"Comes now to search your manhoodThrough all the thankless years,Cold, edged with dear bought wisdom,The judgment of your peers!"
"Comes now to search your manhoodThrough all the thankless years,Cold, edged with dear bought wisdom,The judgment of your peers!"
It was, however, a real voice though a faint one, that came next to his ears.
"You said these wild sheep were your people—that you owed them what you could give them—of leadership."
Boone wheeled, and his voice broke from him like a sob, as the watch slipped from his fingers and fell, shattered.
"Do you mean to go through with it—you and Morgan?"
But before she could shape a response, his hand came up and he went on in excited haste: "No, don't answer. You didn't come to answer questions." Then, with a long intake of breath and an abrupt change to flint hardness again, he added: "It was I who was to answer you. You are right. I was a damned quitter. Thesearemy people, and I belong to them—but not to the feud-war, to myself—nor to you."
"Boone," began Anne Masters, but she got no further than that, for the man again raised a warning hand and spoke in a crisp whisper:
"Hush!" he commanded, and bent, listening.
In the distance a long whoop was dying away, and then after a moment of tense silence a cautious whistle sounded from the night outside. Boone took a step toward the door, and halted.
"They're coming! It won't do for you to be found here with me alone." He cast a hurried glance toward the other room, then added; "No—he'sin there. They'll have to see him. Can you wait upstairs?"
Anne Masters nodded, and as, with a lamp which he handed her, she put her foot upon the lowest step of the boxed-in stairway, he went on:
"You've paid me one compliment tonight. You said that I could control men. As for myself, I doubt that, and if I fail—well, that comes later."
From the stairhead she looked down. Boone had gone to the door and stood with his hand on the latch, yet for the moment he did not lift it. To her he seemed bracing himself against a fresh assault of heavy forces.
With Joe Gregory entered three others, and to Anne, who was walled off from any sight of what went on, every word and intonation came up the enclosed stair well as if from a sounding board. She felt like a blind theatregoer whose ears strain to make amends for the want of eyes while a tense melodrama is building toward its climax.
Her imagination filled in the intervals of silence with heart-straining anxiety, and she felt that she must see the movements, the gestures, the light and shadow in the sombre eyes, when the wrath of the voices broke off in ominous quiet. At the thought of the closed door which must soon be opened to them she shuddered, and she wanted to see Boone; to be able to assure herself that he was dominating the situation, which, as she listened, seemed blazing beyond control like a fire that outgrows the power of its fighters.
It was difficult to gauge the flow and counterflow of influences in the scene below stairs. Boone's voice came infrequently as though he, too, were only a listener, and in the other voices was a unanimity of violence and hatred. It was a clamour for prompt vengeance unfolding an iliad of long-fostered animosities.
To the girl it seemed an intolerable babel—a dissonance of profane fury and menace—and she could feel her heart pounding like a muffled drum.
"We've passed out word to the boys and we won't hev need ter delay now ter git 'em gathered together," came a deep-chested voice at whose raising the others fell silent. "They're gathered right now in leetle clumps an' hovers hyar an' thar, whar they kin rally straightway when ye gives ther signal." The bass fell silent, then supplemented in reassurance to the leader: "Thar hain't a timorous ner a disable feller in ther lot."
"I'm obliged to you, Luther," Boone spoke as one in deep contemplation. "Then I reckon we're fixed to go over there and take Saul away from the Carrs, aren't we?"
Anne Masters pressed her hands agitatedly to her breast as a chorus of yapping assent gave answer. Had he so soon, under the pressure of their crowd influence, repudiated his decision to play the hard rôle of restraint?
"Maybe, though, boys," the representative's voice continued reflectively when he had succeeded in quieting them, "we'd better wait for the other men before we start on any grave errand. I hear some of them out there now."
For an hour the talk ran in a hot freshet, while newcomers augmented the handful, and with the increase of numbers came a fuller-throated mounting of passion. Would Boone be able to curb their ferocities? Could any man do it? Did he even mean to try?
As she listened to the feud disciples coming in from creek beds and cove pockets, it appeared to her entirely possible that they were capable of turning on and rending the leader who ventured to cross their strongly fixed purposes.
Saul Fulton's treachery to Asa, Tom Carr's giving sanctuary to the Judas, the affront to the clan; these things made up the inflamed burden of their growing and deepening wrath, and as yet they had not been told of the man who lay dead, a victim freshly justifying their hunger for reprisal!
Anne missed the voice of Joe Gregory who, after a brief consultation with Boone, had gone out again. In Joe's presence she would have felt strong reassurance, but Joe was carrying sorry tidings to the house of the boy who lay dead.
Boone knew his people, and he was adroitly playing a most difficult rôle, but to her ears came no proof of that. Until the clansmen had opened and aired the festering sores of their grievances there lay in them no hope of amenability. After that—perhaps—but the issue must await its moment, neither anticipating nor procrastinating by the part of a minute.
At last Boone's glance measured the crowd and recognized that there was no longer any one for whom to wait. Ahead lay a disclosure, but before its making he must throw his dice and let circumstances ordain with what faces upward they would roll.
He stood before Victor McCalloway's fireplace and raised his hands.
"Men," he began without haste or excitement, "I've listened to all of you and I've had little to say. I sat with Asa in the court that tried him. I've visited him not once but often in the jail where Saul Fulton's perjury has put him and kept him. I've besieged the Governor to plead for him, and I yield to no man in loyalty to Asa Gregory. Now I claim the right to be heard."
Anne crouched, listening with inheld breath, while the voices below stairs dwindled from clamour to attention. She tried to visualize the speaker, but because the whole world had receded from familiarity he, too, became vague and hard to picture.
But as Boone talked, she knew that his voice and words and the heart which was meeting, full-front, an issue he had been in danger of deserting, were making magic, and along her own scalp went the creep that is the ultimate test of drama. Inconsequentially she fretted because she could not see his eyes. His auditors, though, could see the eyes and respond to their hypnotic fires—respond though the text he taught was hard to stomach.
He was winning them against their prejudices, and so skilfully had he carried them step by step that they were saved from anything like full realization of self-reversal, which means loss of self-esteem. If for the hireling shot from the laurel they had no other response than retaliation in kind, they were only rising to the bait of a lawless and unimaginative enemy. It was better, he asserted, that the efforts to murder him succeed than that they should draw the life essence out of every principle in which his adherents had supported him.
Anne said to herself that Boone had carried the night, but Boone knew otherwise.
A handful of men keyed for violence now accorded him calm attentiveness. They could even laugh, on occasion, but he was thinking of the closed door of McCalloway's room. He had need to grapple them to his leadership more strongly yet, for when he opened that door they would no longer laugh.
Now he drew a deep breath.
