Mr. Carewe returned, one warm May afternoon, by the six o'clock boat, which was sometimes a day late and sometimes a few hours early; the latter contingency arising, as in the present instance, when the owner was aboard. Nelson drove him from the wharf to the bank, where he conferred briefly, in an undertone, with Eugene Madrillon; after which Eugene sent a note containing three words to Tappingham Marsh. Marsh tore up the note, and sauntered over to the club, where he found General Trumble and Jefferson Bareaud amicably discussing a pitcher of cherry bounce.
“He has come,” said Tappingham, pleased to find the pair the only occupants of the place. “He saw Madrillon, and there's a session to-night.”
“Praise the Lord!” exclaimed the stout General, rising to his feet. “I'll see old Chenoweth at once. My fingers have the itch.”
“And mine, too,” said Bareaud. “I'd begun to think we'd never have a go with him again.”
“You must see that Crailey comes. We want a full table. Drag him, if you can't get him any other way.”
“He won't need urging,” said Jefferson.
“But he cut us last time.”
“He won't cut tonight. What hour?”
“Nine,” answered Tappingham. “It's to be a full sitting, remember.”
“Don't fear for us,” laughed Trumble.
“Nor for Crailey,” Jefferson added. “After so long a vacation you couldn't keep him away if you chained him to the court-house pillars; he'd tear 'em in two!”
“Here's to our better fortunes, then!” said the old soldier, filling a glass for Tappingham; and, “Here's to our better fortunes!” echoed the young men, pouring off the gentle liquor heartily. Having thus made libation to their particular god, the trio separated. But Jefferson did not encounter the alacrity of acceptance he expected from Crailey, when he found him, half an hour later, at the hotel bar. Indeed, at first, Mr. Gray not only refused outright to go, but seriously urged the same course upon Jefferson; moreover, his remonstrance was offered in such evident good faith that Bareaud, in the act of swallowing one of his large doses of quinine, paused with only half the powder down his throat, gazing, nonplussed, at his prospective brother-in-law.
“My immortal soul!” he gasped. “Is this Crailey Gray? What's the trouble?”
“Nothing,” replied Crailey, quietly. “Only don't go, you've lost enough.”
“Well, you're a beautiful one!” Jefferson exclaimed, with an incredulous laugh. “You're a master hand; you, to talk about losing enough!”
“I know, I know,” Crailey began, shaking his head, “but—”
“You've promised Fanchon never to go again, and you're afraid Miss Betty will see or hear us, and tell her you were there.”
“I don't know Miss Carewe.”
“Then you needn't fear; besides, she'll be out when we come, and asleep when we go. She will never know we've been in the house.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” said Crailey, impatiently; and he was the more earnest because he remembered the dangerous geography of the Carewe house, which made it impossible for anyone to leave the cupola-room except by the long hall which passed certain doors. “I will not go, and what's more, I promised Fanchon I'd try to keep you out of it hereafter.”
“Lord, but we're virtuous!” laughed the incredulous Jefferson. “I'll come for you at a quarter to nine.”
“I will not go, I tell you.”
Jefferson roared. “Yes, you will. You couldn't keep from it if you tried!” And he took himself off, laughing violently, again promising to call for Crailey on his way to the tryst, and leaving him still warmly protesting that it would be a great folly for either of them to go.
Crailey looked after the lad's long, thin figure with an expression as near anger as he ever wore. “He'll go,” he said to himself.
“And—ah, well—I'll have to risk it! I'll go with him, but only to try and bring him away early—that is, as early as it's safe to be sure that they are asleep downstairs. And I won't play. No, I'll not play; I'll not play.”
He paid his score and went out of the hotel by a side door. Some distance up the street, Bareaud was still to be seen, lounging homeward in the pleasant afternoon sunshine, he stopped on a corner and serenely poured another quinine powder into himself and threw the paper to a couple of pigs who looked up from the gutter maliciously.
“Confound him!” said Crailey, laughing ruefully. “He makes me a missionary—for I'll keep my word to Fanchon in that, at least! I'll look after Jefferson tonight. Ah, I might as well be old Tom Vanrevel, indeed!”
Meanwhile, Mr. Carewe had taken possession of his own again. His daughter ran to the door to meet him; she was trembling a little, and, blushing and smiling, held out both her hands to him, so that Mrs. Tanberry vowed this was the loveliest creature in the world, and the kindest.
Mr. Carewe bowed slightly, as to an acquaintance, and disregarded the extended hands.
At that, the blush faded from Miss Betty's cheeks; she trembled no more, and a salutation as icy as her father's was returned to him. He bent his heavy brows upon her, and shot a black glance her way, being, of course, immediately enraged by her reflection of his own manner, but he did not speak to her.
Nor did he once address her during the evening meal, preferring to honor Mrs. Tanberry with his conversation, to that diplomatic lady's secret anger, but outward amusement. She cheerfully neglected to answer him at times, having not the slightest awe of him, and turned to the girl instead; indeed, she was only prevented from rating him soundly at his own table by the fear that she might make the situation more difficult for her young charge. As soon as it was possible, she made her escape with Miss Betty, and they drove away in the twilight to pay visits of duty, leaving Mr. Carewe frowning at his coffee on the veranda.
