Betty never forgot her first sight of the old friend of her family. Returning with a sad heart, she was walking the colt slowly through the carriage-gates, when an extravagantly stout lady, in green muslin illustrated with huge red flowers, came out upon the porch and waved a fat arm to the girl. The visitor wore a dark-green turban and a Cashmere shawl, while the expanse of her skirts was nothing short of magnificent: some cathedral-dome seemed to have been misplaced and the lady dropped into it. Her outstretched hand terrified Betty: how was she to approach near enough to take it?
Mrs. Tanberry was about sixty, looked forty, and at first you might have guessed she weighed nearly three hundred, but the lightness of her smile and the actual buoyancy which she somehow imparted to her whole dominion lessened that by at least a hundred-weight. She ballooned out to the horse-block with a billowy rush somewhere between bounding and soaring; and Miss Betty slid down from the colt, who shied violently, to find herself enveloped, in spite of the dome, in a vast surf of green and red muslin.
“My charming girl!” exclaimed the lady vehemently, in a voice of such husky richness, of such merriment and unction of delight, that it fell upon Miss Betty's ear with more of the quality of sheer gayety than any she had ever heard. “Beautiful child! What a beautiful child you are!”
She kissed the girl resoundingly on both cheeks; stepped back from her and laughed, and clapped her fat hands, which were covered with flashing rings. “Oh, but you are a true blue Beauty! You're a Princess! I am Mrs. Tanberry, Jane Tanberry, young Janie Tanberry. I haven't seen you since you were a baby and your pretty mother was a girl like us!”
“You are so kind to come,” said Betty hesitatingly. “I shall try to be very obedient.”
“Obedient!” Mrs. Tanberry uttered the word with a shriek. “You'll be nothing of the kind. I am the light-mindedest woman in the universe, and anyone who obeyed me would be embroiled in everlasting trouble every second in the day. You'll find that I am the one that needs looking after, my charmer!”
She tapped Miss Betty's cheek with her jeweled fingers as the two mounted the veranda steps. “It will be worry enough for you to obey yourself; a body sees that at the first blush. You have conscience in your forehead and rebellion in your chin. Ha, ha, ha!” Here Mrs. Tanberry sat upon, and obliterated, a large chair, Miss Carewe taking a stool at her knee.
“People of our age oughtn't to be bothered with obeying; there'll be time enough for that when we get old and can't enjoy anything. Ha, ha!”
Mrs. Tanberry punctuated her observations with short volleys of husky laughter, so abrupt in both discharge and cessation that, until Miss Betty became accustomed to the habit, she was apt to start slightly at each salvo. “I had a husband—once,” the lady resumed, “but only once, my friend! He had ideas like your father's—your father is such an imbecile!—and he thought that wives, sisters, daughters, and such like ought to be obedient: that is, the rest of the world was wrong unless it was right; and right was just his own little, teeny-squeeny prejudices and emotions dressed up for a crazy masquerade as Facts. Poor man! He only lasted about a year!” And Mrs. Tanberry laughed heartily.
“They've been at me time and again to take another.” She lowered her voice and leaned toward Betty confidentially. “Not I! I'd be willing to engage myself to Crailey Gray (though Crailey hasn't got round to me yet) for I don't mind just being engaged, my dear; but they'll have to invent something better than a man before I marry any one of 'em again! But I love 'em, I do, the Charming Billies! And you'll see how they follow me!” She patted the girl's shoulder, her small eyes beaming quizzically. “We'll have the gayest house in Rouen, ladybird! The young men all go to the Bareauds', but they'll come here now, and we'll have the Bareauds along with 'em. I've been away a long time, just finished unpacking yesterday night when your father came in after the fire—Whoo! what a state he was in with that devilish temper of his! Didn't I snap him up when he asked me to come and stay with you? Ha, ha! I'd have come, even if you hadn't been beautiful; but I was wild to be your playmate, for I'd heard nothing but 'Miss Betty Carewe, Miss Betty Carewe' from everybody I saw, since the minute my stage came in. You set 'em all mad at your ball, and I knew we'd make a glorious house-full, you and I! Some of the vagabonds will turn up this very evening, you'll see if they don't. Ha, ha! The way they follow me!”
Mrs. Tanberry was irresistible: she filled the whole place otherwise than by the mere material voluminousness of her; bubbling over with froth of nonsense which flew through the house, driven by her energy, like sea-foam on a spring gale; and the day, so discordantly begun for Miss Betty, grew musical with her own laughter, answering the husky staccato of the vivacious newcomer. Nelson waited upon them at table, radiant, his smile like the keyboard of an ebony piano, and his disappearances into the kitchen were accomplished by means of a surreptitious double-shuffle, and followed by the cachinnating echoes of the vain Mamie's reception of the visitor's sallies, which Nelson hastily retailed in passing.
Nor was Mrs. Tanberry's prediction allowed to go unfulfilled regarding the advent of those persons whom she had designated as vagabonds. It may have been out of deference to Mr. Carewe's sense of decorum (or from a cautious regard of what he was liable to do when he considered that sense outraged) that the gallants of Rouen had placed themselves under the severe restraint of allowing three days to elapse after their introduction to Miss Carewe before they “paid their respects at the house;” but, be that as it may, the dictator was now safely under way down the Rouen River, and Mrs. Tanberry reigned in his stead. Thus, at about eight o'clock that evening, the two ladies sat in the library engaged in conversation—though, for the sake of accuracy, it should be said that Mrs. Tanberry was engaged in conversation, Miss Betty in giving ear—when their attention was arrested by sounds of a somewhat musical nature from the lawn, which sounds were immediately identified as emanating from a flute and violin.
