"A-settin' in de kingdom,Y-e-s, m-y-L-a-w-d!"
"A-settin' in de kingdom,Y-e-s, m-y-L-a-w-d!"
"Well, you've got gumption," said Bob, the manager. "That's what I always lacked—just plain gumption, and when you ain't got it, there's nothing to take its place. I was talking to General Bolingbroke about you yesterday, Ben, and that's what I said. 'There's but one word for that boy, General, and it's gumption.'"
I accepted the tribute with a swelling heart. "What good will it do me if I can't get an education?" I demanded.
"It's that will give it to you, Ben. Why, don't you know every blessed word in the English language that begins with ana? That's more than I know—that's more, I reckon," he burst out, "than the General himself knows!"
In this there was comfort, if a feeble one. "But there're so many other things besides thea's that you've got to learn," I responded.
"Yes, but if you learn thea's, you'll learn the other things,—now ain't that logic? The trouble with me, you see, is that I learned the other things without knowing a blamed sight of ana. I tell you what I'll do, Ben, my boy, I'll speak to the General about it the Very next time he comes to the factory."
He gave me back the dictionary, and I applied myself to its pages with a terrible earnestness while I awaited the great man's attention.
It was a week before it came, for the General, having gone North on affairs of the railroad, did not condescend to concern himself with my destiny until the more important business was arranged and despatched. Being in a bland mood, however, upon his return, it appeared that he had listened and expressed himself to some purpose at last.
"Tell him to go to Theophilus Pry and let me have his report," was what he had said.
"But who is Theophilus Pry?" I enquired, when this was repeated to me by Bob Brackett.
"Dr. Theophilus Pry, an old friend of the General's, who takes his nephew to coach in the evenings. The doctor's very poor, I believe, because they say of him that he never refuses a patient and never sends a bill. He swears there isn't enough knowledge in his profession to make it worth anybody's money."
"And where does he live?"
"In that little old house with the office in the yard on Franklin Street. The General says you're to go to him this evening at eight o'clock."
The sound of my beating heart was so loud in my ears that I hurriedly buttoned my jacket across it. Then as if I were to be examined on Johnson's Dictionary, my lips began to move silently while I spelled over the biggest words. If I could only confine my future conversations to the use of thea's andb's, I felt that I might safely pass through life without desperate disaster in the matter of speech.
It was a mild October evening, with a smoky blue haze, through which a single star shone over the clipped box in Dr. Theophilus Pry's garden, when I opened the iron gate and went softly along the pebbled walk to the square little office standing detached from the house. A black servant, carrying a plate of waffles from the outside kitchen, informed me in a querulous voice that the doctor was still at supper, but I might go in and wait; and accepting the suggestion with more amiability than accompanied it, I entered the small, cheerful room, where a lamp, with a lowered wick, burned under a green shade. Around the walls there were many ancient volumes in bindings of stout English calf, and on the mantelpiece, above which hung one of the original engravings of Latane's "Burial," two enormous glass jars, marked "Calomel" and "Quinine," presided over the apartment with an air of medicinal solemnity. They were the only visible and positive evidence of the doctor's calling in life, and when I knew him better in after years, I discovered that they were the only drugs he admitted to a place in the profession of healing. To the day of his death, he administered these alternatives with a high finality and an imposing presence. It was told of him that he considered but one symptom, and this he discovered with his hand on the patient's pulse and his eyes on a big loud-ticking watch in a hunting case. If the pulse was quick, he prescribed quinine, if sluggish, he ordered calomel. To dally with minor ailments was as much beneath him as to temporise with modern medicine. In his last years he was still suspicious of vaccination, and entertained a profound contempt for the knife. Beyond his faith in calomel and quinine, there were but two articles in his creed; he believed first in cleanliness, secondly in God. "Madam," he is reported to have remarked irreverently to a mother whom he found praying for her child's recovery in the midst of a dirty house, "when God doesn't respond to prayer, He sometimes answers a broom and a bucket of soapsuds." Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other practitioner of his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability to appreciate the exchange value of dollars and cents; and this failing grew upon him so rapidly in his declining years that Mrs. Clay, his widowed sister, who kept his house, was at last obliged to "put up pickles" for the market in order to keep a roof over her brother's distinguished head.
I was sitting in one of the worn leather chairs under the green lamp, when the door opened and shut quickly, and Dr. Theophilus Pry came in and held out his hand.
"So you're the lad George was telling me about," he began at once, with a charming, straightforward courtesy. "I hope I haven't kept you waiting many minutes, sir."
He was spare and tall, with stooping shoulders, a hooked nose, bearing a few red veins, and a smile that lit up his face like the flash of a lantern. Everything about his clothes that could be coloured was of a bright, strong red; his cravat, his big silk handkerchief, and the polka dots in his black stockings. "Yes, I like any colour as long as it's red," he was fond of saying with his genial chuckle.
Bending over the green baize cloth on the table, he pushed away a pile of examination papers, and raised the wick of the lamp.
"So you've started out to learn Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by heart," he observed. "Now by a fair calculation how long do you suppose it will take you?"
I replied with diffidence that it appeared to me now as if it would very likely take me till the Day of Judgment.
"Well, 'tis as good an occupation as most, and a long ways better than some," commented the doctor. "You've come to me, haven't you, because you think you'd like to learn a little Latin?"
"I'd like to learn anything, sir, that will help me to get on."
"What's the business?"
"Tobacco."
"I don't know that Latin will help you much there, unless it aids you to name a blend."
"It—it isn't only that, sir, I—I want an education—not just a common one."
A smile broke suddenly like a beam of light on his face, and I understood all at once why his calomel and his quinine so often cured. At that moment I should have swallowed tar water on faith if he had prescribed it.
"I don't know much about you, my lad," he remarked with a grave, old-fashioned courtesy, which lifted me several feet above the spot of carpet on which I stood, "but a gentleman who starts out to learn old Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by heart, is a gentleman I'll give my hand to."
With my pulses throbbing hard, I watched him take down a dog-eared Latin Grammar, and begin turning the pages; and when, after a minute, he put a few simple questions to me, I answered as well as I could for the lump in my throat. "It's the fashion now to neglect the classics," he said sadly, "and a man had the impertinence to tell me yesterday that the only use for a dead language was to write prescriptions for sick people in it. But I maintain, and I will repeat it, that you never find a gentleman of cultured and elevated tastes who has not at least a bowing acquaintance with the Latin language. The common man may deride—"
I looked up quickly. "If you please, sir, I'd like to learn it," I broke in with determination.