When they came home, three hours later, Miss Betty noticed that a fringe of illumination bordered each of the heavily curtained windows in the cupola, and she uttered an exclamation, for she had never known that room to be lighted.
“Look!” she cried, touching Mrs. Tanberry's arm, as the horses trotted through the gates under a drizzle of rain, “I thought the room in the cupola was empty. It's always locked, and when I came from St. Mary's he told me that old furniture was stored there.”
Mrs. Tanberry was grateful for the darkness. “He may have gone there to read,” she answered, in a queer voice. “Let us go quietly to bed, child, so as not to disturb him.”
Betty had as little desire to disturb her father as she had to see him; therefore she obeyed her friend's injunction, and went to her room on tip-toe. The house was very silent as she lit the candles on her bureau. Outside, the gentle drizzle and the soothing tinkle from the eaves were the only sounds; within, there was but the faint rustle of garments from Mrs. Tanberry's room. Presently the latter ceased to be heard, and a wooden moan of protest from the four-poster upon which the good lady reposed, announced that she had drawn the curtains and wooed the rulers of Nod.
Although it was one of those nights of which they say, “It is a good night to sleep,” Miss Betty was not drowsy. She had half-unfastened one small sandal, but she tied the ribbons again, and seated herself by the open window. The ledge and casement framed a dim oblong of thin light from the candles behind her, a lonely lustre, which crossed the veranda to melt shapelessly into darkness on the soggy lawn. She felt a melancholy in the softly falling rain and wet, black foliage that chimed with the sadness of her own spirit. The night suited her very well, for her father's coming had brought a weight of depression with it. Why could he not have spoken one word to her, even a cross one? She knew that he did not love her, yet, merely as a fellow-being, she was entitled to a measure of courtesy; and the fact that she was his daughter could not excuse his failure to render it. Was she to continue to live with him on their present terms? She had no intention to make another effort to alter them; but to remain as they were would be intolerable, and Mrs. Tanberry could not stay forever, to act as a buffer between her and her father. Peering out into the dismal night, she found her own future as black, and it seemed no wonder that the Sisters loved the convent life; that the pale nuns forsook the world wherein there was so much useless unkindness; where women were petty and jealous, like that cowardly Fanchon, and men who looked great were tricksters, like Fanchon's betrothed. Miss Betty clenched her delicate fingers. She would not remember that white, startled face again!
Another face helped her to shut out the recollection: that of the man who had come to mass to meet her yesterday morning, and with whom she had taken a long walk afterward. He had shown her a quaint old English gardener who lived on the bank of the river, had bought her a bouquet, and she had helped him to select another to send to a sick friend. How beautiful the flowers were, and how happy he had made the morning for her, with his gayety, his lightness, and his odd wisdom! Was it only yesterday? Her father's coming had made yesterday a fortnight old.
But the continuously pattering rain and the soft drip-drop from the roof, though as mournful as she chose to find them, began, afterwhile, to weave their somnolent spells, and she slowly drifted from reveries of unhappy sorts, into half-dreams, in which she was still aware she was awake; yet slumber, heavy-eyed, stirring from the curtains beside her with the small night breeze, breathed strange distortions upon familiar things, and drowsy impossibilities moved upon the surface of her thoughts. Her chin, resting upon her hand, sank gently, until her head almost lay upon her relaxed arms.
“That is mine, Crailey Gray!”
She sprang to her feet, immeasurably startled, one hand clutching the back of her chair, the other tremulously pressed to her cheek, convinced that her father had stooped over her and shouted the sentence in her ear. For it was his voice, and the house rang with the words; all the rooms, halls, and even the walls, seemed still murmurous with the sudden sound, like the tingling of a bell after it had been struck. And yet—everything was quiet.
She pressed her fingers to her forehead, trying to untangle the maze of dreams which had evolved this shock for her, the sudden clamor in her father's voice of a name she hated and hoped never to hear again, a name she was trying to forget. But as she was unable to trace anything which had led to it, there remained only the conclusion that her nerves were not what they should be. The vapors having become obsolete for young ladies as an explanation for all unpleasant sensations, they were instructed to have “nerves.” This was Miss Betty's first consciousness of her own, and, desiring no greater acquaintance with them, she told herself it was unwholesome to fall asleep in a chair by an open window when the night was as sad as she.
Turning to a chair in front of the small oval mirror of her bureau, she unclasped the brooch which held her lace collar, and, seating herself, began to unfasten her hair. Suddenly she paused, her uplifted arms falling mechanically to her sides.
Someone was coming through the long hall with a soft, almost inaudible step, a step which was not her father's. She knew at once, with instinctive certainty, that it was not he. Nor was it Nelson, who would have shuffled; nor could it be the vain Mamie, nor one of the other servants, for they did not sleep in the house. It was a step more like a woman's, though certainly it was not Mrs. Tanberry's.
Betty rose, took a candle, and stood silent for a moment, the heavy tresses of her hair, half-unloosed, falling upon her neck and left shoulder like the folds of a dark drapery.