Mrs. Tanberry bounded across the room like a public building caught by a cyclone, and, dashing at the candles, “Blow 'em out, blow 'em out!” she exclaimed, suiting the action to the word in a fluster of excitement.
“Why?” asked Miss Carewe, startled, as she rose to her feet. The candles were out before the question.
“'Why!” repeated the merry, husky voice in the darkness. “My goodness, child precious, those vagabonds are here! To think of your never having been serenaded before!”
She drew the girl to the window and pointed to a group of dim figures near the iliac bushes. “The dear, delightful vagabonds!” she chuckled. “I knew they'd come! It's the beautiful Tappingham Marsh with his fiddle, and young Jeff Bareaud with his flute, and 'Gene Madrillon and little Frank Chenowith and thin Will Cummings to sing. Hark to the rascals!”
It is perfectly truthful to say that the violin and flute executed the prelude, and then the trio sounded full on the evening air, the more effective chords obligingly drawn out as long as the breath in the singers could hold them, in order to allow the two fair auditors complete benefit of the harmony. They sang “The Harp that Once Thro' Tara's Halls,” and followed it with “Long, Long Ago.”
“That,” Mrs. Tanberry whispered, between stifled gusts of almost uncontrollable laughter, “is meant for just me!”
“Tell me the tales that to me were so dear,” entreated the trio.
“I told 'em plenty!” gurgled the enlivening widow. “And I expect between us we can get up some more.” “Now you are come my grief is removed,” they sang.
“They mean your father is on his way to St. Louis,” remarked Mrs. Tanberry.
“Let me forget that so long you have roved, Let me believe that you love as you loved, Long, long ago, long ago.”
“Applaud, applaud!” whispered Mrs. Tanberry, encouraging the minstrels by a hearty clapping of hands.
Hereupon dissension arose among the quintet, evidently a dispute in regard to their next selection; one of the gentlemen appearing more than merely to suggest a solo by himself, while the others too frankly expressed adverse opinions upon the value of the offering. The argument became heated, and in spite of many a “Sh!” and “Not so loud!” the ill-suppressed voice of the intending soloist, Mr. Chenoweth, could be heard vehemently to exclaim: “I will! I learned it especially for this occasion. I will sing it!”
His determination, patently, was not to be balked without physicalencounter, consequently he was permitted to advance some paces from thelilac bushes, where he delivered himself, in an earnest and plaintivetenor, of the following morbid instructions, to which the violin playedan obligato in tremulo, so execrable, and so excruciatingly discordant,that Mr. Chenoweth's subsequent charge that it was done with adeliberately evil intention could never be successfully opposed:“Go! Forget me!Why should SorrowO'er that brow a shadow fling?Go! Forget me, and, to-morrow,Brightly smile and sweetly sing!“Smile! tho' I may not be near thee;Smile! tho' I may never see thee;May thy soul with pleasure shineLasting as this gloom of mine!”
Miss Carewe complied at once with the request; while her companion, unable to stop with the slight expression of pleasure demanded by the songster, threw herself upon a sofa and gave way to the mirth that consumed her.
Then the candles were relit, the serenaders invited within; Nelson came bearing cake and wine, and the house was made merry. Presently, the romp, Virginia Bareaud, making her appearance on the arm of General Trumble, Mrs. Tanberry led them all in a hearty game of Blind-man's Buff, followed by as hearty a dancing of Dan Tucker. After that, a quadrille being proposed, Mrs. Tanberry suggested that Jefferson should run home and bring Fanchon for the fourth lady. However, Virginia explained that she had endeavored to persuade both her sister and Mr. Gray to accompany the General and herself, but that Mr. Gray had complained of indisposition, having suffered greatly from headache, on account of inhaling so much smoke at the warehouse fire; and, of course, Fanchon would not leave him. (Miss Carewe permitted herself the slightest shrug of the shoulders.)
So they danced the quadrille with Jefferson at the piano and Mr. Marsh performing in the character of a lady, a proceeding most unacceptable to the General, whom Mrs. Tanberry forced to be his partner. And thus the evening passed gayly away, and but too quickly, to join the ghosts of all the other evenings since time began; and each of the little company had added a cheerful sprite to the long rows of those varied shades that the after years bring to revisit us, so many with pathetic reproach, so many bearing a tragic burden of faces that we cannot make even to weep again, and so few with simple merriment and lightheartedness. Tappingham Marsh spoke the truth, indeed, when he exclaimed in parting, “O rare Mrs. Tanberry!”
But the house had not done with serenades that night. The guests had long since departed; the windows were still and dark under the wan old moon, which had risen lamely, looking unfamiliar and not half itself; the air bore an odor of lateness, and nothing moved; when a delicate harmony stole out of the shadows beyond the misty garden. Low but resonant chords sounded on the heavier strings of a guitar, while above them, upon the lighter wires, rippled a slender, tinkling melody that wooed the slumberer to a delicious half-wakefulness, as dreamily, as tenderly, as the croon of rain on the roof soothes a child to sleep. Under the artist's cunning touch the instrument was both the accompaniment and the song; and Miss Betty, at first taking the music to be a wandering thread in the fabric of her own bright dreams, drifted gradually to consciousness to find herself smiling. Her eyes opened wide, but half closed again with the ineffable sweetness of the sound.
Then a voice was heard, eerily low, yet gallant and clear, a vibrant baritone, singing to the guitar.
“My lady's hair, That dark delight, Is both as fair And dusk as night. I know some lovelorn hearts that beat In time to moonbeam twinklings fleet, That dance and glance like jewels there, Emblazoning the raven hair!
“Ah, raven hair! So dark and bright, What loves lie there Enmeshed, to-night? I know some sighing lads that say Their hearts were snared and torn away; And now as pearls one fate they share, Entangled in the raven hair.