He glanced at me kindly, secretly flattered, I suspect, by my spontaneous tribute to his eloquence, and the leaves of the Latin Grammar had fluttered open, when the door swung wide with a cheerful bang, and a boy of about my own age, though considerably under my height and size, entered the room.
"I didn't get in from the ball game till an hour ago, doctor," he exclaimed. "Uncle George says please don't slam me if I am late."
Some surface resemblance to my hero of the railroad made me aware, even before Dr. Pry introduced us, that the newcomer was the "young George" of whom I had heard. He was a fresh, high-coloured boy, whose features showed even now a slight forecast of General Bolingbroke's awful redness. Before I looked: at him I got a vague impression that he was handsome; after I looked at him I began to wonder curiously why he was not? His hair was of a bright chestnut colour, very curly, and clipped unusually close, in order to hide the natural wave of which, I discovered later, he was ashamed. He had pleasant brown eyes, and a merry smile, which lent a singular charm to his face when it hovered about his mouth.
"I say, doctor, I wish you'd let me off to-night. I'll do double to-morrow," he begged, and then turned to me with his pleasant, intimate manner: "Don't you hate Latin? I do. Before Dr. Theophilus began coaching me I went to a woman, and that was worse—she made it so silly. I hate women, don't you?"
"Young George," observed Dr. Theophilus, with sternness, "for every disrespectful allusion to the ladies, I shall give you an extra page of grammar."
"I'm no worse than uncle, doctor. Uncle says—"
"I forbid you to repeat any flippant remarks of General Bolingbroke's, George, and you may tell him so, with my compliments, at breakfast."
Opening his book, he glanced at me gravely over its pages, and the next instant my education in the ancient languages and the finer graces of society commenced.
On that first evening I won a place in the doctor's affections, which, I like to think, I never really lost in the many changes the future brought me. My obsequious respect for dead tongues redeemed, to a great measure, the appalling ignorance I immediately displayed of the merest rudiments of geography and history; and when the time came, I believe it even reconciled him to my bodily stature, which always appeared to him to be too large to conform to the smaller requirements of society. In my fourteenth year I began to grow rapidly, and his chief complaint of me after this was that I never learned to manage my hands and feet as if they really belonged to me—a failing that I am perfectly aware I was never able entirely to overcome. It would doubtless take the breeding of all the Bolingbrokes, he once informed me, with a sigh, to enable a man to carry a stature such as mine with the careless dignity which might possibly have been attained by a moderate birth and a smaller body.
"Nature has intended you for a prize-fighter, but God has made of you a gentleman," he added, with his fine, characteristic philosophy, which escaped me at the moment; "it is a blessing, I suppose, to be endowed with a healthy body, but if I were you, I should endeavour to keep my members constantly in my mind. It is the next best thing to behaving as if they did not exist."
This was said so regretfully that I hadn't the heart to inform him that my mind, being of limited dimensions, found difficulty in accommodating at one and the same time my bodily members and the Latin language. Even my "Cæsar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to behave for a single instant as if they did not exist.
Except for the embarrassment of my increasing stature, the years that followed my introduction to Dr. Theophilus, as he was called, stand out in my memory as ones of almost unruffled happiness. The two great jars of calomel and quinine on the mantelpiece became like faces of familiar, beneficent friends; and the dusty bookcases, with their shining rows of old English bindings, formed an appropriate background for the flight of my wildest dreams. To this day those adolescent fancies have never detached themselves from the little office, the scattered bricks of which are now lying in the ruined garden between the blighted yew tree and the uprooted box. I can see them still circling like vague faces around the green lamp, under which Dr. Theophilus sits, with his brown and white pointer, Robin, asleep at his feet. Sometimes there was a saucer of fresh raspberry jam brought in by Mrs. Clay, the widowed sister; sometimes a basket of winesap apples; and once a year, on the night before Christmas, a large slice of fruit cake and a very small tumbler of egg-nog. Always there were the cheery smile, the pleasant talk, racy with anecdotes, and the wagging tail of Robin, the pointer.
"A good dog, Ben, this little mongrel of yours," the doctor would say, as he stooped to pat Samuel's head; "but then, all dogs are good dogs. You remember your Plutarch? Now, here's this Robin of mine. I wouldn't take five hundred dollars in my hand for him to-night." At this Robin, the pointer, would lift his big brown eyes, and slip his soft nose into his master's hand. "I wouldn't take five hundred dollars down for him," Dr. Theophilus would repeat with emphasis.
On the nights when our teacher was called out to a patient, as he often was, George Bolingbroke and I would push back the chairs for a game of checkers, or step outside into the garden for a wrestling match, in which I was always the victor. The physical proportions which the doctor lamented, were, I believe, the strongest hold I had upon the admiration of young George. Latin he treated with the same half-playful, half-contemptuous courtesy that I had observed in General Bolingbroke's manner to "the ladies," and even the doctor he regarded as a mixture of a scholar and a mollycoddle. It was perfectly characteristic that one thing, and one thing only, should command his unqualified respect, and this was the possession of the potential power to knock him down.
In my eighteenth year, when I had achieved a position and a salary in the tobacco factory, I left the Old Market forever, and moved into a room, which Mrs. Clay had offered to rent to me, in the house of Dr. Theophilus. During the next twelve months my intimacy with young George, who was about to enter the University, led to an acquaintance, though a slight one, with that great man, the General. As the years passed my dream of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, instead of evaporating, had become fixed in my mind as the fruition of all my toil, the end of all my ambition. I saw in it still, as I had seen in it that afternoon against the rosy sunset and the anchored vessel, the one glorious possibility, the great adventure. The General's plethoric figure, with his big paunch and his gouty toe, had never lost in my eyes the legendary light in which I had enveloped it; and when George suggested to me carelessly one spring afternoon that I should stop by his house and have a look at his uncle's classical library, I felt my cheeks burn, while my heart beat an excited tattoo against my ribs. The house I knew by sight, a grave, low-browed mansion, with a fringe of purple wistaria draping the long porch; and it was under a pendulous shower of blossoms that we found the General seated with the evening newspaper in his hand and his bandaged foot on a wicker stool. As we entered the gate he was making a face over a glass of water, while he complained fretfully to Dr. Theophilus, who sat in a rocking-chair, with Robin, the pointer, stretched on a rug at his feet.