"These things that I am saying to you, I say not only with a full knowledge of all that you men have told me but with a knowledge of a harder thing to bear." He paused, and then he told them bluntly:
"'Little' Jim Bartleton lies dead behind that door. He was killed tonight when he rode my horse on an errand for me, and was taken for me."
After an interval of hushed amazement, the commotion broke afresh, and Boone again raised his hands and awaited its subsiding.
"When a man asks his friends to hold their hands, though their hearts are justly hot, he has need to prove his own steadfastness. Here is my promise. Tomorrow Joe Gregory as deputy sheriff, and myself are going to Tom Carr's house. We are going alone in the full light of day and without any force of armed men to bolster up our demands. If any enemy seeks our injury he must do that too in the full light of day. In the name of the law and not of the mob, we will demand that Saul be turned over to us. We will accept no lies and no evasions. We will take Saul to Frankfort and present him to the court that refused to send for him. If they fail, then, it will be time foryouto act. Meanwhile you must wait. I have never before asked any test of your trust in me. Now those that believe in me must stand with me, and—" his last words were like the crack of a cattle whip—"and those that don't must fight me."
With eyes that burned and a breast that pounded, Anne awaited the reception of that peroration, and for what seemed an endless time there was no reception at all, except tense silence. The girl closed her eyes and fancied a pendulum swinging in the dark, and as it registered seconds her nerves tautened until the impulse to scream became poignant. Yet she told herself this long silence meant assent—must mean assent.
Then, with an abruptness that made her start, came a voice, not from the room below, but raised from the roadside in a long halloo, and from within sounded the staccato challenge, "Who's thar?"
Once more a silence momentary and taut, a silence that hurt, came like a margin about sound, then the outer voice spoke again:
"Hit's me—Mark Bartleton." That much was steady, but there the intonation altered and mingled challenge with heartbreak. "I've done come with my jolt wagon—ter fotch my dead boy home."
Anne covered her face with her hands and shivered behind the door. She did not need to have her fears confirmed in the growing whisper that raised itself slowly from the sunken levels of silence. Those words with the weighty force of their simplicity had crashed upon trembling scales of indecision, and they trembled no longer. Labour and courage and effort had gone into Boone's upbuilding dam of persuasion. It took a single blow to shatter it.
Now the night belonged to the torch and rifle, unless a miracle intervened, and though Boone would struggle like a shepherd whose flock has been scattered, he would persevere in the face of foredoomed failure. Yet until the death-freighted and ox-drawn wagon had strained and jolted slowly away, and even a little longer, the specious calm held.
The swinging lantern had disappeared around a turn; the sounds of creaking axle and hub had died into the night and the door of the house had been closed, before the hum of low talk gave her any coherent sign. Below there was only the confused blurring of words such as may come from a locked jury room, until over it sounded the deep basso that she had heard first that evening.
Its words were not pitched in oratorical effect, but they were contemptuous and final. "Come on along, men," said the voice. "We're wastin' time hyar foolin' with a man thet kain't do nothin' but talk. What we wants now is a man with guts inside him."
The sentiment of accord declared itself loudly, profanely and indubitably. But as the fickle gathering grew turbulent, Anne heard once again a shout followed by the opening of a door, and after that an outcry of amazement which she could in no wise translate, beyond a realization that something was happening which was both unforeseen and incredible.
Anne's posture, as she listened to the fluttering of her own heart, was one of terror in its most abject and helpless form. She had persuaded him, not only with argument but the taunt of cowardice, to interpose himself between this tidal wave of human savagery and its object. Now the wave had seized him up and tossed him from his precarious foothold. His career had ended: his influence, crumbled under too severe a strain, and his life itself probably hung on a hair balance while he stood among wolves. She told herself that the responsibility lay with her, and her reason grew palpitant and dizzy. Only a miracle could quench the conflagration now, and a miracle five minutes hence would be too late.
This deadly pause was unendurable. A door had opened and clamour had been breathlessly stilled. What did it mean? Some one had entered—Who was it?
The man who had just made his entrance had boldly pushed his way to the threshold before he called out, and had as boldly thrown wide the door without awaiting a reply. Faces turning with a single impulse toward the invader remained staringly intent as they saw standing there the broad-shouldered figure of Asa Gregory, who should be in jail, who for seven years had not been free to ride or walk the highways.
"I was pardoned out, this morning," he said briefly, "and I met up with some of our boys while'st I was ridin' home. I was right interested in what them boys told me."
"Ye've done come in good season, Asa," shouted an impulsive spokesman. "We're settin' out ter settle old scores, an' Boone Wellver's done laid down on us."
But Asa turned a cool eye on the informant, and into the sonorous quality of his voice came an acid bite.
"Who's got the best license here to talk about score-settling? Who's been sulterin' in jail for seven years?"
"You have, Asa," came the chorused response. "We're hearkenin' ter ye, Asa."
"All right," snapped back the new arrival. "What I have need to say I kin say right speedily. Quit it! Go home and leave me to pay off my own scores!" He crossed to Boone and laid a hand on his shoulder, and standing that way, he added: "The man that says this boy lays down is a liar. As for me, I stands by whathesays! Ef our own folks don't know who their strong men are, our enemies know—an' seek to hire 'em kilt. Go home an' wait till we calls on ye!"
An hour later Boone stood alone with Anne in the room where he had been overthrown and rehabilitated.
"I ought to take you across to Aunt Judy's house," he told her in a weary voice. "I don't suppose you should be left here—with me—like this—for what's left of the night. Until now there's been company enough."
The girl shook her head wearily. "I'd fall off of a horse," she said. "I'm too tired to ride. I'm going back up those stairs—"
The man moved a step forward.
"Joe Gregory is coming back," he explained, "but it will probably be near to dawn before he gets here."
As she reached the stairway she halted impulsively with her hand on the latch, and stood poised there with an expression of baffling, half-eager expectancy. The sensitive beauty of her face and the slender grace of her body seemed for a moment to cast aside their fatigue and to invite him, but Boone stood resolutely the width of the room away.
Had he known it, that was a moment in which he might have grasped a more vital rehabilitation. Had he then offered again the explanation for which he had once been denied opportunity, her readiness to hear him would have been eager. At that moment she was once more his for the taking. He need only have extended his arms and said, "Come!" and she would have responded instantly and gladly. She was receptive, stirred, but one thing her pride still inhibited. She could not make the advances.
Boone let his moment pass; let it pass unrecognized with the blindness of life's perverse coincidence. At that precise instant, a mood was upon him which was no intrinsic reflection of his own spirit, but rather the reflection of all the stormy transitions of the night.
She had seen him at a crisis when he had been on the verge of collapse like a bridge whose centre rests upon a span of flawed steel. True, he had not actually collapsed, but, save for her intervention, he would have done so. Now his mortification withered him and perversely expressed itself in resentment against her—for having witnessed his shame.