At the slight rustle of her rising, the steps ceased instantly. Her heart set up a wild beating and the candle shook in her hand. But she was brave and young, and, following an irresistible impulse, she ran across the room, flung open the door, and threw the light of the candle into the hall, holding it at arm's length before her.
She came almost face to face with Crailey Gray.
The blood went from his cheeks as a swallow flies down from a roof; he started back against the opposite wall with a stifled groan, while she stared at him blankly, and grew as deathly pale as he.
He was a man of great resource in all emergencies which required a quick tongue, but, for the moment, this was beyond him. He felt himself lost, toppling backward into an abyss, and the uselessness of his destruction made him physically sick. For he need not have been there; he had not wished to come; he had well counted the danger to himself, and this one time in his life had gone to the cupola-room out of good-nature. But Bareaud had been obstinate and Crailey had come away alone, hoping that Jefferson might follow. And here he was, poor trapped rat, convicted and ruined because of a good action! At last he knew consistency to be a jewel, and that a greedy boy should never give a crust; that a fool should stick to his folly, a villain to his deviltry, and each hold his own; for the man who thrusts a good deed into a life of lies is wound about with perilous passes, and in his devious ways a thousand unexpected damnations spring.
Beaten, stunned, hang-jawed with despair, he returned her long, dumfounded gaze hopelessly and told the truth like an inspired dunce.
“I came—I came—to bring another man away,” he whispered brokenly; and, at the very moment, several heavy, half-suppressed voices broke into eager talk overhead.
The white hand that held the candle wavered, and the shadows glided in a huge, grotesque dance. Twice she essayed to speak before she could do so, at the same moment motioning him back, for he had made a vague gesture toward her.
“I am not faint. Do you mean, away from up there?” She pointed to the cupola-stairs.
“Yes.”
“Have-have you seen my father?”
The question came out of such a depth of incredulousness that it was more an articulation of the lips than a sound, but he caught it; and, with it not hope, but the shadow of a shadow of hope, a hand waving from the far shore to the swimmer who has been down twice. Did she fear for his sake?
“No—I have not seen him.” He was groping blindly.
“You did not come from that”
“How did you enter the house?”
The draught through the hall was blowing upon him; the double doors upon the veranda had been left open for coolness. “There,” he said, pointing to them.
“But—I heard you come from the other direction.”
He was breathing quickly; he saw his chance—if Jefferson Bareaud did not come now.
“You did not hear me come down the stairs.” He leaned toward her, risking it all on that.
“Ah!” A sigh too like a gasp burst from Crailey. His head lifted a little, and his eyes were luminous with an eagerness that was almost anguish. He set his utmost will at work to collect himself and to think hard and fast.
“I came here resolved to take a man away, come what would!” he said. “I found the door open, went to the foot of that stairway; then I stopped. I remembered something; I turned, and was going away when you opened the door.”
“You remembered what?”
Her strained attitude did not relax, nor, to his utmost scrutiny, was the complete astonishment of her distended gaze altered one whit, but a hint of her accustomed high color was again upon her cheek and her lip trembled a little, like that of a child about to weep. The flicker of hope in his breast increased prodigiously, and the rush of it took the breath from his throat and choked him. Good God! was she going to believe him?
“I remembered—you!”
“What?” she said, wonderingly.
Art returned with a splendid bound, full-pinioned, his beautiful and treacherous Familiar who had deserted him at the crucial instant; but she made up for it now, folding him in protective wings and breathing through his spirit. In rapid and vehement whispers he poured out the words upon the girl in the doorway.
“I have a friend, and I would lay down my life to make him what he could be. He has always thrown everything away, his life, his talents, all his money and all of mine, for the sake of—throwing them away! Some other must tell you about that room; but it has ruined my friend. Tonight I discovered that he had been summoned here, and I made up my mind to come and take him away. Your father has sworn to shoot me if I set foot in his house or on ground of his. Well, my duty was clear and I came to do it. And yet—I stopped at the foot of the stair—because—because I remembered that you were Robert Carewe's daughter. What of you, if I went up and harm came to me from your father? For I swear I would not have touched him! You asked me not to speak of 'personal' things, and I have obeyed you; but you see I must tell you one thing now: I have cared for this friend of mine more than for all else under heaven, but I turned and left him to his ruin, and would a thousand times, rather than bring trouble upon you! 'A thousand times?' Ah! I swear it should be a thousand times a thousand!”
He had paraded in one speech from the prisoner's dock to Capulet's garden, and her eyes were shining into his like a great light when he finished.
“Go quickly,” she whispered. “Go quickly! Go quickly!”
“But do you understand?”
“Not yet, but I shall. Will you go? They might come-my father might come-at any moment.”
“But—-”
“Do you want to drive me quite mad? Please go!” She laid a trembling, urgent hand upon his sleeve.
“Never, until you tell me that you understand,” replied Crailey firmly, listening keenly for the slightest sound from overhead. “Never—until then!”
“When I do I shall tell you; now I only know that you must go.”
“But tell me—”
“You must go!”