"I'll never get used to the taste of water, if I live to be a hundred," the great man was saying peevishly. "To save my soul I can't understand why the Lord made anything so darn flat!"
A single lock of hair, growing just above the bald spot on his head, stirred in the soft wind like a tuft of bleached grass, while his lower, slightly protruding lip pursed itself into an angry and childish expression. He was paying the inevitable price, I gathered, for his career as "a gay old bird"; but even in the rebuking glance which Dr. Theophilus now bent upon him, I read the recognition that the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad must be dosed more sparingly than other men. Under his loose, puffy chin he wore a loose, puffy tie of a magenta shade, in the midst of which a single black pearl reposed; and when he turned his head, the creases in his neck looked like white cords sunk deep in the scarlet flesh.
"There's no use, Theophilus, I can't stand it," he protested. "Delilah, bring me a sip of whiskey to put a taste in my mouth."
"No whiskey, Delilah, not a drop," commanded the doctor sternly. "It's the result of your own imprudence, George, and you've got to pay for it. You've been eating strawberries, and I told you not to touch one with a ten-foot pole."
"You didn't say a word about strawberry shortcake," rejoined the General, like a guilty child, "and this attack is due to an entirely different cause. I dined at the Blands' on Sunday, and Miss Mitty gave me mint sauce on my lamb. I never could abide mint sauce."
Taking out his prescription book the doctor wrote down a prescription in a single word, which looked ominously like "calomel" from a distance.
"How did Miss Matoaca seem?" he asked, while Robin, the old pointer, came and sniffed at my ankles, and I thought of Samuel, sleeping under a flower bed in the doctor's garden. "She has a touch of malaria, and I ordered her three grains of quinine every morning."
A purple flush mounted to the General's face, which, if I could have read it by the light of history, would have explained the scornful flattery in his attitude toward "the sex." It was easy to catch the personal note in his piquant allusions to "the ladies," though an instinct, which he would probably have called a principle, kept them always within the bounds of politeness. Later I was to learn that Miss Matoaca had been the most ardent, if by no means the only, romance of his youth; and that because of some headstrong and indelicate opinions of hers on the subject of masculine morals, she had, when confronted with tangible proofs of the General's airy wanderings, hopelessly severed the engagement within a few weeks of the marriage. To a gay young bird the prospect of a storm in a nest had been far from attractive; and after a fierce quarrel, he had started dizzily down the descent of his bachelorhood, while she had folded her trembling wings and retired into the shadow. That Miss Matoaca possessed "headstrong opinions," even the doctor, with all his gallantry, would have been the last to deny. "She seems to think men are made just like women," he remarked now, wonderingly, "but, oh, Lord, they ain't!"
"I tell you it's those outlandish heathen notions of hers that are driving us all crazy!" exclaimed the General, making a face as he had done over his glass of water. "Talks about taxes without representation exactly as if she were a man and had rights! What rights does a woman want, anyway, I'd like to know, except the right to a husband? They all ought to have husbands—God knows I'm not denying them that!—the state ought to see to it. But rights! Pshaw! They'll get so presently they won't know how to bear their wrongs with dignity. And I tell you, doctor, if there's a more edifying sight than a woman bearing her wrongs beautifully, I've never seen it. Why, I remember my Cousin Jenny Tyler—you know she married that scamp who used to drink and throw his boots at her. 'What do you do, Jenny?' I asked, in a boiling rage, when she told me, and I never saw a woman look more like an angel than she did when she answered, 'I pick them up.' Why, she made me cry, sir; that's the sort of woman that makes a man want to marry."
"I dare say you're right," sighed the doctor, "but Miss Matoaca is made, of a different stuff. I can't imagine her picking up any man's boots, George."
"No more can I," retorted the General, "it serves her right that she never got a husband. No gentleman wants to throw his boots at his wife, but, by Jove, he likes to feel that if he were ever to do such a thing, she'd be the kind that would pick them up. He doesn't want to think everlastingly that he's got to walk a chalk-line or catch a flea in his ear. Now, what do you suppose Miss Matoaca said to me on Sunday? We were talking of Tom Frost's running for governor, and she said she hoped he wouldn't be elected because he led an impure life. An impure life! Will you tell me what business it is of an unmarried lady's whether a man leads an impure life or not? It isn't ladylike—I'll be damned if it is! I could see that Miss Mitty blushed for her. What's the world coming to, I ask, when a maiden lady isn't ashamed to know that a man leads an impure life?"
He raged softly, and I could see that Dr. Theophilus was growing sterner over his flippancy.
"Well, you're a gay old bird, George," he remarked, "and I dare say you think me something of a prude."
Tearing off a leaf from his prescription book, he laid it on the table, and held out his hand. Then he stood for a minute with his eyes on Robin, who was marching stiffly round a bed of red geraniums near the gate. "It's time to go," he added; "that old dog of mine is getting ready to root up your geraniums."
"You'd better keep a cat," observed the General, "they do less damage."
Young George and I, who had stood in the shadow of the wistaria awaiting the doctor's departure, came forward now, and I made my awkward bow to the General's bandaged foot.
"Any relative of Jack Starr?" he enquired affably as he shook my hand.
I towered so conspicuously above him, while I stood there with my hat in my hand, that I was for a moment embarrassed by my mere physical advantages.
"No, sir, not that I ever heard of," I answered.
"Then you ought to be thankful," he returned peevishly, "for the first time I ever met the fellow he deliberately trod on my toe—deliberately, sir. And now they're wanting to nominate him for governor—but I say they shan't do it. I've no idea of allowing it. It's utterly out of the question."
"Uncle George, I've brought Ben to see your library," interrupted young George at my elbow.
"Library, eh? Are you going to be a lawyer?" demanded the General.
I shook my head.
"A preacher?" in a more reverent voice.
"No, sir, I'm in the Old Dominion Tobacco Works. You got me my first job."
"I got you your job—did I? Then you're the young chap that discovered that blend for smoking. I told Bob you ought to have a royalty on that. Did he give it to you?"