He owed her everything—so much that his self-respect was bankrupted—and if he could have hated her, he would have hated her just then. He even fancied that he did. He saw in her a cold, impersonal deity, consciously superior to himself and secretly triumphant over his weakness. So he not only let the moment pass, but he rebuffed its unspoken invitation.
"I owe you everything," he said with the cold ungraciousness of a grudging confession. "If you hadn't come, I'd have had a hell in my conscience tomorrow. I'd have been a murderer. I even tried to force you to admit that it was for me, myself, that you cared enough to do it. I'm ashamed of that.... It won't happen again." He paused and his voice was bitterly edged when he went on. "I begged for the chance to explain things—when there was still time. You refused to hear me. Now I wouldn't explain ifyoubeggedmeto—That's over, but I acknowledge the debt I owe you—for tonight. It's a heavier debt than any man can stand in and keep his self-respect."
Morgan and Anne had been to the theatre, and when they came back to the house the lawyer had drawn from his pocket a small package, and while Anne opened it he looked on. It was an engagement ring, and quite worthy of his connoisseur's selection. But when he put out his hand to take hers, she drew it back and spoke impulsively:
"Before you put that on—Morgan—there's something I must tell you."
He smiled his acquiescence and waited with the emerald set emblem in his fingers, while, in the manner of one who has determined upon a recital that does not flow easily, she began. She filled in for him the events of the two days of her recent and somewhat mysterious absence, and its cause.
Morgan had learned to accept with a certain philosophy the impulse-governed life of the girl who had promised to marry him. If Anne had been less uniquely her own unstereotyped self, she would not have been the fascinating person who had captured his fastidious admiration.
While she talked, his face grew sober, but he refrained from any interruption, and at last she looked up and said simply: "I thought it was best to tell you all about it now. I went—and that's where I was—and for hours of that ghastly night—there was no one else there—but just the two of us."
"I see," said Morgan slowly. She waited for him to supplement the two words, and when he failed to do so, she went on:
"I thought maybe that—knowing about that—you might not want to—" She broke off, and her eyes falling on the ring, finished the sentence.
Morgan shook his head. His usual self-possession was a shade shaken, but he responded definitely, "I do."
"Of course," she conscientiously explained, "when I went, I didn't know what lay ahead, but I took the chances and—that's what it's important for you to understand, Morgan—even if it were to do over—and I knew it all, I'd go again."
"Yes," said her fiancé slowly, "I suppose so." He paused a moment before he finished. "Naturally, it's not a thing that I'd have chosen to have occur, but it was the only thing you could do—and be yourself."
"And you have no—questions to ask me?"
Once more he shook his head. He even smiled faintly.
"No," he said without hesitancy, "I have no questions to ask you."
Anne rose from her chair and laid a hand on his arm.
"Morgan," she exclaimed, "you know how to be generous. I've got to be honest with you. I'll stand by my agreement—but I guess I'll always love him. If you marry me, you're taking that chance. I can't give you my heart because it's not mine."
He slipped the ring on her finger, and across his serious features came a slow smile.
"I suppose it's what a thousand fools have said before, Anne, and a thousand more may say it again, but all I ask is the chance to make you love me. I'll succeed because I can't afford to fail."
Had Tom Carr chosen to sit in a penitential spirit, reviewing his life, he might, perhaps, have been forced to acknowledge a record tarnished with misdeeds, but his conscience would have remained clear of that most depressing sin—bungling the undertaking to which he had set his hand. Even his delegated murders had been accomplished with tidy and praiseworthy dispatch. Now he had collaborated with a bungler and harvested a dilemma. Saul Fulton had selected an executioner whose rifle ball had targeted itself in a breast not marked for death—yet one which would none the less cry out for vengeance. Above all, thecontretempshad proven most ill-timed, since it coincided with Asa's pardon and return.
Word of his coming had reached the house of Tom Carr before Asa himself had ridden away from the livery stable, and that same hour found Saul, like the general discredited by adébâcle, an outcast from the support of his late allies and a refugee in full flight.
Tom conceived that he was doing enough by way of generosity when he supplied Saul with a horse and a lantern and set him on his way toward the Virginia boundary. Asa's recrudescence from the burial of prison walls to the glamour of a delivered martyr brought him to a choice between standing siege or throwing his Jonah to the whales, and Tom had not hesitated.
So when the party that rode with the deputy sheriff dismounted at the door of the Carr house, they found it unreservedly open to them. Tom did not even waste a lie when he met eyes as uncompromising as though they were looking across rifle-sights.
"You boys hev come jest a leetle too late," he tranquilly informed them. "Yore man spent some sev'ral days an' nights with me—but he hain't hyar now."
"Then,"—it was Boone who put the question, while Asa maintained the stony-faced silence of a graven image—"then you admit that you took him in and sheltered him?"
The eyes of the Carr leader had held the open light of candour. Now they mirrored that of guileless surprise, and both expressions were master achievements of deceit.
"Why wouldn't I take him in, Boone," he inquired with admirable gravity. "He 'peared ter be mighty contrite erbout ther way he'd done acted at Asa's trial. He 'lowed he'd come back home a' purpose ter put sartain matters before ther new governor thet mout holp Asa git his pardon. Thet was p'intedly what he said—or words ter thet amount."
Boone smiled his open and ironic disbelief. "And you swallowed that lie, Tom? It doesn't stand on all fours with your repute for keen wits."
The face of the intriguer remained steadfast save that the unblinking eyes became a little pained. He fumbled in his breast pocket, and from among the few dirty envelopes that came out sheafed in his hands, selected a crumpled page of letter paper.
"Thet's whut I went on," he said simply. "I've done lost ther envellup hit come in, but thar hit is in Saul's own hand-write."
Boone took the missive which bore a South American date line and, after reading it, handed it without comment to Asa.
"Dear Tom," it ran. "I swore to a volume of lies at Asa Gregory's trial to save my own neck. It's been haunting me until I've got to come back and help to get him a pardon. I'm indicted myself, and I've got to come in secret or go to jail without getting results. I'm coming to your house, and until the time is ripe it mustn't be known that I'm there. You don't love Asa, but we're all mountain men together, and that trial was a trial of the mountains. Resp. Saul Fulton."
"Dear Tom," it ran. "I swore to a volume of lies at Asa Gregory's trial to save my own neck. It's been haunting me until I've got to come back and help to get him a pardon. I'm indicted myself, and I've got to come in secret or go to jail without getting results. I'm coming to your house, and until the time is ripe it mustn't be known that I'm there. You don't love Asa, but we're all mountain men together, and that trial was a trial of the mountains. Resp. Saul Fulton."
Saul had ridden away the night before in the haste of a man whose life is forfeit to delay, yet before he mounted he had penned that letter at Tom Carr's dictation, and the ink of the South American date line was scarce twelve hours dry.
"I'll send it back to you, Tom," he had demurred. "There isn't time now. They may come any minute to get me!"