“Ah, raven hair, From such a plight Could you not spare One acolyte? I know a broken heart that went To serve you but as ornament. Alas! a ruby now you wear, Ensanguining the raven hair!”
The song had grown fainter and fainter, the singer moving away as he sang, and the last lines were almost inaudible in the distance The guitar could be heard for a moment or two more, then silence came again. It was broken by a rustling in the room next to Miss Betty's, and Mrs. Tanberry called softly through the open door:
“Princess, are you awake? Did you hear that serenade?”
After a pause the answer came hesitatingly in a small, faltering voice: “Yes—if it was one. I thought perhaps he was only singing as he passed along the street.”
“Aha!” ejaculated Mrs. Tanberry, abruptly, as though she had made an unexpected discovery. “You knew better; and this was a serenade that you did not laugh at. Beautiful, I wouldn't let it go any farther, even while your father is gone. Something might occur that would bring him home without warning—such things have happened. Tom Vanrevel ought to be kept far away from this house.”
“Oh, it was not he,” returned Miss Betty, quickly. “It was Mr. Gray. Didn't you—”
“My dear,” interrupted the other, “Crailey Gray's specialty is talking. Most of the vagabonds can sing and play a bit, and so can Crailey, particularly when he's had a few bowls of punch; but when Tom Vanrevel touches the guitar and lifts up his voice to sing, there isn't an angel in heaven that wouldn't quit the place and come to hear him! Crailey wrote those words to Virginia Bareaud. (Her hair is even darker than yours, you know.) That was when he was being engaged to her; and Tom must have set the music to 'em lately, and now comes here to sing 'em to you; and well enough they fit you! But you must keep him away, Princess.”
Nevertheless, Betty knew the voice was not that which had bid her look to the stars, and she remained convinced that it belonged to Mr. Crailey Gray, who had been too ill, a few hours earlier, to leave the Bareaud house, and now, with Fanchon's kisses on his lips, came stealing into her garden and sang to her a song he had made for another girl!
And the angels would leave heaven to listen when he sang, would they? Poor Fanchon! No wonder she held him so tightly in leading strings! He might risk his life all he wished at the end of a grappling-ladder, dangling in a fiery cloud above nothing; but when it came to—ah, well, poor Fanchon! Did she invent the headaches for him, or did she make him invent them for himself?
If there was one person in the world whom Miss Betty held in bitter contempt and scorn, it was the owner of that voice and that guitar.
More than three gentlemen of Rouen wore their hearts in their eyes for any fool to gaze upon; but three was the number of those who told their love before the end of the first week of Mr. Carewe's absence, and told it in spite of Mrs. Tanberry's utmost effort to preserve, at all times, a conjunction between herself and Miss Betty. For the good lady, foreseeing these declarations much more surely than did the subject of them, wished to spare her lovely charge the pain of listening to them.
Miss Carewe honored each of the lorn three with few minutes of gravity; but the gentle refusal prevented never a swain from being as truly her follower as before; not that she resorted to the poor device of half-dismissal, the every-day method of the school-girl flirt, who thus keeps the lads in dalliance, but because, even for the rejected, it was a delight to be near her. For that matter, it is said that no one ever had enough of the mere looking at her. Also, her talk was enlivening even to the lively, being spiced with surprising turns and amiably seasoned with the art of badinage. To use the phrase of the time, she possessed the accomplishments, an antiquated charm now on the point of disappearing, so carefully has it been snubbed under whenever exhibited. The pursuing wraith of the young, it comes to sit, a ghost at every banquet, driving the flower of our youth to unheard-of exertions in search of escape, to dubious diplomacy, to dismal inaction, or to wine; yet time was when they set their hearts on “the accomplishments.”
Miss Betty Carewe at her harp, ah! it was a dainty picture: the clear profile, with the dark hair low across the temple, silhouetted duskily, in the cool, shadowy room, against the open window; the slender figure, one arm curving between you and the strings, the other gleaming behind them; the delicate little sandal stealing from the white froth of silk and lace to caress the pedal; the nimble hands fluttering across the long strands, “Like white blossoms borne on slanting lines of rain;” and the great gold harp rising to catch a javelin of sunshine that pierced the vines at the window where the honeysuckles swung their skirts to the refrain—it was a picture to return many a long year afterward, and thrill the reveries of old men who were then young. And, following the light cascading ripples of the harp, when her low contralto lifted in one of the “old songs,” she often turned inquiringly to see if the listener liked the music, and her brilliant, dark eyes would rest on his with an appeal that blinded his entranced soul. She meant it for the mere indication of a friendly wish to suit his tastes, but it looked like the divine humility of love. Nobody wondered that General Trumble should fall to verse-making in his old age.
She sketched magnificently. This is the very strongest support for the assertion: Frank Chenoweth and Tappingham Marsh agreed, with tears of enthusiasm, that “magnificently” was the only word. They came to this conclusion as they sat together at the end of a long dinner (at which very little had been eaten) after a day's picnic by the river. Miss Carewe had been of their company, and Tappingham and Chenoweth found each his opportunity in the afternoon. The party was small, and no one had been able to effect a total unconsciousness of the maneuvers of the two gentle-men. Even Fanchon Bareaud comprehended languidly, though she was more blurred than ever, and her far-away eyes belied the mechanical vivacity of her manner, for Crailey was thirty miles down the river, with a fishing-rod neatly packed in a leather case.
Mr. Vanrevel, of course, was not invited; no one would have thought of asking him to join a small party of which Robert Carewe's daughter was to be a member. But it was happiness enough for Tom, that night, to lie hidden in the shrubbery, looking up at the stars between the leaves, while he listened to her harp, and borne through the open window on enchanted airs, the voice of Elizabeth Carewe singing “Robin Adair.”