"I'm to have ten per cent of the sales, sir. They've just begun."
"Well, hold on to it—it's a good blend. I tried it. And when you get your ten per cent, put it into the Old South Chemical Company, if you want to grow rich. It isn't everybody I'd give that tip to, but I like the looks of you. How tall are you?"
"Six feet one in my stockings."
"Well, I wouldn't grow any more. You're all right, if you can only manage to keep your hands and feet down. You've got good eyes and a good jaw, and it's the jaw that tells the man. Now, that's the trouble with that Jack Starr they want to nominate for governor. He lacks jaw. 'You can't make a governor out of a fellow who hasn't jaw,' that's what I said. And besides, he deliberately trod on my toe the first time I ever met him. Didn't know it was gouty, eh? What right has he got, I asked, to suppose that any gentleman's toe isn't gouty?"
His lower lip protruded angrily, and he sat staring into his glass of water with an enquiring and sulky look. It is no small tribute to my capacity for hero-worship to say that it survived even this nearer approach to the gouty presence of my divinity. But the glamour of success—the only glamour that shines without borrowed light in the hard, dry atmosphere of the workaday world—still hung around him; and his very dissipations—yes, even his fleshly frailties—reflected, for the moment at least, a romantic interest. I began to wonder if certain moral weaknesses were, indeed, the inevitable attributes of the great man, and there shot into my mind, with a youthful folly of regret, the memory of a drink I had declined that morning, and of a pretty maiden at the Old Market whom I might have kissed and did not. Was the doctor's teaching wrong, after all, and had his virtues made him a failure in life, while the General's vices had but helped him to his success? I was very young, and I had not yet reached the age when I could perceive the expediency of the path of virtue unless in the end it bordered on pleasant places. "The General is a bigger man than the doctor," I thought, half angrily, "and yet the General will be a gay old bird as long as the gout permits him to hobble." And it seemed to me suddenly that the moral order, on which the doctor loved to dilate, had gone topsy-turvy while I stood on the General's porch. As if reading my thoughts the great man looked up at me, with his roguish twinkle.
"Now there's Theophilus!" he observed. "Whatever you are, sir, don't be a damned mollycoddle."
Young George, plucking persistently at my sleeve, drew me at last out of the presence and into the house, where I smelt the fragrance of strawberries, freshly gathered.
"Here're the books," said George, leading me to the door of a long room, filled with rosewood bookcases and family portraits of departed Bolingbrokes. Then as I was about to cross the threshold, the sound of a bright voice speaking to the General on the porch caused me to stop short, and stand holding my breath in the hall.
"Good afternoon, General! You look as if you needed exercise."
"Exercise, indeed! Do you take me for your age, you minx?"
"Oh, come, General! You aren't old—you're lazy."
By this time George and I had edged nearer the porch, and even before he breathed her name in a whisper, I knew in the instant that her sparkling glance ran over me, that she was my little girl of the red shoes just budding into womanhood. She was standing in a square patch of sunlight, midway between the steps and a bed of red geraniums near the gate, and her dress of some thin white material was blown closely against the curves of her bosom and her rounded hips. Over her broad white forehead, with its heavily arched black eyebrows, the mass of her pale brown hair spread in the strong breeze and stood out like the wings of a bird in flight, and this gave her whole, finely poised figure a swift and expectant look, as of one who is swept forward by some radiant impulse. Her face, too, had this same ardent expression; I saw it in her eyes, which fixed me the next moment with her starry and friendly gaze; in her very full red lips that broke the pure outline of her features; and in her strong, square chin held always a little upward with a proud and impatient carriage. So vivid was my first glimpse of her, that for a single instant I wondered if the radiance in her figure was not produced by some fleeting accident of light and shadow. When I knew her better I learned that this quality of brightness belonged neither to the mind nor to an edge of light, but to the face itself—to some peculiar mingling of clear grey with intense darkness in her brow and eyes.
As she stood there chatting gayly with the General, young George eyed her from the darkened hall with a glance in which I read, when I turned to him, a touch of his uncle's playful masculine superiority.
"She'll be a stunner, if she doesn't get too big," he observed. "I don't like big girls—do you?"
Then as I made no rejoinder, he added after a moment, "Do you think her mouth spoils her? Aunt Hatty calls her mouth coarse."
"Coarse?" I echoed angrily. "What does she mean by coarse?"
"Oh, too red and too full. She says a lady's mouth ought to be a delicate bow."
"I never saw a delicate bow—"
"No more did I—but I'd call Sally a regular stunner now, mouth and all. Sally!" he broke out suddenly, and stepped out on the porch. "I'll go riding with you some day," he said, "if you want me."
She laughed up at him. "But I don't want you."
"You wanted me bad enough a year ago."
"That was a year ago."
Running hurriedly down the steps, he stood talking to her beside the bed of scarlet geraniums, while I felt a burning embarrassment pervade my body to the very palms of my hands.
"Where's the other fellow, George?" called the General, suddenly. "What's become of him?"
As he turned his head in my direction, I left the hall, and came out upon the porch, acutely conscious, all the time, that there was too much of me, that my hands and feet got in my way, that I ought to have put on a different shirt in the afternoon.
Sally was stooping over to snip off the head of a geranium, and when she looked up the next instant, with her hair blown back from her forehead, her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my own.
"Why, it's the boy I used to know," she exclaimed, moving toward me. "Boy, how do you do?" She put out her hand, and as I took it in mine, I saw for the first time that she was a large girl for her age, and would be a large woman. Her figure was already ripening under her thin white gown, but her hands and feet were still those of a child, and moulded, I saw, with that peculiar delicacy, which, I had learned from the doctor, was the distinguishing characteristic of the Virginian aristocracy.
"It is a long time since—since I saw you," she remarked in a cordial voice.
"It's been eight years," I answered. "I wonder that you remember me."
"Oh, I never forget. And besides, if I didn't see you for eight years more, I should still recognise you by your eyes. There aren't many boys," she said merrily, "who have eyes like a blue-eyed collie's."
With this she turned from me to George, and after a word or two to the General, and a nod in my direction, they passed through the gate, and went slowly along the street, her pale brown hair still blown like a bird's wing behind her.