"If ye don't write hit—an' thet speedily—they'll find a ready-made corpse when they gits hyar," had been Tom's succinct reply with an eloquent gesture toward his armpit holster. "Ye got me inter this fix—now ye've got ter alibi me outen hit."
Without waste of words, the posse turned and left the house. They were starting on a pursuit which they knew would end in nothing, but Tom, following them to the gate, called out cheerfully: "I hope ye gits him, boys. He left my house without no farewell betwixt sundown an' sun-up—an' he took ther best nag outen my stable ter go with."
One who would sound the depths of ingenious depravity should lend ear to the tale of the householder whose life has been ravished of tranquillity by that small boy of the neighbourhood who leads and incites the local gang of youthful hooligans.
To such a tale the judge of the Louisville Juvenile Court was listening now, and the defendant, who sat sullen eyed in the essential wickedness of his eleven years, heard witness after witness unfold his record of misdoing. He and his vassal desperadoes, it was averred, broke windows and street light globes, preyed upon the apple barrels of the corner grocery, and used language that scalded and sullied the virginal ears of passing wash-ladies and plumber-gentlemen.
"There can't nobody live in peace in them two blocks, Judge, your Honour," came the heated asseveration of the man in the witness chair. "He's got more influence over my boys than what I've got myself—and the Reform School's the only place for the likes of him."
"Where do you spend your Saturday nights?" inquired the personage on the bench irrelevantly, and the furtive eyes of the witness shifted and lost their self-assurance.
"Here and there, Judge, your Honour. Sometimes I drop in at Mike's place for a glass of common beer."
"Do you occasionally send your boys—the followers of this dangerous bandit—to Mike's place with a bucket?"
The man hesitated, and his glance savoured of repressed truculence. "Maybe I do, once in a while," he replied doggedly. "I ain't on trial here, am I?"
"No—not just now." The judge spoke almost gently. "Stand down and let the fellow whoison trial take that chair."
The child with the sullen face slouched forward, and the Judge's eyes engaged his smouldering young pupil's with less austerity perhaps than the description of his turpitude warranted. This man, who sat one day a week to try the cases of delinquent and incorrigible children, presided five days over more mature hearings. From Monday through Thursday he mantled himself in judicial dignity and his language was the decorous speech of the bench. One who observed him only on Friday would hardly have gathered that. Just now he leaned forward and addressed the boy in a conversational tone and an argot that savoured of the alley-playground.
"Willie, haven't you got any other name—I mean amongst those kids that belong to your gang?"
Willie swallowed hard, but inasmuch as he failed to reply, his inquisitor went on:
"Surely those other kids don't call a rough-neck like you just Willie. You wouldn't stand for that, would you? Haven't you got some professional name like Bulldog Bill—or something?"
A fugitive glint of pride flashed in the boy's eyes under their cultivated toughness and their present alarm, and with a sheepish grin he enlightened this embodiment of the law.
"The other kids calls me 'Apache Bill.'"
The Judge did not smile, but accepted the information with full gravity, and spoke reflectively:
"Officer McGuire tells me that there are about a dozen members in your gang. It looks like a feller that can boss a crew of that size ought to have something in him. Look here, kid, let's talk this over."
After five minutes of low-toned confidences the man on the bench found himself looking into eyes of abated sullenness and listening to a voice that was simply small boy.
"You see it's a sucker play for you to travel the route that ends in the pen."
The Judge made it seem that Apache Bill himself had arrived at this sane conclusion in which his Honour merely concurred.
"And since you realize that yourself, I'm not going to send you to the Reform School this trip. You are going to give me your promise to run that gang differently." He looked up, and his glance fell on a young woman sitting among several others at the back of the room. There was much in her appearance to arrest the attention and challenge interest, but what one noticed most were eyes that held an inner light and a starry brightness. "I'm going to have you report to one of our probation officers every week," continued the Judge to Willie alias "Apache Bill," "and come to see me myself occasionally."
Usually for a case of this sort he would have selected a man from that group of volunteers who made effective the machinery of the children's court but this young terrorist would take a bit of understanding in his reclamation, and among the men and women who aided and abetted his efforts no other seemed to see into the intricacies of the boy mind quite so unerringly as that young woman with the starry eyes, who had been a famous belle and before that a tom-boy.
So the Judge nodded to her and said, "Miss Masters, I'm going to have 'Apache Bill' report to you. You two might talk over a boy-scout organization down there in his district."
As the girl rose from her chair, the Judge's face suddenly developed stern lines and his brows knit closely as he turned his attention to the principal complainant.
"John Vaster," he announced, this time with no softening of tone, "a probation officer is coming to your house, too. If those boys of yours go to Mike's place after this with a bucket, or if you don't find a way to keep them off the streets at night, you're coming back here, not as a prosecuting witness but as a defendant."
Anne Masters had turned to this work of volunteer probation officer as to a refuge from herself. Perhaps in her own mind it stood also for a sort of penance for sins with which she stood self-charged.
Her marriage with Morgan had been set for June, and somehow it seemed to her that when the ceremony had been gone through with her besetting doubts and struggles would end, if not in happiness, at least in resignation. Then she would acknowledge the abdication of Romance and accept her allegiance to Duty.
But meanwhile, until the solemn seal of the Church's ritual had been set upon that resolve, bringing, as she sought to convince herself it would, a steadied feeling of solace and of perplexities resolved, she seemed to hang like a Mahomet's coffin in suspended disquiet and misery.
Boone had said he would never explain—and she accepted his assertion as final. But for that explanation which she had once silenced, and which, when she was receptive, he had refused, she now burned with anxiety. Unless she had work to do while she fought back the insurgency and revolt of her heart, she would not be able to endure the pictures with which her imagination filled the future. Through this period of heartache she missed the essential, in that she did not discern the artificiality of the whole situation or the cure that would have lain in a repudiation of false pride.
Whatever mistakes she had made, she was now bound by her promise to Morgan, and doubly bound by the tyranny of her mother's dependence which, having been once accepted, could no longer be repudiated.
Colonel Wallifarro, bending over his desk one forenoon some two months after he had given the dinner to announce his son's engagement, had chokingly fallen forward with his face on his elbows.
When the physicians arrived, he was lying on his office lounge under the age-yellowed engraving of President Jefferson Davis and the grouped cabinet of the erstwhile Confederate States of America, and it was there that he died within the half hour.
"Acute indigestion," said the doctors, "His blood pressure was high and he refused to ease up on the work. He had often been warned that this might occur."
His will showed that in one respect at least he had heeded the warning, for its date was recent. The estate, much shrunken below the estimate of public supposition, was devised entirely to his son except for a bequest of a few thousand dollars to Anne's mother. There was mention, too, of a note, as yet unpaid, for twenty thousand dollars "loaned and hereby released, to my friend Lawrence Masters, Esq."