It was now that the town indulged its liveliest spirit; never an evening lacked its junketing, while the happy folk of Rouen set the early summer to music. Serenade, dance, and song for them, the light-hearts, young and old making gay together! It was all laughter, either in sunshine or by candlelight, undisturbed by the far thunder below the southern horizon, where Zachary Taylor had pitched his tent, upon the Rio Grande.
One fair evening, soon after that excursion which had proved fatal to the hopes of the handsome Tappingham and of the youthful Chenoweth, it was the privilege of Mr. Thomas Vanrevel to assist Miss Carewe and her chaperon from their carriage, as they drove up to a dance at the Bareauds'. This good fortune fell only to great deserving, for he had spent an hour lurking outside the house in the hope of performing such offices for them.
Heaven was in his soul and the breath departed out of his body, when, after a moment of hesitation, Miss Betty's little lace-gauntleted glove was placed in his hand, and her white slipper shimmered out from the lilac flounces of her dress to fall like a benediction, he thought, on each of the carriage-steps.
It was the age of garlands; they wreathed the Muses, the Seasons, and their speech, so the women wore wreaths in their hair, and Miss Betty's that night was of marguerites. “Read your fortune in them all,” whispered Tom's heart, “and of whomsoever you wish to learn, every petal will say 'He loves you; none declare, He loves you not!'”
She bowed slightly, but did not speak to him, which was perhaps a better reception than that accorded the young man by her companion. “Oh, it's you, is it!” was Mrs. Tanberry's courteous observation as she canted the vehicle in her descent. She looked sharply at Miss Betty, and even the small glow of the carriage-lamps showed that the girl's cheeks had flushed very red. Mr. Vanrevel, on the contrary, was pale.
They stood for a moment in awkward silence, while, from the lighted house where the flying figures circled, came the waltz: “I dreamt that I dwe-helt in ma-har-ble halls.” Tom's own dreams were much wilder than the gypsy girl's; he knew that; yet he spoke out bravely:
“Will you dance the two first with me?”
Miss Betty bit her lip, frowned, turned away, and, vouchsafing no reply, walked toward the house with her eyes fixed on the ground; but just as they reached the door she flashed over him a look that scorched him from head to foot, and sent his spirits down through the soles of his boots to excavate a grotto in the depths of the earth, so charged it was with wrathful pity and contempt.
“Yes!” she said abruptly, and followed Mrs. Tanberry to the dressing-room.
The elder lady shook her head solemnly as she emerged from the enormous folds of a yellow silk cloak. “Ah, Princess,” she said, touching the girl's shoulder with her jeweled hand, “I told you I was a very foolish woman, and I am, but not so foolish as to offer advice often. Yet, believe me, it won't do. I think that is one of the greatest young men I ever knew, and it's a pity—but it won't do.”
Miss Betty kept her face away from her guardian for a moment. No inconsiderable amount of information had drifted to her, from here and there, regarding the career of Crailey Gray, and she thought how intensely she would have hated any person in the world except Mrs. Tanberry for presuming to think she needed to be warned against the charms of this serenading lady-killer, who was the property of another girl.
“You must keep him away, I think,” ventured Mrs. Tanberry, gently.
At that Betty turned to her and said, sharply:
“I will. After this, please let us never speak of him again.”
A slow nod of the other's turbaned head indicated the gravest acquiescence. She saw that her companion's cheeks were still crimson. “I understand,” said she.
A buzz of whispering, like a July beetle, followed Miss Carewe and her partner about the room during the next dance. How had Tom managed it? Had her father never told her? Who had dared to introduce them? Fanchon was the only one who knew, and as she whirled by with Will Cummings, she raised her absent glance long enough to give Tom an affectionate and warning shake of the head.
Tom did not see this; Miss Carewe did. Alas! She smiled upon him instantly and looked deep into his eyes. It was the third time.
She was not afraid of this man-flirt; he was to be settled with once and forever. She intended to avenge both Fanchon and herself; yet it is a hazardous game, this piercing of eye with eye, because the point which seeks to penetrate may soften and melt, leaving one defenseless. For perhaps ten seconds that straight look lasted, while it seemed to her that she read clear into the soul of him, and to behold it, through some befooling magic, as strong, tender, wise, and true, as his outward appearance would have made an innocent stranger believe him; for he looked all these things; she admitted that much; and he had an air of distinction and resource beyond any she had ever known, even in the wild scramble for her kitten he had not lost it. So, for ten seconds, which may be a long time, she saw a man such as she had dreamed, and she did not believe her sight, because she had no desire to be as credulous as the others, to be as easily cheated as that poor Fanchon!
The luckless Tom found his own feet beautiful on the mountains, and, treading the heights with airy steps, appeared to himself wonderful and glorified—he was waltzing with Miss Betty He breathed the entrancing words to himself, over and over: it was true, he was waltzing with Miss Betty Carewe! Her glove lay warm and light within his own; his fingers clasped that ineffable lilac and white brocade waist. Sometimes her hair came within an inch of his cheek, and then he rose outright from the hilltops and floated in a golden mist. The glamour of which the Incroyable had planned to tell her some day, surrounded Tom, and it seemed to him that the whole world was covered with a beautiful light like a carpet, which was but the radiance of this adorable girl whom his gloves and coat-sleeve were permitted to touch. When the music stopped, they followed in the train of other couples seeking the coolness of out-of-doors for the interval, and Tom, in his soul, laughed at all other men with illimitable condescension.
“Stop here,” she said, as they reached the open gate. He was walking out of it, his head in the air, and Miss Betty on his arm. Apparently, he would have walked straight across the State. It was the happiest moment he had ever known.
