion does not signify. There is nothing true but Heaven," Rutledge replied, not to be outdone in cynicism by this young woman who had quite taken his breath away with her impromptu classification of lovers. His own hair was black and his eyes, like hers, were gray; and he saw she was making sport of him under both categories and yet betraying not her real thought in the slightest degree.
"Beware, Mr. Rutledge. Only woman may change her mind. Men must not usurp our prerogative."
"True," said Rutledge; "but a man does not know his mind or his heart either till he's forty. He is not responsible for the guesses he makes before that time. After that, he knows only what he doesnotwant which is much; and, if undisturbed, can enjoy a negative consistency and content."
"I may not defend the sex against such an able and typical representative," said Elise as the diners arose.
Neither of these wholesome-minded young people had any taste for such a fictitious basis of conversation; but each was on the defensive against the supposed attitude of the other, and the moment their thoughts went outside conventional platitudes they were given an unnatural and cynical twist. Both felt a sense of relief when the evening was past. But despite this condition, which prevailed during Elise's visit, Rutledge could not put away the desire to see as much of her as an assumption of indifference would permit, if only with the unformulated hope that he might catch unawares if but for a moment the unstudied good camaraderie and congenial spirit which had won his heart on the St. Lawrence. But the sensitive consciousness of one or the other ever had been present to exorcise the natural spirit from their conversations.
Rutledge lived bravely up to his ideas of what a proper pride demanded of him, but his assumption of indifference was sorely tried from their first meeting at Senator Ruffin's. The mischief began with Elise's offhand little discourse on the colour of eyes and hair as indicia of the traits and fates of lovers—particularly with her statement that a red-headed man will not take a woman's "no" for an answer. The point in that which irritated the cuticle of Mr. Rutledge's indifference was that Mr. Second Lieutenant Morgan had a head of flame.
Now man—natural man—usually has the intelligence to know when a thing is beyond his reach, and the philosophy to content himself without it. He rejoices also in his neighbour's successes. But natural man, with all his intelligence and all his philosophy and all his brotherly love, cannot look with patience or self-deceit upon another's success or probable success where he himself, striving, has failed. In the whole realm of human experience there are exceptions to this rule perhaps; but in the tropical province of Love there is none. There a man may conclude that the woman he wants would not be good for him, even perforce may decide he loves her not: but the merest suggestion of another man as a probable winner will surely bring his decision up for review—and always to overrule it. So with Rutledge: from the moment of Elise's unstudied remark he conceded to his own heart that his indifference was the veriest sham and pretence—while still a pretence necessary to his self-respect.
CHAPTER X
Hayward Graham, with an honourable discharge from the service of the United States buttoned up in his blouse, was taking a look at Washington before going back to re-enlist. He liked the army life, with all its restrictions; and having by his intelligence and aptitude attained the highest non-commissioned rank, he was optimistic enough to believe he could win a commission before another term of enlistment expired. In this hope he was not without a fair idea of the obstacle which his colour placed in the path of his ambition; but in weighing his chances he counted much on the friendliness of the newly inaugurated executive for the negro race generally, and most of all on the President's according his deserts to a man who had saved his life. He would keep his identity in that respect a secret till the time was ripe, so that the President's sense of obligation, if it existed, might not be dulled by the granting of any premature favours—and then he would see whether gratitude would make a man do justice.
He had more than a month yet in which to re-enlist without loss of rank or pay, and his visit to Washington was intended to be short, as he had several other little picnics planned with which to fill out his vacation. He had been there ten days or more and he had walked and looked and lounged till he was thoroughly tired of the city and was decided to leave on the morrow.
But that last afternoon he saw Helen Phillips. Her carriage was driven slowly across the sidewalk in front of him to enter the White House grounds. The sudden quickening of his pulses at sight of her was unaccountable to him. His gaze followed her as she went away from him, and for the first time in months he remembered in dumb pain he was a negro. He tried to separate the thought of his blood from his thought of the young woman, and to put the first and its unpleasantness out of his mind while he enjoyed the latter and its association with his college victory and his patriotic enthusiasms: but he could not think of her without that indefinable and subconscious heartache.
When he came to his lodgings and opened up the afternoon paper, the only item among all the notes of interest that had the power to catch or hold his thought for a moment was a brief statement to the effect that the veteran White House coachman was dead. Hayward sat and turned this over in his mind a few minutes and then asked himself "Why not?"