"In leaving my whole estate to my beloved son Morgan," read an explanatory clause of the document, "I do so happy in the knowledge that I likewise provide for my niece, Anne Masters, to whom he is engaged to be married, and for whom my love and affection is that of a father."
And Boone Wellver, who had still hoped against hope to receive from Anne the word that would restore to him at least a fighting chance, heard nothing. It all seemed to his gloomy analysis relentlessly logical that the girl, who for a long while had fought for her choice of an alien in her own world, should go back to her kind. After all she was not for him, and his dream had only been a fantasy long indulged but no longer possible of indulgence. So Boone plodded on, and in the more obvious manifestations of life was not greatly changed. The zest of the game was gone, but its realities remained to be met, and for him there was a coward memory to be lived down—the memory of a relapse from which a woman had saved him.
The ordeal of waiting was almost over for Anne, and the wedding preparations were under way. From the bed which she had not been able to leave since the day of Colonel Wallifarro's burial, Mrs. Masters injected a more fervent enthusiasm into these preliminaries than did the bride to be.
After the fashion of one who has been embittered and enjoys a belated triumph, the mother lived in a sort of fantasy which could see no clouds in the sky of her daughter's future. A factitious gaiety animated her, even though the death of her mainstay had crushed her into invalidism.
The haunted misery in Anne's face, and the lids that closed as if against a painful glare when Mrs. Masters forecast the happiness to be, were things that had no recognition or acknowledgment from the lady in the sick bed. It was as if her own joy in a dream achieved were comprehensive enough to embrace and assure the life-long happiness of her daughter, as the whole includes the part.
But when Anne sat down at her desk one afternoon to address some of the wedding invitations, she was out of sight of the maternal eye and her sensitive lips dropped piteously.
On the list before her, made out by herself and augmented by Morgan and her mother, she had come upon the name of Boone Wellver, and suddenly the things on her desk swam through a mist of tears.
Anne Masters sat there for a long while, then with a white face she drew a line through the name on the list. At least he should be spared that heartlessness of reminder.
She and Morgan were going abroad. Morgan had foreign business which made the journey imperative, and it was only when the courts adjourned and political matters fell quiet with the coming of summer that he could so long be away from his practice and his public affairs, but Anne could not think of Europe now. Her thoughts turned mutinously to imagined vistas seen from a rock at the lop of Slag-face across valleys where sunset cast the shadows of mountains: where just now the dogwood was in a foam of blossom and the laurel would soon be in pink flowering.
When Victor McCalloway came home in June he read in the face of the young man he met there that chapters deeply shadowed had been written into his life, and Boone was prompt enough in his confessions, though when he alluded to Anne's approaching marriage his words became meagre and his utterance flat with a hampering distrust of emotion and self-betrayal.
McCalloway gazed off grave-eyed across the small door-yard and mercifully refrained from any hurtful attempt at verbal solace.
Finally when the hum of bees in the honeysuckle had been the only disturbers of their long silence, the Scotchman spoke—and the younger features relaxed into relief because the words did not, even in kindness, touch upon the soreness of his mood. "The old spruce over there—the one that used to be the tallest thing we saw—it's gone, isn't it?"
Boone nodded. "The sleet took it down last winter."
Victor McCalloway was sage enough in human diagnosis to divine that, however much Boone had suffered through a period of months, the expression of quiet but well nigh unendurable suffering that just now haunted his eyes had not been constant in them. A man subjected long to that soul-cramping stress, with no outlet or abatement, would have become a melancholiac. In one sense it might be a chronic wretchedness, but today some particular incitement had rendered it acute—acute beyond the power of stoic blood to hold in concealment.
Repression only made the gnawing ache more burdensome. McCalloway wished that Boone might have gone, like the less inhibited folk of an elder generation, to some wailing wall and beat his breast with clenched fists—and come away less pent with hard control.
"I'll just go in and have a look over my scant accumulation of mail," he said with the same Anglo-Saxon pretence of armour-plated emotion. "In these days even the hermit doesn't altogether escape letters."
But when, inside the house, he found among the few and dusty envelopes one containing a wedding invitation, and when his eyes went, quick-glancing, to the wall calendar in a comparison of dates, his brain cleared of its mystification.
Tomorrow was the day of Anne's marriage.
If the number twelve on the calendar's June page bore a black penciling, like a mourning band, it was palpably a thing that Boone had not meant other eyes to see or understand.
McCalloway, himself in the shadowed interior, turned his head and could see through the door a sweep of sun-flooded hills and flawless sky. Against a background of blossoming laurel and crystal brightness Boone sat, stiff-postured, with eyes fixed and unseeing. McCalloway carried the card and its covering to the empty fireplace and touched a match to its edge. When it had been consumed, he went out again, and the younger man looked up, slowly, as though bringing himself out of a lethargy, and spoke with a dull intonation.
"You have said nothing, sir, of what I told you of myself. Saul came back and I reverted. That night I was a feud killer pure and simple. If blood didn't flow it was only because—" He broke off and began over, speaking with the rapidity of one rushing at an obstacle which has balked him, "it was only because—shestopped me."
"The point is," responded McCalloway soberly, "that blood didn't flow. You threw your weight into the right pan of the scales."
Boone shrugged his shoulders, disdaining a specious justification. "The rescue came from outside myself. One must he judged by his motive—and by that standard I failed."
"Not at all, sir! Damn it, not at all!"
At the sudden tempestuousness of the soldier's outburst, Boone looked up, surprised. McCalloway, too, had felt and reacted to the tension of their interview, and now he cleared his throat self-consciously and proceeded in a manner of recovered calmness.
"You were in the position of infantry just then, my boy, under the fire of field pieces. You needed artillery support—and, thanks to her, it came. There are times when no infantry can endure without a curtain of fire."
"She looked as if she'd been seeing ghosts," announced Anne's maid-of-honour, with a little shudder of emphasis, as she stood in a chatting group of wedding attendants just outside the door of Christ Church.
"I think she's the loveliest thing I've ever seen," declared another girl. "Anne has a distinction that's positively royal. Don't you think so, Reed?"
The young man addressed, after a half hour's deprivation inside the church, was hastening to avail himself of a cigarette. With a match close to his lips he grunted, and then having inhaled and exhaled, he supplemented the incoherent affirmative. "You're both right. As for myself, I'd rather have my bride's royalty less suggestive of Marie Antoinette riding in a tumbril. I don't like to have it brought home to me that marriage is life's supreme sacrifice."
Anne herself, sitting beside Morgan Wallifarro as they drove home, was rather breathless in her silence. Today it had been the rehearsal, but tomorrow it would be the ceremony itself, and from that there would be no turning back. An intolerable sense of inevitability seemed to close and darken in a stifling oppression that left her faint.