He wanted to say something wonderful to her; his speech should be like the music and glory and lire that was in him; therefore he was shocked to hear himself remarking, with an inanity of utterance that sickened him:
“Oh, here's the gate, isn't it?”
Her answer was a short laugh. “You mean you wish to persuade me that you had forgotten it was there?”
“I did not see it,” he protested, lamentably.
“No?”
“I wasn't thinking of it.”
“Indeed! You were 'lost in thoughts of '—”
“Of you!” he said, before he could check himself.
“Yes?” Her tone was as quietly contemptuous as she could make it. “How very frank of you! May I ask: Are you convinced that speeches of that sort are always to a lady's liking?”
“No,” he answered humbly, and hung his head. Then she threw the question at him abruptly:
“Was it you who came to sing in our garden?”
There was a long pause before a profound sigh came tremulously from the darkness, like a sad and tender confession. “Yes.”
“I thought so!” she exclaimed. “Mrs. Tanberry thought it was someone else; but I knew that it was you.”
“Yes, you are right,” he said, quietly. “It was I. It was my only way to tell you what you know now.”
“Of course!” She set it all aside with those two words and the slightest gesture of her hand. “It was a song made for another girl, I believe?” she asked lightly, and with an icy smile, inquired farther: “For the one—the one before the last, I understand?”
He lifted his head, surprised. “What has that to do with it? The music was made for you—but then, I think all music was made for you.”
“Leave the music out of it, if you please,” she said, impatiently. “Your talents make you modest! No doubt you consider it unmaidenly in me to have referred to the serenade before you spoke of it; but I am not one to cast down my eyes and let it pass. No, nor one too sweet to face the truth, either!” she cried with sudden passion. “To sing that song in the way you did, meant—oh, you thought I would flirt with you! What right had you to come with such a song to me?”
Tom intended only to disclaim the presumption, so far from his thoughts, that his song had moved her, for he could see that her attack was prompted by her inexplicable impression that he had assumed the attitude of a conqueror, but his explanation began unfortunately.
“Forgive me. I think you have completely misunderstood; you thought it meant something I did not intend, at all, and—”
“What!” she said, and her eyes blazed, for now she beheld him as the arrant sneak of the world. He, the lady-killer, with his hypocritical air of strength and melancholy sweetness, the leader of drunken revels, and, by reputation, the town Lothario and Light-o'-Love, under promise of marriage to Fanchon Bareaud, had tried to make love to another girl, and now his cowardice in trying to disclaim what he had done lent him the insolence to say to this other: “My child, you are betrayed by your youth and conceit; you exaggerate my meaning. I had no intention to distinguish you by coquetting with you!” This was her interpretation of him; and her indignation was not lessened by the inevitable conclusion that he, who had been through so many scenes with women, secretly found her simplicity diverting. Miss Betty had a little of her father in her; while it was part of her youth, too, that, of all things she could least endure the shadow of a smile at her own expense.
“Oh, oh!” she cried, her voice shaking with anger. “I suppose your bad heart is half-choked with your laughter at me.”
She turned from him swiftly, and left him.
Almost running, she entered the house, and hurried to a seat by Mrs. Tanberry, nestling to her like a young sapling on a hillside. Instantaneously, several gentlemen, who had hastily acquitted themselves of various obligations in order to seek her, sprang forward with eager greetings, so that when the stricken Tom, dazed and confounded by his evil luck, followed her at about five paces, he found himself confronted by an impenetrable abbatis formed by the spiked tails of the coats of General Trumble, Madrillon, Tappingham Marsh, Cummings and Jefferson Bareaud. Within this fortification rang out laughter and sally from Miss Carewe; her color was high and her eyes sparkled never more brightly.
Flourish and alarums sounded for a quadrille. Each of the semi-circle, firmly elbowing his neighbor, begged the dance of Miss Betty; but Tom was himself again, and laid a long, strong hand on Madrillon's shoulder, pressed him gently aside, and said:
“Forgive me; Miss Carewe has honored me by the promise of this quadrille.”
He bowed, offering his arm, and none of them was too vain to envy that bow and gesture.
For a moment he remained waiting. Miss Carewe rose slowly, and, directly facing him, said in composed and even voice: “You force me to beg you never to address me again.”
She placed her hand on the General's arm, turning her back squarely upon Tom.
In addition to those who heard, many persons in that part of the room saw the affront and paused in arrested attitudes; others, observing these, turned inquiringly, so that sudden silence fell, broken only by the voice of Miss Betty as she moved away, talking cheerily to the General. Tom was left standing alone in the broken semicircle.
All the eyes swept from her to him and back; then everyone began to talk hastily about nothing. The young man's humiliation was public.
He went to the door under cover of the movement of the various couples to find places in the quadrille, yet every sidelong glance in the room still rested upon him, and he knew it. He remained in the ball, alone, through that dance, and at its conclusion, walked slowly through the rooms, speaking to people, here and there, as though nothing had happened, but when the music sounded again, he went to the dressing-room, found his hat and cloak, and left the house. For a while he stood on the opposite side of the street, watching the lighted windows, and twice he caught sight of the lilac and white brocade, the dark hair, and the wreath of marguerites. Then, with a hot pain in his breast, and the step of a Grenadier, he marched down the street.
In the carriage Mrs. Tanberry took Betty's hand in hers. “I'll do as you wish, child,” she said, “and never speak to you of him again as long as I live, except this once. I think it was best for his own sake as well as yours, but—”
“He needed a lesson,” interrupted Miss Betty, wearily. She had danced long and hard, and she was very tired.
Mrs. Tanberry's staccato laugh came out irrepressibly. “All the vagabonds do, Princess!” she cried. “And I think they are getting it.”