The General's sister, young George's Aunt Hatty, a severe little lady, with a very flat figure, had come out on the porch, and was offering her brother a dose of medicine.
"A good girl, Hatty," remarked the great man, in an affable mood. "A little too much of her Aunt Matoaca's spirit for a wife, but a very good girl, as long as you ain't married to her."
"She would be handsome, George, except for her mouth. It's a pity her mouth spoils her."
"What's the matter with her mouth? I haven't got your eyesight, Hatty, but it appears a perfectly good mouth to me."
"That's because you have naturally coarse tastes, George. A lady's mouth should be a delicate bow."
A delicate bow, indeed! Those full, sensitive lips that showed like a splash of carmine in the clear pallor of her face! As I walked home under the broad, green leaves of the sycamores, I remembered the features of the pretty maiden at the Old Market, and they appeared to me suddenly divested of all beauty. It was as if a bright beam of sunshine had fallen on a blaze of artificial light, and extinguished it forever. Henceforth I should move straight toward a single love, as I had already begun to move straight toward a single ambition.
My first successful speculation was made in my twenty-first year with five hundred dollars paid to me by Bob Brackett when the Nectar blend had been six months on the market. By the General's advice I put the money in the Old South Chemical Company, and selling out a little later at high profits, I immediately reinvested. As the years went by, that smoking mixture, discovered almost by accident in an idle moment, began to yield me considerably larger checks twice a year; and twice a year, with the General's enthusiastic assistance, I went in for a modest speculation from which I hoped sometime to reap a fortune. When I was twenty-five, a temporary depression in the market gave me the opportunity which, as Dr. Theophilus had informed me almost daily for ten years, "waits always around the corner for the man who walks quickly." I put everything I owned into copper mining stock, then selling very low, and a year later when the copper trade recovered quickly and grew active, I rushed to the General and enquired breathlessly if I must sell out.
"Hold on and await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't try to flirt with her, but at the same time don't throw your boots at her head."
Five years before I had left the tobacco factory to go into the General's office, and my days were spent now, absorbed and alert, beside the chair in which he sat, coolly playing his big game of chess, and controlling a railroad. He was in his day the strongest financier in the South, and he taught me my lesson. Tireless, sleepless, throbbing with a fever that was like the fever of love, I studied at his side every movement of the market, I weighed every word he uttered, I watched every stroke of his stout cork-handled pen. An infallible judge of men, my intimate knowledge soon taught me that it was by judging men, not things, he had won his success. "Learn men, learn men, learn men," he would repeat in one of his frequent losses of temper. "Everything rests on a man, and the way to know the thing is to know the man."
"That's why I'm learning you, General," I once replied, as he hobbled out of his office on my arm.
"Oh, I know, I know," he retorted with his sly chuckle. "You are letting me lean on you now because you think the time will come when you can throw me aside and stand up by yourself. It's age and youth, my boy, age and youth."
He sighed wearily, and looking at him I saw for the first time that he was growing old.
"Well, you've stood straight enough in your day, sir," I answered.
"Oh, I've had my youth, and I shan't begin to put on a long face because I've lost it. I didn't have your stature, Ben, but I had a pretty fair middling-size one of my own. They used to say of me that I had an eye for the big chance, and that's a thing a man's got to be born with. To see big you've got to be big, and that's what I like about you—you ain't busy looking for specks."
"If I can only become as big a man as you, General, I shall be content."
"No, you won't, no, you won't, don't stop at me. Already they are beginning to call you my 'wonderful boy,' you know. 'I like that wonderful boy of yours, George,' Jessoms said to me only last night at the club. You know Jessoms—don't you? He's president of the Union Bank."
"Yes, I talked to him for two solid hours yesterday."
"He told me so, and I said to him: 'By Jove, you're right, Jessoms, and that boy's got a future ahead of him if he doesn't swell.' Now that's the Gospel truth, Ben, and all the body you've got ain't going to save you if you don't keep your head. If you ever feel it beginning to swell, you step outside and put it under a pump, that's the best thing I know of. How old are you?"
"Twenty-six."
"And you've got fifty thousand dollars already?"
"Thanks to you, sir."
"So you ain't swelled yet. Well, I've given you six years of hard training, and I made it all the blamed harder because I liked you. You've got the look of success about you, I've seen enough of it to know it. They used to say of me in Washington that I could sit in my office chair and overlook a line of men and spot every last one of them that was going to get on. I never went wrong but once, and that was because the poor devil began to swell and thought he was as big as his own shadow. But if the look's there, I see it—it's something in the eye and the jaw, and the grip of the hands that nobody can give you except God Almighty—and by George, it turns me into a downright heathen and makes me believe in fate. When a man has that something in the eye and in the jaw and in the grip of the hand, there ain't enough devils in the universe to keep him from coming out on top at the last. He may go under, but he won't stay under—no, sir, not if they pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on top his shoulders."
"Anyway, you've started me rolling, General, whether I spin on or come to a dead stop."
"Then remember," he retorted slyly, as we parted,' "that my earnest advice to a young man starting in business is—don't begin to swell!"
There was small danger of that, I thought, as I went on alone with my vision of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. From my childhood I had seen the big road, as I saw it to-day, sweeping in a bright track over the entire South, lengthening, branching, winding away toward the distant horizon, girdling the cotton fields, the rice fields, and the coal fields, like a protecting arm. One by one, I saw now, the small adjunct lines, absorbed by the main system, until in the whole South only the Great South Midland and Atlantic would be left. To dominate that living organism, to control, in my turn, that splendid liberator of a people's resources, this was still the inaccessible hope upon which I had fixed my heart.
In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he at once informed me, "a good half an hour."
"I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your fingers all thumbs?"
"They must be," I replied with a humility I had never assumed before the General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life."
"I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked dispassionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you're the kind of chap who can put on a turned-down collar with your evening clothes, or a tie that's been twisted through a wringer, and not look ridiculous. It's the rest of us that seem fops because we're properly dressed."
"I'd prefer to wear the right thing, you know," I returned, crestfallen.
"You never will. Anybody might as well expect a mountain to put forth rose-bushes instead of pine. It suits you, somehow, like your hair, which would make the rest of us look a regular guy. But I'm forgetting my mission. I've brought you an invitation to a party."
"What on earth should I do at a party?"