Until now she had been telling herself, as one will tell oneself specious things to prop a tottering resolution, that the ghosts of incertitude and panic would hold dominion only over the days and weeks of waiting. If she could keep her courage steadfast until she had actually become Morgan's wife, the forces that support one in one's duty would rally in closer order to uphold her.
But there in the church, going through the formula of the rehearsal, that fallacious self-bolstering had collapsed, and the misgivings of these days stood revealed as prefatory only to a more permanent and chafing thraldom.
If Boone had been there she felt that there was no law within herself strong enough to have prevented her from fleeing to him—and terror had seized upon her.
Then it was that the something came into her eyes which the maid-of-honour had described as the appearance of one seeing ghosts.
Morgan owed every success in life, or at least attributed every success, to his refusal to admit the possibility of failure. Like the Nervii, "he was strong because he seemed strong." Anne had brought him, at times, close to an acknowledgment of defeat in his paramount resolve—but his perseverance, he believed, had conquered, and his fears were over.
Now he looked into a face from which the colour had ebbed and in which the eyes were far from radiant—but Morgan told himself that it should be his privilege to bring the bloom of happiness back, and his colossal self-confidence was not daunted by any serious misgiving.
It was not until they had entered the house and stood alone in the same room where Boone had listened to his edict of banishment, that she turned slowly and said in a voice both terrified and defiant:
"Morgan—I can't do it.... For God's sake release me from my promise!"
She stood facing him and braced for the recoil of that indignant protestation which she had every right to expect from him. She was not only withdrawing the promise upon which she had let him plan the entire edifice of his future, but doing so with a tardiness that made it, for him, inescapably conspicuous and mortifying.
But Morgan was a master of the strategy of surprise. His jaw did not drop in stricken amazement. His left hand, holding the glove just drawn from the right, did not clench in dramatic tensity. His eyes did not even smoulder into that suppressed rage which mischievously she used to tease into them for the pleasure of seeing them snap.
If anything, the prominent out-thrust of the clean-cut jaw was less emphatic than usual, and the girl felt the sinking helplessness of one who, keyed to a hard battle, launches the attack and encounters no opposition.
Morgan had seen the wild, almost irrational, terror of her eyes, and they had silenced argument. For once he recognized a defeat that he could avoid only by an ungenerous victory to which he could not bring himself, and he had no reproach because he could see that, in her effort to perform her promise, she had goaded herself to the breaking point.
His face showed every thoroughbred and manly quality of its blood as he inquired, with as great a deference as though her sudden announcement came with entire reasonableness: "Are you sure—you can't?"
When she had nodded her head miserably, Morgan argued his cause. He talked with a quiet and earnest eagerness but without reproach, as if he were for the first time pleading his love.
But the arguments held nothing new. She herself had lain awake at night repeating them until they were like parrot reiterations. They interposed no answer to the monstrous fact that a marriage which she faced in such unwillingness would be a thing that divorced the heart from the body. That she had so long beguiled herself into believing it possible, filled her now with self-scorn, but to the untimeliness of her decision he offered no protest.
They talked, all things considered, with surprising calmness, and at length Morgan glanced down and, seeing on the table near his hand the plans for the house they had meant to build, picked them up absently, glanced at them and tossed them back. It was the gesture of accepting a finality.
"I suppose, Anne," he said, with a rather more than merely decent assumption of whatever fault existed, "I've refused to see the truth because I was blindly selfish, but I couldn't seek to hold you—if it costs you both happiness and self-respect." He paused and then added. "I ask only one thing, now. Don't make this decision final. Think it over for three months—"
"Morgan dear," she interrupted in a gasping voice, "for more than three months, I've thought of nothing else."
"I know." The gentleness of his speech was the more telling by its contrast with his aggressive habit of self-assertion. "But you were thinking then with a sense of being bound. Complete freedom may make a difference. At least leave me that hope."
"I'm afraid," she faltered, "I'm very certain."
"Anyway," he reminded her, as he forced a rueful smile, "it will be easier to tell your mother in that fashion. She is on my side, you know."
Possibly Morgan had long ago counted this over-ardent advocacy on the part of Mrs. Masters as a hurtful partisanship. He knew that Anne's spirit had been fretted, ragged under the maternal insistence, even when it was tempered with finesse. He knew too that in this final declaration of freedom, the girl could not escape the knowledge that for her mother as well as herself she was wrecking every provident prospect and raising the ghosts of shabby, genteel poverty.
"I think," said Morgan, with a delicacy of tact which one would hardly have expected from him, "you'd better let me tell her—that we've decided to wait until I come back from abroad."
Anne sickened at the thought of her mother's disappointment and at the thought too of how, for her, the future was to be met. Then as if that were too gigantic a problem, her mind veered to lesser, yet disturbing, complications.
Today's papers had printed advance details of the wedding. The type of one heading seemed to stand at the moment before her eyes, "Happy Event of Interest to Society," but when she spoke somewhat timidly of these things to Morgan he contemptuously waved them aside.
"Damn the invitations and the wedding guests," he exclaimed. "We weren't getting married for their benefit. Leave that to me. The papers will announce that I've got to go to Europe—and that because of a turn in your mother's condition you've decided to defer the wedding until I come back. That's all they need to know."
He turned to the window and after a minute wheeled suddenly back.
"I have one thing still to ask. I have no longer any claim, of course. But until three months have passed—you won't send for Boone Wellver, will you?"
The girl's head came up with a tilted chin.
"I shall never send for him," she vehemently declared. "He's done with me and that's all there is to it!"
It was not undiluted fiction which Morgan gave to the morning papers that night, as he regretfully reported the sudden heart attack of Mrs. Masters, which necessitated an eleventh hour postponement of his wedding. There had been a heart attack which might have been averted had the good lady been able to receive his tidings with a less flurried spirit, but that he did not regard it necessary to explain, and a flinty something in his eye discouraged unnecessary questions.
So Morgan set out alone on the trip which was to have been a honeymoon, and the lady whose dreams of a rehabilitated place in society had been dashed afforded her daughter a fulness of anxiety by hanging precariously between life and death.
It is doubtful whether those circles in which Anne and Morgan moved were wholly beguiled, and it is certain that sympathy followed the traveller.
"The engagement will never be renewed," mused an elderly lady who had been fond of Anne from childhood. "She won't take up again with her wild man of the mountains either, you may rest assured of that."
"But why?" challenged the gentleman to whom these sage observations were addressed. "Presumably a persistent interest in young Wellver caused this break with—"
A quiet laugh interrupted him, and the gentleman's eyes for some reason grew grave. He and the woman with whom he talked had been lovers once, engaged years upon years ago, and society had always wondered that neither of them had ever married. Now with snow upon both their heads he still sedately marched where he had once danced attendance upon her.
"Because," she soberly replied, "there is such a thing as letting the psychological moment go by. Life isn't all mating season."
"As to that," he entered dignified demurrer, "we have always disagreed."