“No, no, I don't mean—”
“We've turned their heads, my dear, between us, you and I; and we'll have to turn 'em again, or they'll break their necks looking over their shoulders at us, the owls!” She pressed the girl's hand affectionately. “But you'll let me say something just once, and forgive me because we're the same foolish age, you know. It's only this: The next young man you suppress, take him off in a corner! Lead him away from the crowd where he won't have to stand and let them look at him afterward. That's all, my dear, and you mustn't mind.”
“I'm not sorry!” said Miss Betty hotly. “I'm not sorry!”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Tanberry, soothingly. “It was better this time to do just what you did. I'd have done it myself, to make quite sure he would keep away—because I like him.”
“I'm not sorry!” said Miss Betty again.
“I'm not sorry!” she repeated and reiterated to herself after Mrs. Tanberry had gone to bed. She had sunk into a chair in the library with a book, and “I'm not sorry!” she whispered as the open unread page blurred before her, “I'm not sorry!” He had needed his lesson; but she had to bear the recollection of how white his face went when he received it. Her affront had put about him a strange loneliness: the one figure with the stilled crowd staring; it had made a picture from which her mind's eye had been unable to escape, danced she never so hard and late. Unconsciously, Robert Carewe's daughter had avenged the other figure which had stood in lonely humiliation before the staring eyes.
“I'm not sorry!” Ah, did they think it was in her to hurt any living thing in the world? The book dropped from her lap, and she bowed her head upon her hands. “I'm not sorry! “—and tears upon the small lace gauntlets!
She saw them, and with an incoherent exclamation, half self-pitying, half impatient, ran out to the stars above her garden.
She was there for perhaps half an hour, and just before she returned to the house she did a singular thing.
Standing where all was clear to the sky, where she had stood after her talk with the Incroyable, when he had bid her look to the stars, she raised her arms to them again, her face, pale with a great tenderness, uplifted.
“You, you, you!” she whispered. “I love you!”
And yet it was to nothing definite, to no man, nor outline of a man, to no phantom nor dream-lover, that she spoke; neither to him she had affronted, nor to him who had bidden her look to the stars. Nor was it to the stars themselves.
She returned slowly and thoughtfully to the house, wondering what she had meant.
Crailey came home the next day with a new poem, but no fish. He lounged up the stairs, late in the afternoon, humming cheerfully to himself, and, dropping his rod in a corner of Tom's office, laid the poem on the desk before his partner, produced a large, newly-replenished flask, opened it, stretched himself comfortably upon a capacious horse-hair sofa, drank a deep draught, chuckled softly, and requested Mr. Vanrevel to set the rhymes to music immediately.
“Try it on your instrument,” he said. “It's a simple verse about nothing but stars, and you can work it out in twenty minutes with the guitar.”
“It is broken,” said Tom, not looking up from his work.
“Broken! When?”
“Last night.”
“Who broke it?”
“It fell from the table in my room.”
“How? Easily mended, isn't it?”
“I think I shall not play it soon again.”
Crailey swung his long legs off the sofa and abruptly sat upright. “What's this?” he asked gravely.
Tom pushed his papers away from him, rose and went to the dusty window that looked to the west, where, at the end of the long street, the sun was setting behind the ruin of charred timbers on the bank of the shining river.
“It seems that I played once too often,” he said.
Crailey was thoroughly astonished. He took a long, affectionate pull at the flask and offered it to his partner.
“No,” said Tom, turning to him with a troubled face, “and if I were you, I wouldn't either. These fishing trips of yours—”
“Fishing!” Crailey laughed. “Trips of a poetaster! It's then I write best, and write I will! There's a poem, and a damned good one, too, old preacher, in every gill of whiskey, and I'm the lad that can extract it! Lord! what's better than to be out in the open, all by yourself in the woods, or on the river? Think of the long nights alone with the glory of heaven and a good demijohn. Why, a man's thoughts are like actors performing in the air and all the crowding stars for audience! You know in your soul you'd rather have me out there, going it all by myself, than raising thunder over town. And you know, too, it doesn't tell on me; it doesn't show! You couldn't guess, to save your life, how much I've had to-day, now, could you?”
“Yes,” returned the other, “I could.”
“Well, well,” said Crailey, good-naturedly, “we weren't talking of me.” He set down the flask, went to his friend and dropped a hand lightly on his shoulder. “What made you break the guitar? Tell me.”
“What makes you think I broke it?” asked his partner sharply.
“Tell me why you did it,” said Crailey.
And Tom, pacing the room, told him, while Crailey stood in silence, looking him eagerly in the eye whenever Tom turned his way. The listener interrupted seldom; once it was to exclaim: “But you haven't said why you broke the guitar?”
“'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!' I ought to have cut off the hands that played to her.”
“And cut your throat for singing to her?”
“She was right!” the other answered, striding up and down the room. “Right—a thousand times! in everything she did. That I should even ap-proach her, was an unspeakable insolence. I had forgotten, and so, possibly, had she, but I had not even been properly introduced to her.”
“No, you hadn't, that's true,” observed Crailey, reflectively. “You don't seem to have much to reproach her with, Tom.”
“Reproach her!” cried the other. “That I should dream she would speak to me or have anything to do with me, was to cast a doubt upon her loyalty as a daughter. She was right, I say! And she did the only thing she could do: rebuked me before them all. No one ever merited what he got more roundly than I deserved that. Who was I, in her eyes, that I should besiege her with my importunities, who but her father's worst enemy?”
Deep anxiety knitted Crailey's brow. “I understood she knew of the quarrel,” he said, thoughtfully. “I saw that, the other evening when I helped her out of the crowd. She spoke of it on the way home, I remember; but how did she know that you were Vanrevel? No one in town would be apt to mention you to her.”
“No, but she did know, you see.”