There was a shuffling of chairs on the floor overhead, and Crailey went. He went even more hastily than might have been expected from the adaman-tine attitude he had just previously assumed. Realizing this as he reached the wet path, he risked stealing round to her window:
“For your sake!” he breathed; and having thus forestalled any trifling imperfection which might arise in her recollection of his exit from the house, he disappeared, kissing his hand to the rain as he ran down the street.
Miss Betty locked her door and pulled close the curtains of her window. A numerous but careful sound of footsteps came from the hall, went by her door and out across the veranda. Silently she waited until she heard her father go alone to his room.
She took the candle and went in to Mrs. Tanberry. She set the light upon a table, pulled a chair close to the bedside, and placed her cool hand lightly on the great lady's forehead.
“Isn't it very late, child? Why are you not asleep?”
“Mrs. Tanberry, I want to know why there was a light in the cupola-room tonight?”
“What?” Mrs. Tanberry rolled herself as upright as possible, and sat with blinking eyes.
“I want to know what I am sure you know, and what I am sure everybody knows, except me. What were they doing there tonight, and what was the quarrel between Mr. Vanrevel and my father that had to do with Mr. Gray?”
Mrs. Tanberry gazed earnestly into the girl's face. After a long time she said in a gentle voice:
“Child, has it come to matter that much?”
“Yes,” said Miss Betty.
Tom Vanrevel always went to the post-office soon after the morning distribution of the mail; that is to say, about ten o'clock, and returned with the letters for the firm of Gray and Vanrevel, both personal and official. Crailey and he shared everything, even a box at the post-office; and in front of this box, one morning, after a night of rain, Tom stood staring at a white envelope bearing a small, black seal. The address was in a writing he had never seen before, but the instant it fell under his eye he was struck with a distinctly pleasurable excitement.
Whether through some spiritual exhalation of the writer fragrant on any missive, or because of a hundred microscopic impressions, there are analysts who are able to select, from a pile of letters written by women (for the writing of women exhibits certain phenomena more determinably than that of men) those of the prettiest or otherwise most attractive. And out upon the lover who does not recognize his mistress's hand at the first glimpse ever he has of it, without post-mark or other information to aid him! Thus Vanrevel, worn, hollow-eyed, and sallow, in the Rouen post-office, held the one letter separate from a dozen (the latter not, indeed, from women), and stared at it until a little color came back to his dark skin and a great deal of brightness to his eye. He was no analyst of handwritings, yet it came to him instantly that this note was from a pretty woman. To see that it was from a woman was simple, but that he knew—and he did know—that she was pretty, savors of the occult. More than this: there was something about it that thrilled him. Suddenly, and without reason, he knew that it came from Elizabeth Carewe.
He walked back quickly to his office with the letter in the left pocket of his coat, threw the bundle of general correspondence upon his desk, went up to the floor above, and paused at his own door to listen. Deep breathing from across the hall indicated that Mr. Gray's soul was still encased in slumber, and great was its need, as Tom had found his partner, that morning at five, stretched upon the horsehair sofa in the office, lamenting the emptiness of a bottle which had been filled with fiery Bourbon in the afternoon.
Vanrevel went to his own room, locked the door, and took the letter from his pocket. He held it between his fingers carefully, as though it were alive and very fragile, and he looked at it a long time, holding it first in one hand, then in the other, before he opened it. At last, however, after examining all the blades of his pocketknife, he selected one brighter than the others, and loosened the flap of the envelope as gently and carefully as if it had been the petal of a rose-bud that he was opening.
“Dear Mr. Vanrevel:
“I believed you last night, though I did not understand. But I understand, now—everything—and, bitter to me as the truth is, I must show you plainly that I know all of it, nor can I rest until I do show you. I want you to answer this letter—though I must not see you again for a long time—and in your answer you must set me right if I am anywhere mistaken in what I have learned.
“At first, and until after the second time we met, I did not believe in your heart, though I did in your mind and humor. Even since then, there have come strange, small, inexplicable mistrustings of you, but now I throw them all away and trust you wholly, Monsieur Citizen Georges Meilbac!—I shall always think of you in those impossible garnishments of my poor great-uncle, and I persuade myself that he must have been a little like you.
“I trust you because I have heard the story of your profound goodness. The first reason for my father's dislike was your belief in freedom as the right of all men. Ah, it is not your pretty exaggerations and flatteries (I laugh at them!) that speak for you, but your career, itself, and the brave things you have done. My father's dislike flared into hatred because you worsted him when he discovered that he could not successfully defend the wrong against you and fell back upon sheer insult.
“He is a man whom I do not know—strange as that seems as I write it. It is only to you, who have taught me so much, that I could write it. I have tried to know him and to realize that I am his daughter, but we are the coldest acquaintances, that is all; and I cannot see how a change could come. I do not understand him; least of all do I understand why he is a gambler. It has been explained to me that it is his great passion, but all I comprehend in these words is that they are full of shame for his daughter.
“This is what was told me: he has always played heavily and skillfully—adding much to his estate in that way—and in Rouen always with a certain coterie, which was joined, several years ago, by the man you came to save last night.