"Look pleasant. Did I take you to Miss Lessie Bell's dancing class for nothing? and were you put through the steps of the Highland Fling in vain?"
"I wasn't put through, I never learned."
"Well, you kicked at it anyway. I say, is all your pirouetting to be done with stocks? Are you going to pass away in ignorance of polite society and the manners of the ladies?"
"When I make a fortune, perhaps—"
"Perhaps is always too late. To-morrow is better."
"Where is the party?"
"The Blands are giving it. Uncle George was puffing and blowing about you when we dined there last Sunday, and Sally Mickleborough told me to bring you to her party on Wednesday night."
Rising hurriedly I walked away from young George to the fireplace. A mist was before my eyes, I smelt again the scent of wallflowers, and I saw in a dream the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains parted from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the crooked pavement.
"I'll go, George," I said, wheeling about, "if you'll pledge yourself that I go properly dressed."
"Done," he responded, with his unfailing amiability. "I'll tie your cravat myself; and thank your stars, Ben, that whatever you are, you can't be little, for that's the unforgivable sin in Sally's eyes."
On Wednesday night he proved as good as his promise, and when nine o'clock struck, it found me, in irreproachable evening clothes, following him down Franklin Street, to the old house, where a softly coloured light streamed through the windows and lay in a rosy pool under the sycamores. All day I had been very nervous. At the moment when I was reading telegrams for the General, I had suddenly remembered that I possessed no gloves suitable to be worn at my first party, and I had committed so many blunders that the great man had roared the word "Swelled!" in a furious tone. Now, however, when the sound of a waltz, played softly on stringed instruments, fell on my ears, my nervousness departed as quickly as it had come. The big mahogany doors swung open before us, and as I passed with George, into the brilliantly lighted hall, where the perfume of roses filled the air, I managed to move, if not with grace, at least with the necessary dignity of an invited guest. The lamps, placed here and there amid feathery palm branches, glowed under pink shades like enormous roses in full bloom, and up and down the wide staircase, carpeted in white, a number of pretty girls tripped under trailing garlands of Southern smilax. As we entered the door on the right, I saw Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, standing very erect in their black brocades and old lace, with outstretched hands and constantly smiling lips.
George presented me, with the slightly formal manner which seemed appropriate to the occasion. I had held the little hand of each lady for a minute in my own, and had looked once into each pair of brightly shining eyes, when my glance, dropping from theirs, flew straight as a bird to Sally Mickleborough, who stood talking animatedly to an elderly gentleman with grey side-whiskers and a pleasant laugh. She was dressed all in white, and her pale brown hair, which I had last seen flying like the wing of a bird, was now braided and wound in a wreath about her head. As the elderly gentleman bowed and passed on, she lifted her eyes, and her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my face.
Between us there stretched an expanse of polished floor, in which the pink-shaded lamps and the nodding roses were mirrored as in a pool. Around us there was the music of stringed instruments, playing a waltz softly; the sound, too, of many voices, now laughing, now whispering; of Miss Mitty's repeated "It was so good of you to come"; of Miss Matoaca's gently murmured "We aresoglad to have you with us"; of Dr. Theophilus's "You grow younger every day, ladies. Will you dance to-night?"; of General Bolingbroke's "I never missed an opportunity of coming to you in my life, ma'am"; of a confused chorus of girlish murmurs, of youthful merriment.
For one delirious instant it seemed to me that if I stepped on the shining floor, I should go down as on a frozen pool. Then her look summoned me, and as I drew nearer she held out her hand and stood waiting. There was a white rose in her wreath of plaits, and when I bent to speak to her the fragrance floated about me.
"Do you still remember me because of the blue-eyed collie?" I asked, for it was all I could think of.
Her firm square chin was tilted a little upward, and as she smiled at me, her thick black eyebrows were raised in the old childish expression of charming archness. It was the face of an idea rather than the face of a woman, and the power, the humour, the radiant energy in her look, appeared to divide her, as by an immeasurable distance, from the pretty girls of her own age among whom she stood. She seemed at once older and younger than her companions—older by some deeper and sadder knowledge of life, younger because of the peculiar buoyancy with which she moved and spoke. As I looked at her mouth, very full, of an almost violent red, and tremulous with expression, I remembered Miss Hatty's "delicate bow" with an odd feeling of anger.
"It has been a long time, but I haven't forgotten you, Ben Starr," she said.
"Do you remember the night of the storm and the cup of milk you wouldn't drink?"
"How horrid I was! And the geranium you gave me?"
"And the churchyard and the red shoes and Samuel?"
"Poor Samuel. I can't have any dogs now. Aunt Mitty doesn't like them—"
Some one came up to speak to her, and while I bowed awkwardly and turned away, I saw her gaze looking back at me from the roses and the pink-shaded lamps. A touch on my arm brought the face of young George between me and my ecstatic visions.
"I say, Ben, there's an awfully pretty girl over there I want you to waltz with—Bessy Dandridge."
In spite of my protest he led me the next instant to a slim figure in pink tarlatan, with a crown of azaleas, who sat in one corner between two very stout ladies. As I approached, the stout ladies smiled at me benignly, hiding suppressed yawns behind feather fans. Miss Dandridge was, as George said, "awfully pretty," with large shallow eyes of pale blue, an insipid mouth, and a shy little smile that looked as if she had put it on with her crown of azaleas and would take it off again and lay it away in her bureau drawer when the party was over.
"Get up and dance, dear," urged one of the stout ladies sleepily, "we ought to have come earlier."
"The girls look very well," remarked the other, suddenly alert and interested, "but I don't like this new fashion of wearing the hair. Sally Mickleborough is handsome, though it's a pity she takes so much after her father."
My arm was already around the pink tarlatan waist of my partner, the crown of azaleas had brushed my shoulder like a gentle caress, and I had whirled halfway down the room in triumphant agony, when a floating phrase uttered in a girlish voice entered my ears and carried confusion into my brain.
"Get out of the way. Doesn't Bessy look for all the world like a rose-bush uprooted by a whirlwind?"
I caught the words as I went, and they proved too much for the trembling balance of my self-confidence. My strained gaze, fixed on the glassy surface beneath my feet, plunged suddenly downward amid the reflected roses and lamps. The music went wild and out of tune on the air. My blood beat violently in my pulses, I made a single false step, tripped over a flounce of pink tarlatan, which seemed to shriek as I went down, and the next instant my partner and I were flat on the polished floor, clutching desperately for support at the mirrored roses beneath.