“Yes,” returned Mr. Gray slowly. “So it seems! Probably her father told her to avoid you, and described you so that she recognized you as the man who caught the kitten.”
He paused, picked up the flask, and again applied himself to its contents, his eyes peering over the up-tilted vessel at Tom, who continued to pace up and down the length of the office. After a time, Crailey, fumbling in his coat, found a long cheroot, and, as he lit it, inquired casually:
“Do you remember if she addressed you by name?”
“I think not,” Tom answered, halting. “What does it matter?”
Crailey drew a deep breath.
“It doesn't,” he returned.
“She knew me well enough,” said Tom, sadly, as he resumed his sentry-go.
“Yes,” repeated Crailey, deliberately. “So it seems; so it seems!” He blew a long stream of smoke out into the air before him, and softly mur-mured again: “So it seems, so it seems.”
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of Tom's footsteps, until, presently, some one informally shouted his name from the street below. It was only Will Cummings, passing the time of day, but when Tom turned from the window after answering him, Crailey, his poem, and his flask were gone.
That evening Vanrevel sat in the dusty office, driving himself to his work with a sharp goad, for there was a face that came between him and all else in the world, and a voice that sounded always in his ears. But the work was done before he rose from his chair, though he showed a haggard visage as he bent above his candles to blow them out.
It was eleven o'clock; Crailey had not come back, and Tom knew that his light-hearted friend would not return for many hours; and so, having no mind to read, and no belief that he could if he tried, he went out to walk the streets. He went down to the river first, and stood for a little while gazing at the ruins of the two warehouses, and that was like a man with a headache beating his skull against a wall. As he stood on the blackened wharf, he saw how the charred beams rose above him against the sky like a gallows, and it seemed to him that nothing could have been a better symbol, for here he had hanged his self-respect. “Reproach her!” He, who had so displayed his imbecility before her! Had he been her father's best friend, he should have had too great a sense of shame to dare to speak to her after that night when her quiet intelligence had exhibited him to himself, and to all the world, as nought else than a fool—and a noisy one at that!
Suddenly a shudder convulsed him; he struck his open palm across his forehead and spoke aloud, while, from horizon to horizon, the night air grew thick with the whispered laughter of observing hobgoblins:
“And even if there had been no stairway, we could have slid down the hose-line!”
He retraced his steps, a tall, gray figure moving slowly through the blue darkness, and his lips formed the heart-sick shadow of a smile when he found that he had unconsciously turned into Carewe Street. Presently he came to a gap in a hedge, through which he had sometimes stolen to hear the sound of a harp and a girl's voice singing; but he did not enter there tonight, though he paused a moment, his head bowed on his breast.
There came a sound of voices; they seemed to be moving toward the hedge, toward the gap where he stood; one a man's eager, quick, but very musical; the other, a girl's, a rich and clear contralto that passed into Tom's soul like a psalm of rejoicing and like a scimitar of flame. He shivered, and moved away quickly, but not before the man's voice, somewhat louder for the moment, came distinctly from the other side of the hedge:
“After all,” said the voice, with a ripple of laughter, “after all, weren't you a little hard on that poor Mr. Gray?”
Tom did not understand, but he knew the voice. It was that of Crailey Gray.
He heard the same voice again that night, and again stood unseen. Long after midnight he was still tramping the streets on his lonely rounds, when he chanced to pass the Rouen House, which hostelry bore, to the uninitiated eye, the appearance of having closed its doors upon all hospitalities for the night, in strict compliance with the law of the city fathers, yet a slender wand of bright light might be discovered underneath the street door of the bar-room.
From within the merry retreat issued an uproar of shouting, raucous laughter and the pounding of glasses on tables, heralding all too plainly the hypocrisy of the landlord, and possibly that of the city fathers also. Tom knew what company was gathered there: gamblers, truckmen, drunken farmers, men from the river steamers making riot while their boats lay at the wharf, with a motley gathering of good-for-nothings of the back-alleys, and tippling clerks from the Main Street stores. There came loud cries for a song, and, in answer, the voice of Crailey rose over the general din, somewhat hoarse, and never so musical when he sang as when he spoke, yet so touching in its dramatic tenderness that soon the noise fell away, and the roisterers sat quietly to listen. It was not the first time Ben Jonson's song had stilled a disreputable company.
“I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honoring thee, As giving it the hope that there It might not withered be.”
Perhaps, just then, Vanrevel would have wished to hear him sing anything in the world rather than that, for on Crailey's lips it carried too much meaning tonight, after the voice in the garden. And Tom lingered no more near the betraying sliver of light beneath the door than he had by the gap in the hedge, but went steadily on his way.
Not far from the hotel he passed a small building brightly lighted and echoing with unusual clamors of industry: the office of the Rouen Journal. The press was going, and Mr. Cummings's thin figure crossed and recrossed the windows, while his voice could be heard energetically bidding his assistants to “Look alive!” so that Tom imagined that something might have happened between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande; but he did not stop to ask the journalist, for he desired to behold the face of none of his friends until he had fought out some things within himself. So he strode on toward nowhere.
Day was breaking when Mr. Gray climbed the stairs to his room. There were two flights, the ascent of the first of which occupied about half an hour of Crailey's invaluable time; and the second might have taken more of it, or possibly consumed the greater part of the morning, had he received no assistance. But, as he reclined to meditate upon the first landing, another man entered the hallway from without, ascended quickly, and Crailey became pleasantly conscious that two strong hands had lifted him to his feet; and, presently, that he was being borne aloft upon the new-comer's back. It seemed quite a journey, yet the motion was soothing, so he made no effort to open his eyes, until he found himself gently deposited upon the couch in his own chamber, when he smiled amiably, and, looking up, discovered his partner standing over him.