“Your devotion to Mr. Gray has been the most beautiful thing in your life. I know all that the town knows of that, except the thousand hidden sacrifices you have made for him, those things which no one will ever know. (And yet, you see, I know them after all!) For your sake, because you love him, I will not even call him unworthy.
“I have heard—from one who told unwillingly—the story of the night two years ago, when the play ran so terribly high; and how, in the morning when they went away, all were poorer except one, their host!—how Mr. Gray had nothing left in the world, and owed my father a great sum which was to be paid in twenty-four hours; how you took everything you had saved in the years of hard work at your profession, and borrowed the rest on your word, and brought it to my father that afternoon; how, when you had paid your friend's debt, you asked my father not to play with Mr. Gray again; and my father made that his excuse to send you a challenge. You laughed at the challenge—and you could afford to laugh at it.
“But this is all shame, shame for Robert Carewe's daughter. It seems to me that I should hide and not lift my head; that I, being of my father's blood, could never look you in the face again. It is so unspeakably painful and ugly. I think of my father's stiff pride and his look of the eagle,—and he still plays with your friend, almost always 'successfully!' And your friend still comes to play!—but I will not speak of that side of it.
“Mr. Gray has made you poor, but I know it was not that which made you come seeking him last night, when I found you there in the hail. It was for his sake you came—and you went away for mine. Now that I know, at last—now that I have heard what your life has been (and oh I heard so much more than I have written!)—now that my eyes have been opened to see you as you are, I am proud, and glad and humble that I can believe that you felt a friendship for me strong enough to have made you go 'for my sake.' You will write to me just once, won't you? and tell me if there was any error in what I listened to; but you must not come to the garden. Now that I know you, I cannot meet you clandestinely again. It would hurt the dignity which I feel in you now, and my own poor dignity—such as it is! I have been earnestly warned of the danger to you. Besides, you must let me test myself. I am all fluttering and frightened and excited. You will obey me, won't you?—do not come until I send for you. Elizabeth Carewe.”
Mr. Gray, occupied with his toilet about noon, heard his partner descending to the office with a heavy step, and issued from his room to call a hearty greeting. Tom looked back over his shoulder and replied cheerily, though with a certain embarrassment; but Crailey, catching sight of his face, uttered a sharp ejaculation and came down to him.
“Why, what's the matter, Tom? You're not going to be sick? You look like the devil and all!”
“I'm all right, never fear!” Tom laughed, evading the other's eye. “I'm going out in the country on some business, and I dare say I shall not be back for a couple of days; it will be all up and down the county.” He set down a travelling-bag he was carrying, and offered the other his hand. “Good-by.”
“Can't I go for you? You don't look able.”
“No, no. It's something I'll have to attend to myself.”
“Ah, I suppose,” said Crailey, gently, “I suppose it's important, and you couldn't trust me to handle it. Well—God knows you're right! I've shown you often enough how incompetent I am to do anything but write jingles!”
“You do some more of them—without the whiskey, Crailey. They're worth more than all the lawing Gray and Vanrevel have ever done or ever will do. Good-by—-and be kind to yourself.”
He descended to the first landing, and then, “Oh, Crailey,” he called, with the air of having forgotten something he had meant to say.
“Yes, Tom?”
“This morning at the post-office I found a letter addressed to me. I opened it and—” He hesitated, and uneasily shifted his weight from one foot to the other, with a feeble, deprecatory laugh.
“Yes, what of it?”
“Well—there seemed to be a mistake. I think it must have been meant for you. Somehow, she—she's picked up a good many wrong impressions, and, Lord knows how, but she's mixed our names up and—and I've left the letter for you. It's on my table.”
He turned and calling a final good-by over his shoulder, went clattering noisily down to the street and vanished from Crailey's sight.
Noon found Tom far out on the National Road, creaking along over the yellow dust in a light wagon, between bordering forests that smelt spicily of wet underbrush and May-apples; and, here and there, when they would emerge from the woods to cleared fields, liberally outlined by long snake-fences of black walnut, the steady, jog-trotting old horse lifted his head and looked interested in the world, but Tom never did either. Habitually upright, walking or sitting, straight, keen, and alert, that day's sun saw him drearily hunched over, mile after mile, his forehead laced with lines of pain. He stopped at every farm-house and cabin, and, where the young men worked in the fields, hailed them from the road, or hitched his horse to the fence and crossed the soft furrows to talk with them. At such times he stood erect again, and spoke stirringly, finding eager listeners. There was one question they asked him over and over:
“But are you sure the call will come?”
“As sure as that we stand here; and it will come before the week is out. We must be ready!”
Often, when he left them, they would turn from the work in hand, leaving it as it was, to lie unfinished in the fields, and make their way slowly and thoughtfully to their homes, while Tom climbed into his creaking little wagon once more, only to fall into the same dull, hunched-over attitude. He had many things to think out before he faced Rouen and Crailey Gray again, and more to fight through to the end with himself. Three days he took for it, three days driving through the soft May weather behind the kind, old jog-trotting horse; three days on the road, from farm-house to farm-house and from field to field, from cabin of the woods to cabin in the clearing. Tossing unhappily at night, he lay sleepless till dawn, though not because of the hard beds; and when daylight came, journeyed steadily on again, over the vagabond little hills that had gypsied it so far into the prairie-land in their wanderings from their range on the Ohio, and, passing the hills, went on through the flat forest-land, always hunched over dismally in the creaking wagon.