The wreck lasted only a minute. A single suppressed titter fell on my ears, and was instantly checked. I looked up in time to see a smile freeze on Miss Mitty's face, and melt immediately into an expression of sympathy. The pretty girl, with the crown of azalea hanging awry on her flaxen tresses, and her flounce of pink tarlatan held disconsolately in her hand, looked for one dreadful instant as if she were about to burst into tears. A few dancers had stopped and gathered sympathetically around us, but the rest were happily whirling on, while the music, after a piercing crescendo, came breathlessly to a pause amid a silence that I felt to be far louder than sound. The perspiration, forced out by inward agony, stood in drops on my forehead, and as I wiped it away, I said almost defiantly:—
"It was the fault of George Bolingbroke. I told him I didn't know how to dance."
"I think I'd better go home," murmured the heroine of the disaster, catching her lower lip in her teeth to bite back a sob, "I wonder where mamma can be?"
"Here, dear," responded a commiserating voice, and I was about to turn away in disgrace without a further apology, when the little circle around us divided with a flutter, and Sally appeared, leaning on the arm of a youth with bulging eyes and a lantern jaw.
"Go home, Bessy? Why, how silly!" she exclaimed, and her energetic voice seemed suddenly to dominate the situation. "It wasn't so many years ago, I'm sure, that you used to tumble for the pleasure of it. Here, let me pin on your crown, and then run straight upstairs to the red room and get mammy to mend your flounce. It won't take her a minute. There, now, you're all the prettier for a high colour."
When she had pushed Bessy across the threshold with her small, strong hands, she turned to me, laughing a little, and slipped her arm into mine with the air of a young queen bestowing a favour.
"It's just as well, Ben Starr," she said, "that you're engaged to me for this dance, and not to a timid lady."
It wasn't my dance, I knew; in fact, I had not had sufficient boldness to ask her for one, and I discovered the next minute, when she sent away rather impatiently a youth who approached, that she had taken such glorious possession merely from some indomitable instinct to give people pleasure.
"Shall we sit down and talk a little over there under the smilax?" she asked, "or would you rather dance? If you'd like to dance," she added with a sparkle in her face, "I am not afraid."
"Well, I am," I retorted, "I shall never dance again."
"How serious that sounds—but since you've made the resolution I hope you'll keep it. I like things to be kept."
"There's no chance of my breaking it. I never made but one other solemn vow in my life."
"And you've kept that?"
"I am keeping it now."
She sat down, arranging her white draperies under the festoons of smilax, her left hand, from which a big feather fan drooped, resting on her knees, her small, white-slippered foot moving to the sound of the waltz.
"Was it a vow not to grow any more?" she asked with a soft laugh.
"It was," I leaned toward her and the fragrance of the white rose, drooping a little in her wreath of plaits, filled my nostrils, "that I would not stay common."
Her lashes, which had been lowered, were raised suddenly, and I met her eyes. "O Ben Starr, Ben Starr," she said, "how well you have kept it!"
"Do you remember the stormy night when you would not let me take your wet cap because I was a common boy?".
"How hateful I must have been!"
"On that night I determined that I would not grow up to be a common man. That was why I ran away, that was why I went into the tobacco factory, that was why I started to learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart—why I drudged over my Latin, why I went into stocks, why—"
Her eyes had not left my face, but unfurling the big feather fan, she waved it slowly between us. I, who had, in the words of Dr. Theophilus, "no small wits in my head," who could stand, dumb and a clown, in a ballroom, who could even trip up my partner, had found words that could arrest the gaze of the woman before me. To talk at all I must talk of big things, and it was of big things that I now spoke—of poverty, of struggle, of failure, of aspiration. My mind, like my body, was not rounded to the lighter graces, the rippling surface, that society requires. In my everyday clothes, among men, I was at no loss for words, but the high collar and the correctly tied cravat I wore seemed to strangle my throat, until those starry eyes, seeking big things also, had looked into mine. Then I forgot my fruitless efforts at conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,—the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,—was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. Our consciousness had left the surface of life. We had become acutely aware of each other and aware, too, of the silence in which our eyes wavered and met.
"That was why I starved and sweated and drudged and longed," I added, while her fan waved with its large, slow movement between us, "that was why—"
Her lips parted, she leaned slightly forward, and I saw in her face what I had never seen in the face of a woman before—the bloom of a soul.
"And you've done this all your life?"
"Since that stormy evening."
"You have won—already you have won—"
"Not yet. I am beginning and I may win in the end if I keep steady, if I don't lose my head. I shall win in the end—perhaps—"
"You will win what?"
"A fortune it may be, or it may be even the thing that has made the fortune seem worth the having."
"And that is?" she asked simply.
"It is too long a story. Some day, if you will listen, I may tell you, but not now—"
The dance stopped, she rose to her feet, and George Bolingbroke, rushing excitedly to where we stood, claimed the coming Virginia reel as his own.
"Some day you shall tell me the long story, Ben Starr," she said, as she gave me her hand.
I watched her take her place in the Virginia reel, watched the dance begin, watched her full, womanly figure, in its soft white draperies, glide between the lines, with her head held high, her hand in George Bolingbroke's, her white slippers skimming the polished floor. Then turning away, I walked slowly down the length of the two drawing-rooms, and said "Good-night" to Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca near the door. As I passed into the hall, I heard a woman's voice murmur distinctly:—
"Yes, he is a magnificent animal, but he has no social manner."
My sleep that night was broken by dreams of roses and pink-shaded lamps. For the first time in my life my brain and body alike refused rest, and the one was illumined as by the rosy glow of a flame, while the other was scorched by a fever which kept me tossing sleeplessly between Mrs. Clay's lavender-scented sheets. At last when the sun rose, I got out of bed, and hurriedly dressing, went up Franklin Street, and turned into one of the straight country roads which led through bronzed levels of broomsedge. Eastward the sun was ploughing a purple furrow across the sky, and toward the south a single golden cloud hung over some thin stretches of pine. The ghost of a moon, pale and watery, was riding low, after a night of high frolic, and as the young dawn grew stronger, I watched her melt gradually away like a face that one sees through smoke. The October wind, blowing with a biting edge over the broomsedge, bent the blood-red tops of the sumach like pointed flames toward the road.