Tom was very pale and there were deep, violet scrawls beneath his eyes. For once in his life he had come home later than Crailey.
“First time, you know,” said Crailey, with difficulty. “You'll admit first time completely incapable? Often needed guiding hand, but never—quite—before.”
“Yes,” said Tom, quietly, “it is the first time I ever saw you quite finished.”
“Think I must be growing old and constitution refuses bear it. Disgraceful to be seen in condition, yet celebration justified. H'rah for the news!” He waved his hand wildly. “Old red, white, and blue! American eagle now kindly proceed to scream! Starspangled banner intends streaming to all the trade winds! Sea to sea! Glorious victories on political thieving exhibition—no, expedition! Everybody not responsible for the trouble to go and get himself patriotically killed!”
“What do you mean?”
“Water!” said the other, feebly. Tom brought the pitcher, and Crailey, setting his hot lips to it, drank long and deeply; then, with his friend's assistance, he tied a heavily moistened towel round his head. “All right very soon and sober again,” he muttered, and lay back upon the pillow with eyes tightly closed in an intense effort to concentrate his will. When he opened them again, four or five minutes later, they had marvellously cleared and his look was self-contained and sane.
“Haven't you heard the news?” He spoke much more easily now. “It came at midnight to the Journal.”
“No; I've been walking in the country.”
“The Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande on the twenty-sixth of last month, captured Captain Thornton and murdered Colonel Crook. That means war is certain.”
“It has been certain for a long time,” said Tom. “Polk has forced it from the first.”
“Then it's a devil of a pity he can't be the only man to die!”
“Have they called for volunteers?” asked Tom, going toward the door.
“No; but if the news is true, they will.”
“Yes,” said Tom; and as he reached the hallway he paused. “Can I help you to undress?”
“Certainly not!” Crailey sat up, indignantly. “Can't you see that I'm perfectly sober? It was the merest temporary fit, and I've shaken it off. Don't you see?” He got upon his feet, staggered, but shook himself like a dog coming out of the water, and came to the door with infirm steps.
“You're going to bed, aren't you?” asked Tom. “You'd much better.”
“No,” answered Crailey. “Are you?
“No. I'm going to work.”
“You've been all up night, too, haven't you?” Crailey put his hand on the other's shoulder. “Were you hunting for me?”
“No; not last night.”
Crailey lurched suddenly, and Tom caught him about the waist to steady him.
“Sweethearting, tippling, vingt-et-un, or poker, eh, Tom?” he shouted, thickly, with a wild laugh. “Ha, ha, old smug-face, up to my bad tricks at last!” But, recovering himself immediately, he pushed the other off at arm's length, and slapped himself smartly on the brow. “Never mind; all right, all right—only a bad wave, now and then. A walk will make me more a man than ever.”
“You'd much better go to bed, Crailey.”
“I can't. I'm going to change my clothes and go out.”
“Why?”
Crailey did not answer, but at that moment the Catholic church-bell, summoning the faithful to mass, pealed loudly on the morning air; and the steady glance of Tom Vanrevel rested upon the reckless eyes of the man beside him as they listened together to its insistent call. Tom said, gently, almost timidly:
“You have an—engagement?”
This time the answer came briskly. “Yes; I promised to take Fanchon to the cemetery before breakfast, to place some flowers on the grave of the little brother who died. This happens to be his birthday.”
It was Tom who averted his eyes, not Crailey.
“Then you'd best hurry,” he said, hesitatingly; “I mustn't keep you,” and went downstairs to his office with flushed cheeks, a hanging head, and an expression which would have led a stranger to believe that he had just been caught in a lie.
He went to the Main Street window, and seated himself upon the ledge, the only one in the room not too dusty for occupation; for here, at this hour, Tom had taken his place every morning since Elizabeth Carewe had come from the convent. The window was a coign of vantage, commanding the corner of Carewe and Main streets. Some distance west of the corner, the Catholic church cast its long shadow across Main Street, and, in order to enter the church, a person who lived upon Carewe Street must pass the corner, or else make a half-mile detour and approach from the other direction—which the person never did. Tom had thought it out the first night that the image of Miss Betty had kept him awake—and that was the first night Miss Carewe spent in Rouen—the St. Mary's girl would be sure to go to mass every day, which was why the window-ledge was dusted the next morning.
The glass doors of the little corner drug-store caught the early sun of the hot May morning and became like sheets of polished brass; a farmer's wagon rattled down the dusty street; a group of Irish waitresses from the hotel made the boardwalk rattle under their hurried steps as they went toward the church, talking busily to one another; and a blinking youth in his shirt-sleeves, who wore the air of one newly, but not gladly, risen, began to struggle mournfully with the shutters of Madrillon's bank. A moment later, Tom heard Crailey come down the stairs, sure of foot and humming lightly to himself. The door of the office was closed; Crailey did not look in, but presently appeared, smiling, trim, immaculate, all in white linen, on the opposite side of the street, and offered badinage to the boy who toiled at the shutters.
The bell had almost ceased to ring when a lady, dressed plainly in black, but graceful and tall, came rapidly out of Carewe Street, turned at the corner by the little drug-store, and went toward the church. The boy was left staring, for Crailey's banter broke off in the middle of a word.
He overtook her on the church steps, and they went in together.
That afternoon Fanchon Bareaud told Tom how beautiful her betrothed had been to her; he had brought her a great bouquet of violets and lilies-of-the-valley, and had taken her to the cemetery to place them on the grave of her baby brother, whose birthday it was. Tears came to Fanchon's eyes as she spoke of her lover's goodness, and of how wonderfully he had talked as they stood beside the little grave.
“He was the only one who remembered that this was poor tiny Jean's birthday!” she said, and sobbed. “He came just after breakfast and asked me to go out there with him.”