But on the evening of the third day he drove into town, with the stoop out of his shoulders and the lustre back in his eyes. He was haggard, gray, dusty, but he had solved his puzzle, and one thing was clear in his mind as the thing that he would do. He patted the old horse a hearty farewell as he left him with the liveryman from whom he had hired him, and strode up Main Street with the air of a man who is going somewhere. It was late, but there were more lights than usual in the windows and more people on the streets. Boys ran shouting, while, here and there, knots of men argued loudly, and in front of the little corner drug-store a noisily talkative, widely gesticulative crowd of fifty or more had gathered. An old man, a cobbler, who had left a leg at Tippecanoe and replaced it with a wooden one, chastely decorated with designs of his own carving, came stumping excitedly down the middle of the street, where he walked for fear of the cracks in the wooden pavement, which were dangerous to his art-leg when he came from the Rouen House bar, as on the present occasion. He hailed Tom by name.
“You're the lad, Tom Vanrevel,” he shouted. “You're the man to lead the boys out for the glory of the State! You git the whole blame Fire De-partment out and enlist 'em before morning! Take 'em down to the Rio Grande, you hear me?
“And you needn't be afraid of their puttin' it out, if it ketches afire, neither!”
Tom waved his hand and passed on; but at the open doors of the Catholic Church he stopped and looked up and down the street, and then, unnoticed, entered to the dim interior, where the few candles showed only a bent old woman in black kneeling at the altar. Tom knew where Elizabeth Carewe knelt each morning; he stepped softly through the shadowy silence to her place, knelt, and rested his head upon the rail of the bench before him.
The figure at the altar raised itself after a time, and the old woman limped slowly up a side aisle, mumbling her formulas, courtesying to the painted saints, on her way out. The very thinnest lingerings of incense hung on the air, seeming to Tom like the faint odor that might exhale from a heavy wreath of marguerites, worn in dark-brown hair. Yet, the place held nothing but peace and good-will. And he found nothing else in his own heart. The street was quiet when he emerged from that lorn vigil; the corner groups had dissolved; shouting youths no longer patrolled the sidewalks. Only one quarter showed signs of life: the little clubhouse, where the windows still shown brightly, and whence came the sound of many voices settling the destinies of the United States of America. Thither Tom bent his steps, thoughtfully, and with a quiet mind. There was a small veranda at the side of the house; here he stood unobserved to look in upon his noisy and agitated friends.
They were all there, from the old General and Mr. Bareaud, to the latter's son, Jefferson, and young Frank Chenoweth. They were gathered about a big table upon which stood a punch-bowl and Trumble, his brow as angry red as the liquor in the cup he held, was proposing a health to the President in a voice of fury.
“In spite of all the Crailey Grays and traitors this side of hell!” he finished politely.
Crailey emerged instantaneously from the general throng and mounted a chair, tossing his light hair back from his forehead, his eyes sparkling and happy. “You find your own friends already occupying the place you mentioned, do you, General?” he asked.
General Trumble stamped and shook his fist.
“You're a spawn of Aaron Burr!” he vociferated. “There's not a man here to stand by your infernal doctrines. You sneer at your own State, you sneer at your own country, you defile the sacred ground! What are you, by the Almighty, who attack your native land in this, her hour of peril!”
“Peril to my native land!” laughed Crailey. “From Santa Anna?”
“The General's right, sir,” exclaimed the elder Chenoweth indignantly, and most of the listeners appeared to agree with him. “It's a poor time to abuse the President when he's called for volunteers and our country is in danger, sir!”
“Who is in danger?” answered Crailey, lifting his hand to still the clamor of approbation that arose. “Is Polk in danger? Or Congress? But that would be too much to hope! Do you expect to see the Greasers in Washington? No, you idiots, you don't! Yet there'll be plenty of men to suffer and die; and the first should be those who thrust this war on us and poor little Mexico; but it won't be they; the men who'll do the fighting and dying will be the country boys and the like of us from the towns, while Mr. Polk sits planning at the White House how he can get elected again. I wish Tom were here, confound you! You listen to him because he always has the facts and I'm just an embroiderer, you think. What's become of the gaudy campaign cry you were all wearing your lungs out with a few months ago? 'Fifty-four-forty or fight!' Bah! Polk twisted the lion's tail with that until after election. Then he saw he had to make you forget it, or fight England and be ruined, so he forces war on Mexico, and the country does forget it. That's it: he asks three regiments of volunteers from this State to die of fevers and get shot, so that he can steal another country and make his own elect him again. And you ask me to drink the health of the politician who sits at home and sends his fellowmen to die to fix his rotten jobs for him?” Crailey had persuaded himself into such earnestness, that the depth of his own feeling almost choked him, but he finished roundly in his beautiful, strong voice: “I'll drink for the good punch's sake—but that health?—I'll see General Trumble in heaven before I'll drink it!”