For me a new light shone on the landscape—a light that seemed to have its part in the high wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the rising sun. For the first time since those old days in the churchyard I felt with every fibre of me, with every beat of my pulses, with every drop of my blood, that it was good to be alive—that it was worth while every bit of it. My starved boyhood, the drudgery in the tobacco factory, the breathless nights in the Old Market, the hours when, leaning over Johnson's Dictionary, I had been obliged to pinch myself to keep wide awake—the squalor out of which I had come, and the future into which I was going—all these were a part to-day of this strange new ecstasy that sang in the wind and moved in the waving broomsedge.
And through it all ran my thoughts: "How fragrant the white rose was in her hair! How tremulous her mouth! Are her eyes grey or green, and is it only the heavy shadow of her lashes that makes them appear black at times, as if they changed colour with her thoughts? Is it possible that she could ever love me? If I make a fortune will that bring me any nearer to her? Obscure as I am my cause is hopeless, but even if I were rich and powerful, should I ever dare to ascend the steps of that house where I had once delivered marketing at the kitchen door?"
The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with my basket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged, barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the great sycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life the thought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as she had stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holding her mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me with her sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes, dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later, as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her houses of moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as a woman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her a little above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on.
The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and I went over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was she merely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaning in her divine smile—in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you have won!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of her bosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modest or humble I had never been. The will to fight—the exaggerated self-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has made his way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking there that morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and the blood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which I had carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep. She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was that because she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for her sake?—that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well as to achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered, have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but with no social manner," the voice had said of me, and the words burned now, hot with shame, in my memory. The recollection of my fall in the dance, of the crying lips of the pretty girl in pink tarlatan, while she stood holding her ruined flounce, became positive agony. What did she think of my boorishness? Was I, for her also, merely a magnificent animal? Had she noticed how ill at ease I felt in my evening clothes? O young Love, young Love, your sharpest torments are not with arrows, but with pin pricks!
A trailing blackberry vine, running like a crimson vein close to the earth, caught my foot, and I stooped for a minute. When I looked up she was standing clear against the reflected light of the sunrise, where a low hill rose above the stretches of broomsedge. Her sorrel mare was beside her, licking contentedly at a bright branch of sassafras; and I saw that she had evidently dismounted but the moment before. As I approached, she fastened her riding skirt above her high boots, and kneeling down on the dusty roadside, lifted the mare's foot and examined it with searching and anxious eyes. Her three-cornered riding hat had slipped to her shoulders, where it was held by a broad black band of elastic, and I saw her charming head, with its wreath of plaits, defined against the golden cloud that hung above the thin stretch of pines. At my back the full sunrise broke, and when she turned toward me, her gaze was dazzled for a moment by the flood of light.
"Let me have a look," I said, as I reached her, "is the mare hurt?"
"She went lame a few minutes ago. There's a stone in her foot, but I can't get it out."
"Perhaps I can."
Rising from her knees, she yielded me her place, and then stood looking down on me while I removed the stone.
"She'll still limp, I fear, it was a bad one," I said as I finished.
Without replying, she turned from me and ran a few steps along the road, calling, "Come, Dolly," in a caressing voice. The mare followed with difficulty, flinching as she put her sore foot to the ground.
"See how it hurts her," she said, coming back to me. "I'll have to lead her slowly—there's no other way."
"Why not ride at a walk?"
She shook her head. "My feet are better than a lame horse. It's not more than two miles anyway."
"And you danced all night?"
I hung the reins over my arm and we turned together, facing the sunrise.
"Yes, but the way to rest is to run out-of-doors. Are you often up with the dawn, too?"
"No, but I couldn't sleep. The music got into my head."
"Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour."
"And this is your road?"
"Not always. I go different ways. This one I call the road-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches a glorious view."
"Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on the road-to-what-is-to-be."
She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder why they say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observed mockingly.
"I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life I couldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady in pink tarlatan whose dress I tore."
"Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with you again."
"She's perfectly safe to vow it."
"Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know, I like you better out-of-doors."
"Out-of-doors?"
"Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous."
"His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge."
"Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair—it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head—and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, you are in your native element."
"Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy fitting into the picture?"
"To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her native element is pink tarlatan."
"And yours?" I demanded.
"That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light.
"The sunrise," I answered.
"Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied.
"You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."
Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression.
"Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?"
I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky. "Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison."
"Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."
"Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."
"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life—and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He—he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it—and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said—and can you believe it?—she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think—but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so—so extreme in her views."
"What are her views?"
"She calls them principles—but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that, however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General has acted."
"I hope she isn't still in love with him?"
Her clear rippling laugh—the laugh of a free spirit—fluted over the broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and have a voice in the government. Do you?"
"I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wife to go to the polls," I answered.
Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?—that when you ask a man anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when he hasn't got one?"
"That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose."
"Do you want one very badly?" she taunted.
"Dreadfully—the one I want."
"A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?"
"No, a living lady in a riding habit."
If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hope was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly to the dust of the road.
"An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison," she retorted.
"Just now it was the General that I resembled."
"Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."
The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,—I who had stood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of sex, into her sparkling eyes.
"And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly.
"Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics."
"I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," I said.
With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance, straight and full, like a gallant boy.
"Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it."
We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy which to me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly.
"You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all my life," I said.
"The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" she asked.
"Only to the end of thec's. Don't credit me, please, with the whole alphabet."
"The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn thea,b,c's of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?"
"If you wish it I will tell you what it was."
For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is Franklin Street, and in a little while we shall be at home."
"It is not long—it is very short. It is a single word of three letters."
"I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?"
"Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters."
"What an elastic word!"
"It is, for it has covered everything at which I looked—both the earth and the sky."
"And the General and the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad?"
"Without that word the General and the railroad would have been nothing."
"How very much obliged to it the poor General must be!"
"Will you hear it?" I asked, for when I was once started to the goal there was no turning me by laughter.
She raised her eyes, which had been lowered, and looked at me long and deeply—so long and deeply that it seemed as if she were seeking something within myself of which even I was unconscious.
"Will you hear it?" I asked again.
Her gaze was still on mine. "What is the word?" she asked, almost in a whisper.