The lady, ignoring the observation, went on, holding intact the thread of her reflections. "If the break with Boone had been remediable it would never have widened till so many months ran between them. No, she has given each hiscongé, and she hasn't a penny of her own in the world and—" She paused dramatically, and the man finished the sentiment for her in a less alarmed tone.
"It would seem to leave her flat; still she has a good mind and wonderful charm."
"Yes,"—the retort was dry. "The mind is untrained, and the charm is a menace."
Mrs. Masters died early that summer, though the physicians assured her self-accusing daughter that no possible connection of cause and effect could be traced between her death and the heart attack provoked by the doldrums of disappointment. But the girl's eyes were haunted when she came back from the funeral to the empty house, which was not her own house, and sat down, ghost-pale, against the black of her mourning. The world which she must now face was an absolutely changed world from which, as from dismantled furniture, all the easy cushioning and draperies had been ripped away, leaving sharp and uncovered angles of contact.
In it there was no place for her, save such a place as she could gain by invoking some miracle, for which she had no formula, to exchange butterfly beauty for the provident effectiveness of the ant hill.
Morgan, whose frequent letters had gone unanswered, became obsessed with an anxiety which drove him homeward by a fast steamer that had seemed to him intolerably slow.
When its voyage had ended, a fog had held it in the harbour for half a day, and during that half day Morgan paced the decks, fuming over a dozen apprehensions.
It was to a Morgan Wallifarro unaccustomedly pale and agitated that the same lady, who had pessimistically forecast Anne's future, gave him, on his arrival at home, what information she could.
"No one seems to have her address, Morgan," she said. "I suppose she wanted, for a while, to be in new surroundings. As for myself, I had a brief note sent back with a book I'd lent her. She said that she was going to New York—but that was all, and when I telephoned she had gone."
"But her affairs must be arranged for her. She has nothing," protested the man desperately. "In God's name what is she going to do? How did she suppose I was going to find her?"
The lady laid a hand on the young man's elbow, and tears came into her own eyes,
"She didn't confide in me, Morgan. What I think is only guess-work—but I don't believe she wanted you to find her."
To Boone Wellver, Louisville had become a city lying without the zone of personal experience. Like a steamer which has altered its sailings, he made it no longer a port of call.
That mad hiatus of apostacy, in which he had been willing to throw down all the shrines of his acquired faith, had become to him an evil dream of the past—yet out of it something had remained. The fog which had bemused him then had left uncleared certain minors of realization. Just as he had not yet recognized that the Commonwealth's attorney had sent him away unsatisfied because he had come making his demands to the arrogant tune of insult, so he failed, too, to appreciate that Anne had held the silence, which, without her permission, he was resolved not to break, because he had violently rebuffed her.
He had refused to read the papers on the day set for her wedding, because he could not bear the torture of what he had expected to find there, and McCalloway had not spoken of the postponement because it fell within the boundaries of a topic upon which he had set a ban of silence, unless the younger man broached it. So with what would have seemed an impossible coincidence, it was weeks later that Boone ceased to flagellate himself with the thought of a honeymoon that had never begun. Even then he, unlike the more sophisticated of the circle to which he had once been admitted, accepted without question the reason given for the deferred marriage, and saw for himself no brightening of possibility.
With the curtain rung down on the thrilling drama whose theme had been dominated by love, work seemed to Boone increasingly the motif of things. Service appeared more and more the purpose meant in the blind gropings of existence toward some end. Otherwise there was nothing.
But one day long after all this, when the months had run to seasons, Boone broke his law of self-appointed exile and went to Louisville. He did not go from Marlin Town but came the other way—from Washington.
For now the mountain man had his place on Capitol Hill and no longer felt the uncertainty of diffidence in answering when he heard himself recognized from the speaker's chair as "the gentleman from Kentucky."
It was not at all the Washington he had pictured. In many ways it was a more wonderful, and in many a less wonderful, place than that known from photographs and print and fancy.
Life had caught him out of meagre and primitive beginnings and led him, for a while, through corridors of romanticism. Before his eyes, imagination-kindled, had been the colours of dreams and the beckoning of an evening star. The colours had been evanescent, and the star had set. The corridor of visionary promise had come to an end, and its door had opened on Commonplace.
He told himself that he was done with romance. In his life it had been, perhaps, necessary as a stage through which experience must lead him. Henceforth his deity was to be Reason, a cold and austere goddess but a constant one.
But Boone did not quite know himself. Sentiment still lay as strong in him as the spring life that sleeps under the winter sleet. The man in whom it does not survive is one whose spiritual arteries have hardened.
One lesson he modestly believed he had learned out of his journeying from his log-cabin down to the Bluegrass and up to Capitol Hill. He had become an apostle of Life's mutability, chained to no fixed post of unplastic thought.
Upon these things his reflections had been running as he made the journey back to Kentucky, and of them he was thinking now, as, having arrived, he stood with bared head in the billowing stretches of Cave Hill Cemetery.
Victor McCalloway had been in Marlin County hardly at all during these last two years and he was not there now. As usual, when the veteran was absent, Boone had no idea to what quarter of the globe, or in response to what mysterious call, his steps had turned. He thought, though, that it would be his preceptor's wish to be represented as the body of General Prince was lowered to its last rest.
He saw again in memory two figures before a cabin hearth, debating with the heat of devotees, the calibre and qualities of today's and yesterday's military leaders in general, of Hector Dinwiddie in particular. He saw himself again sitting huddled in the chimney corner, nursing the patched knees of an illiterate boy.
Now one was dead—he could not even be sure that both were not dead—and Boone, no longer in homespun, had come from Washington to uncover his head under the winter sky as the words of the last rites were spoken over the body of General Prince.
Into that grave, it seemed to him, was going something unreplaceable. This man was the embodiment of a passing tradition, almost of a dead era, in the altering life of the nation itself.
The ideas and beliefs for which his early life had stood were already buried, and now he lay himself at rest, a link between present and past—as much an exemplification of chivalry as though his feet had been crossed and his sword laid in the crusader's posture of repose.
Boone heard the austere beauty of the service—but he felt more poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with two flags that overlapped their folds—though once a tide of cannon-smother ran between them—the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.
On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave.
Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and butternut, clasping in his tight hands the coon-skin cap that his boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant of passing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for he had been born a pioneer!
The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Constitution of the United States stands."
It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in the keeping of ravens—for back of the ravens was the Promise.
From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were, several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went out."
For that was the phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes.
When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the pines of Marlin County.
In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint "song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."
Because no dollar could go out from the school's closely guarded treasury without assurance that it would bring other dollars back, the experiment of increasing the traveling expenses by including this girl in the journey to New York had been discussed back of Cedar Mountain with prayerful earnestness, and the girl herself had greeted the final decision as one of the great moments of her life.