There rose at once a roar of anger and disapproval, and Crailey became a mere storm centre amid the upraised hands gestulating madly at him as he stood, smiling again, upon his chair.
“This comes of living with Tom Vanrevel!” shouted the General furiously. “This is his damned Abolition teaching! You're only his echo; you spend half your life playing at being Vanrevel!”
“Where is Vanrevel?” said Tappingham Marsh.
“Ay, where is he!” raged Trumble, hammering the table till the glasses rang. “Let him come and answer for his own teaching; it's wasted time to talk to this one; he's only the pupil. Where is the traitor?”
“Here,” answered a voice from the doorway; and though the word was spoken quietly it was nevertheless, at that juncture, silencing. Everyone turned toward the door as Vanrevel entered. But the apoplectic General, whom Crailey's speech had stirred to a fury beyond control, almost leaped at Tom's throat.
“Here's the tea-sipping old Granny,” he bellowed hoarsely. (He was ordinarily very fond of Tom.) “Here's the master! Here's the man whose example teaches Crailey Gray to throw mud at the flag. He'll stay here at home with Crailey, of course, and throw more, while the others boys march out to die under it.”
“On the contrary,” answered Tom, raising his voice, “I think you'll find Crailey Gray the first to enlist, and as for myself, I've raised sixty men in the country, and I want forty more from Rouen, in order to offer the Governor a full company. So it's come to 'the King, not the man'; Polk is a pitiful trickster, but the country needs her sons; that's enough for us to know; and while I won't drink to James Polk “—he plunged a cup in the bowl and drew it out brimming—“I'll empty this to the President!”
It was then that from fifty throats the long, wild shout went up that stirred Rouen, and woke the people from their midnight beds for half a mile around.
For the first time it was Crailey who sat waiting for Tom to come home. In a chair drawn to his partner's desk in the dusty office, he half-reclined, arms on the desk, his chin on his clenched fists. To redeem the gloom he had lit a single candle, which painted him dimly against the complete darkness of his own shadow, like a very old portrait whose background time has solidified into shapeless browns; the portrait of a fair-haired gentleman, the cavalier, or the Marquis, one might have said at first glance; not describing it immediately as that of a poet, for there was no mark of art upon Crailey, not even in his hair, for they all wore it rather long then. Yet there was a mark upon him, never more vivid than as he sat waiting in the loneliness of that night for Tom Vanrevel; though what the mark was and what its significance might have been puzzling to define. Perhaps, after all, Fanchon Bareaud had described it best when she told Crailey one day, with a sudden hint of apprehensive tears, that he had a “look of fate.”
Tom took his own time in coming; he had stayed at the club to go over his lists—so he had told Crailey—with the General and old Bareaud. His company was almost complete, and Crailey had been the first to volunteer, to the dumfounding of Trumble, who had proceeded to drink his health again and again. But the lists could not detain Tom two hours, Crailey knew, and it was two hours since the new volunteers had sung “The Star Spangled Banner” over the last of the punch, and had left the club to Tom and the two old men. Only once or twice in that time had Crailey shifted his position, or altered the direction of his set gaze at nothing. But at last he rose, went to the window and, leaning far out, looked down the street toward the little clubhouse. Its lights were extinguished and all was dark up and down the street. Abruptly Crailey went back to the desk and blew out the candle, after which he sat down again in the same position. Twenty minutes later he heard Tom's step on the stair, coming up very softly. Crailey waited in silence until his partner reached the landing, then relit the candle.
“Tom,” he called. “Come in, please, I've been waiting for you.”
There was a pause before Tom answered from the hall:
“I'm very tired, Crailey. I think I'll go up to bed.”
“No,” said Crailey, “come in.”
The door was already open, but Tom turned toward it reluctantly. He stopped at the threshold and the two looked at each other.
“I thought you wouldn't come as long as you believed I was up,” said Crailey, “so I blew out the light. I'm sorry I kept you outside so long.”
“Crailey, I'm going away to-morrow,” the other began. “I am to go over and see the Governor and offer him this company, and to-night I need sleep, so please—”
“No,” interrupted Crailey quietly, “I want to know what you're going to do.”
“To do about what?”
“About me.”
“Oh!” Tom's eyes fell at once from his friend's face and rested upon the floor. Slowly he walked to the desk and stood in embarrassed contemplation of the littered books and papers, while the other waited.
“I think it's best for you to tell me,” said Crailey.
“You think so?” Tom's embarrassment increased visibly, and there was mingled with it an odd appearance of apprehension, probably to relieve which he very deliberately took two long cheroots from his pocket, laid one on the desk for Crailey and lit the other himself, with extreme carefulness, at the candle. After this ceremonial he dragged a chair to the window, tilted back in it with his feet on the low sill, his back to the thin light and his friend, and said in a slow, gentle tone: “Well, Crailey?”