Next morning he applied for the vacant position of coachman to the President. With the purpose to conceal his identity during his little adventure, as he thought of it, he gave only his Christian names: John Hayward. With similar purpose he had dressed himself in civilian clothes; but these could not conceal his magnificent lines, and, though another employee had been given the dead coachman's place, Hayward's fine appearance was so much in his favour that he was engaged as footman on trial. This was really better suited to his wishes than the other. He had not foregone his army ambition in a night, but neither had he been able to resist the temptation to spend a short time—the remainder of his furlough at least—where he could see something of the young woman who was so closely associated in his mind with the events in his life that were worth while.
Hayward was not in love with Helen Phillips in any sense—at least not in the ordinary sense; for that undefined pain, a dumb monitor of the impossible, kept him hedged away from that. On the other hand, to his mite of natural feeling of inferiority was added the respect for rank and dignity which his army life had hammered into him; and his attitude toward her was the devotion which a loyalist peasant soldier might have for the daughter of his king. He wished to be near her, to serve her; and he counted himself fortunate that this opportunity had come to him.
—And a superb footman he made, having every aptitude and manner both of mind and body for form and show; and being relieved of any humiliation of spirit by his secret feeling that he had set himself to guard and serve a crown princess.
A superb footman he made—and a new-rich Pittsburger offered him double wages to enter his service. The sneer with which Hayward told him that he was not working for money ever will be a riddle to that Pittsburg brain.
A superb footman he made; and with the added distinction of the President's livery he always drew attention and comment. The veteran Senator Ruffin was entertaining a few friends with reminiscences once when Hayward passed. One of the party said: "Look at that footman. Phillips has a fine eye for form, hasn't he?"
"Yes," Senator Ruffin answered, "if he saw him before he employed him, which he very likely did not.
"But do you know," he went on, "I never see that nigger but I think of John Hayward of whose last speech in Congress I was telling some of you yesterday. The nigger has his figure and carriage, even the set and toss of his head, about everything save his colour. The first time I saw him get down from the Phillips' carriage I thought of John Hayward, who is dead these fifty years.
"There was a man for you, gentlemen. No more knightly spirit was ever carried in a kinglier figure of a man. He was just out of college when I was a boy, but I can remember that even then John Hayward was a toast and a young man of mark down in Carolina. Our fathers' plantations adjoined, and he was the first man that ever stirred in my boyish heart the sentiment of hero-worship. The Haywards were men of note in my State in that day as in this, and young John Hayward's future was as brilliant and well-assured as wealth, fine family, abounding talent, high purpose and personal force of character could make it."
—"But we lost him. A former half-Spanish, half-devil overseer on his father's plantation, who had been discharged because of his cruelty and general wickedness, had bought a small farm near the elder Hayward's place, and was trying to establish himself as a land and slave holder. This overseer came back from one of his periodical trips bringing with him one of the likeliest mulatto girls, as I remember it now, that I ever saw. All the neighbours knew he could have no good purpose in buying her, for he needed no house-girl to keep dressed up in calico as he began to keep her. It was but a few days before reports of his terrible cruelty to her began to be circulated by both negroes and white people, who heard her screams as he whipped her day and night.
"Late one afternoon, a week perhaps after he had brought her home, John Hayward and Dick Whitaker were riding through the overseer's farm and heard the girl scream. John, who was acquainted with the situation, said, 'Come on, Dick, let's go up and stop that;' and put his horse at the little gate and was pounding on the overseer's door before Dick could reply.
"The sound of blows ceased and the overseer came and opened the door, revealing the girl crouched down on the floor moaning and sobbing. When the slave-driver saw it was John his eyes snapped in wrath.
"'What do you want?' he demanded.
"'I want you to quit whipping that nigger,' said John.
"'You go to hell,' retorted the overseer. 'I'll whip my slaves whenever they won't work like I—'
"'Oh, master, I work, I work,' protested the girl to John.
"'Shut up! you—' began the overseer.
"'Yes, I know you work,' said John to the girl; and he turned to the man, 'and I know—everybody knows—what your purpose is, you fiend! My God, it is crime enough for such as you to own the bodies of women without your tearing their souls!'
"'Get off my land, damn you!' ordered the overseer; and then, as if to show his contempt for Hayward and Whitaker, he turned again to begin flogging the cowering girl, saying: 'She's my property, and the law gives me the right to make her obey!'
"'Stop!' thundered John, laying his hand on his pistol as the slave-driver raised his arm to strike. 'You son of hell! The man who puts the weight of his hand on a woman, even his wife, to make her obey his passions, deserves to die!'
"Whitaker said it was all over before he could slide from his horse. The overseer struck the girl a vicious cut as John was speaking, and his whip was descending again when John's pistol flashed and the brute dropped to the floor with a ball through his brain...."