Now that girl stood beside the piano a little tremulous with stage fright as she looked out over an audience more sophisticated than any to which she had ever sung before. It was in one of the women's university clubs in the Forties and to her uninitiated eye the light fell on a confusing display of evening dress and worldly-wise faces full of self-containment.
They would listen with politeness but how could her offering interest these men and women to whom great voices were familiar? Hers was untrained and the songs were crude vehicles for folk-lore compositions, plaintive with uncultivated minors.
That elderly gentleman, sitting far back near the door, had been identified to her in a whisper. He was a music critic whose word carried the force of authority—and she wondered if he sat near the exit with thought of escape from her inflictions. Just now he was writing a series of magazine articles on folk-lore music in America, and the girl felt herself the subject of a cold experiment in mental vivisection.
The lady with the white pompadour was one whose name she had known with awe on the school's list of patronesses and even here in New York it was a great name.
The mountain singer's knees trembled a little as the accompanist struck the keys, and her first note stole out, sweetly clear and naturally fresh.
She finished her first song and retreated to her chair on the platform, wishing that there had been a trap-door through which she might have escaped that barrage of human sight.
Then her glance caught the elderly man with the great reputation in the music world. He had not yet fled. He was making notes on a scrap of paper and his keenly alert, finely chiselled face wore the expression of unmistakable interest. The singer glanced at the white-haired lady—the great Mrs. Ariton—and she read "well-done, my child," in a smile of moist eyes.
She could not know that there was a direct simplicity of pathos and artless humour in her ballads, borne on a bird-like sweetness of voice, to the hearts of these people. She could not know that she was bringing to the touch of their sympathy phrases and forms that had seemed as remote and unreal as lines from Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Yet, because it was all so new and strange, the air seemed heavy to her with a terrifying formality, as the incense laden atmosphere of a cathedral might have been. So she looked, as she rose to sing again, for the comforting presence of some face that might reassure her with a kin-ship of human simplicity.
Then she saw slip quietly through the entrance door, and drop into a seat near the critic, a young woman who was unaccompanied and who, at first glance, seemed to carry in her fine eyes the burthen of habitual weariness.
These eyes were deeply violet and though sadness haunted them and bespoke ghosts that stirred uneasily and often back in their depths they still held the hint of fires that had flashed, once, into gay and spontaneous whimseys. The singer had a momentary sense of looking at a face made for gracious and merry expressions, but drawn into the short and desperate outlook of one who has fallen into deep and angry waters, and who can see nothing ahead beyond the struggle to keep afloat.
The newcomer was tall and slender, even thin, but there was still an intrinsic gallantry about the swing of her shoulders that made one think of invincible qualities, though the plain severity of her clothing brought into that contrasting company the undeniable assertion of poverty.
The singer finished her ballad and once again went back to her chair. This time with a diminished diffidence. She was thinking about the other young woman at the back who looked poor and sick and who, in spite of these things, gave her an indescribable impression of distinction. The two of them, thought the mountain girl, had a bond of sympathy in that they were each set quite apart from all these others unified by the stamp of affluence.
Miss Shorte was talking now; telling the story of the school and its work; flashing before her hearers as if her words were pictures imbued with colour and form, the patriarchal conditions with which this work was surrounded. Laughter interrupted her lighter recitals, and when she spoke of graver phases there was that light clearing of throats that carries from an audience to a stage the proclamation of stirred emotion, and of tears not far from the surface.
The speaker gave a few illustrations of the sort of manhood and womanhood that is sometimes wrought out of that crude ore when the tempering of help and education is available to refine it.
Lincoln had sprung from such stock. Even now the member in Congress from that district was a man born in a log shack of illiterate parents. He had fought feudal animosities and gone upward by a rugged ascent. Now he was recognized by his colleagues as a man of ability and breadth. So far had he outgrown the strictures of provincialism, that he was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But better than that his own people swore by him because they knew "their lives and deaths were his to him"—because in a land where men had been afraid to serve on juries and to enforce the law, they were no longer afraid.
The school sought to develop other Boone Wellvers from the same beginnings ... to help others toward a similar fulfilment.
The musical critic heard a faint gasping breath from the chair at his side. He turned quickly and was startled by the pale, emotion-drawn face of the young woman who sat there without escort. For an instant he thought that some poor creature actually pinched by want had crept in, attracted by the light and warmth for a brief interval of rest, then he looked with a more piercing appraisement at the features and discarded that idea.
"Are you ill?" he demanded in a low voice. "Can I serve you?"
The young woman shook her head and forced a smile whose graciousness must have come less from conscious effort than from life habit.
"No, thank you," she answered in a low voice that had meaning to one who knew music wherever he found it. "It was nothing ... I came late ... who is the girl who sang?"
"She was introduced as Miss Happy Spradling," said the critic.
His questioner's hands were at her sides where he did not see them tighten convulsively, but he saw the pale cheeks go a shade whiter and wondered if she was going to faint.
She did not faint, and though through the course of the evening the elderly man found time, more than once, to turn his friendly glance of solicitude her way he did not again intervene with questions. Clearly this young woman, whatever the cause, was in a condition of nerves that might mean skirting the precipitous edge of collapse. Clearly too she had that fortitude which can resist and after a shock bring itself back to the poise of equilibrium. What had shocked her? He could not guess, but he knew that in the depleted condition that her pale cheeks and thinness argued, unaccountable trifles may assume the gravity of a crisis. And besides the critic found his attention and interest elsewhere engaged. That other girl who was singing claimed them both. She was having a little triumph there on the platform beside the piano. On her smooth, dark face was a pink flush and her deep eyes glowed with pleasure for the enthusiasm that had capped the cordiality of her reception.
When the program came to its end the audience in large part gathered about the platform and the meeting resolved itself into an informal reception. Among the first to go forward was the critic and as he rose, noticing a struggle between eagerness and hesitation in the violet eyes of his chance neighbour, he yielded to an impulse of the moment.
"Shall we go up together," he smiled, "and introduce each other? I have a question or two to ask her?"
But the girl shook her head. She had started nervously at the question as though in realization that he had read her thoughts and as if she had not wished them to be readable.
Still when he had left her she lingered in the door before she turned out to the street as if some strong magnetism sought to draw her into the group about the speaker and singer—a group in which her clothes would have been conspicuous. Finally she turned and left and went outside, where the obscurity was more merciful.
Her course took her southward and eastward and brought her at last to a building that loomed large and dark now, but which in daylight sounded to the shouts of immigrant children whose voices might have rung in the sun-yellowed bazaars of Levantine towns or about the moujik habitations of Russia. It was one of the settlement schools of the East Side where the strident grind of the elevated was never silent, and in a small and very bare room the girl took off her hat and coat. She was one of the least important of the women who conducted the affairs of this mission school. Its assembly rooms,crêchesand diet kitchens constituted her present world.