“I suppose you mean that I ought to offer my explanation first,” said the other, still standing. “Well, there isn't any.” He did not speak doggedly or sullenly, as one in fault, but more with the air of a man curiously ready to throw all possible light upon a cloudy phenomenon. “It's very simple—all that I know about it. I went there first on the evening of the Madrillon masquerade and played a little comedy for her, so that some of my theatrical allusions—they weren't very illuminating!—to my engagement to Fanchon, made her believe I was Vanrevel when her father told her about the pair of us. I discovered that the night his warehouses burned—and I saw something more, because I can't help seeing such things: that yours was just the character to appeal to a young girl fresh from the convent and full of honesty and fine dreams and fire. Nobody could arrange a more fatal fascination for a girl of nineteen than to have a deadly quarrel with her father. And that's especially true when the father's like that mad brute of a Bob Carewe! Then, too, you're more or less the town model of virtue and popular hero, in spite of the Abolitionism, just as I am the town scamp. So I let it go on, and played a little at being you, saying the things that you only think—that was all. It isn't strange that it's lasted until now, not more than three weeks, after all. She's only seen you four or five times, and me not much oftener. No one speaks of you to her, and I've kept out of sight when others were about. Mrs. Tanberry is her only close friend, and, naturally, wouldn't be apt to mention that you are dark and I am fair, or to describe us personally, any more than you and I would mention the general appearance of people we both meet about town. But you needn't tell me that it can't last much longer. Some petty, unexpected trifle will turn up, of course. All that I want to know is what you mean to do.”
“To do?” repeated Tom softly, and blew a long scarf of smoke out of the window.
“Ah!” Crailey's voice grew sharp and loud. “There are many things you needn't tell me! You need not tell me what I've done to you—nor what you think of me! You need not tell me that you have others to consider, that you have Miss Carewe to think of. Don't you suppose I know that? And you need not tell me that you have a duty to Fanchon—”
“Yes,” Tom broke in, his tone not quite steady. “Yes, I've thought of that.”
“Well?”
“Have you—did you—” he hesitated, but Crailey understood immediately.
“No; I haven't seen her again.”
“But you—”
“Yes—I wrote. I answered the letter.”
“As-”
“Yes; I signed your name. I told you that I had just let things go on,” Crailey answered, with an impatient movement of his hands. “What are you going to do?”
“I'm going over to see the Governor in the morning. I'll be away two or three days, I imagine.”
“Vanrevel!” exclaimed Crailey hotly, “Will you give me an answer and not beat about the bush any longer? Or do you mean that you refuse to answer?”
Tom dropped his cigar upon the brick window-ledge with an abysmal sigh. “Oh, no, it isn't that,” he answered mildly “I've been thinking it all over for three days in the country, and when I got back tonight I found that I had come to a decision without knowing it, and that I had come to it even before I started; my leaving the letter for you proved it. It's a little like this Mexican war, a mixed-up problem and only one thing clear. A few schemers have led the country into it to increase the slave-power and make us forget that we threatened England when we couldn't carry out the threat. And yet, if you look at it broadly, these are the smaller things and they do not last. The means by which the country grows may be wrong, but its growth is right; it is only destiny, working out through lies and blood, but the end will be good. It is bound to happen and you can't stop it. I believe the men who make this war for their own uses will suffer in hell-fire for it; but it is made, and there's only one thing I can see as the thing for me to do. They've called me every name on earth—and the same with you, too, Crailey—because I'm an Abolitionist, but now, whether the country has sinned or not, a good many thousand men have got to do the bleeding for her, and I want to be one of them. That's the one thing that is plain to me.”
“Yes,” returned Crailey. “You know I'm with you; and I think you're always right. Yes; we'll all be on the way in a fortnight or so. Do you mean you won't quarrel with me because of that? Do you mean it would be a poor time now, when we're all going out to take our chances together?”
“Quarrel with you!” Tom rose and came to the desk, looking across it at his friend. “Did you think I might do that?”
“Yes—I thought so.”
“Crailey!” And now Tom's expression showed desperation; it was that of a man whose apprehensions have culminated and who is forced to face a crisis long expected, long averted, but imminent at last. His eyes fell from Crailey's clear gaze and his hand fidgeted among the papers on the desk.
“No,” he began with a painful lameness and hesitation. “I did not mean it—no; I meant, that, in the same way, only one thing in this other—this other affair that seems so confused and is such a problem—only one thing has grown clear. It doesn't seem to me that—that—” here he drew a deep breath, before he went on with increasing nervousness—“that if you like a man and have lived with him a good many years; that is to say, if you're really much of a friend to him, I don't believe you sit on a high seat and judge him. Judging, and all that, haven't much part in it. And it seems to me that you've got yourself into a pretty bad mix-up, Crailey.”
“Yes,” said Crailey. “It's pretty bad.”
“Well,” Tom looked up now, with an almost tremulous smile, “I believe that is about all I can make of it. Do you think it's the part of your best friend to expose you? It seems to me that if there ever was a time when I ought to stand by you, it's now.”
There was a silence while they looked at each other across the desk in the faint light. Tom's eye fell again as Crailey opened his lips.
“And in spite of everything,” Crailey said breathlessly, “you mean that you won't tell?”
“How could I, Crailey?” said Tom Vanrevel as he turned away.