XI.
Roycewaited over one day after this agreement with Tynes, and marked with satisfaction how thoroughly his will was subject to his own control. He had seen New Helvetia once. There was naturally a certain mundane curiosity on his part to be satisfied. Doubtless, after another excursion or so thither, it would all pall upon him and he would be more content, since there was no dream of unattainable enchantments at hand upon which he dared not look.
The place was singularly cheerful of aspect in its matutinal guise. The slanting morning sunshine struck through the foliage of the great oaks and dense shrubs; but there was intervenient shadow here, too, dank, grateful to the senses, for the day already betokened the mounting mercury. Across the valley the amethystine mountains shimmered through the heated air; ever and anon darkly purple simulacra of clouds went fleeing along their vast sunlit slopes beneath the dazzling white masses in the azure sky. In a ravine, a tiny space of blue-green tint amongst the strong full-fleshed dark verdure of the forests of July bespoke a cornfield, and through a field-glass might be descried the little log cabin with its delicatetendril of smoke, the home of the mountaineer who tilled the soil. Of more distinct value in the landscape was the yellow of the harvested wheatfields in the nearer reaches of the valley, where the bare spaces revealed the stage-road here and there as it climbed the summits of red clay hills.
There was no sound of music on the air, the band being off duty for the nonce. Even that instrument of torture, the hotel piano, was silent. The wind played through the meshes of the deserted tennis-nets, and no clamor of rolling balls thundered from the tenpin-alley, the low long roof of which glimmered in the sunshine, down among the laurel on the slope toward the gorge. The whole life of the place was focused upon the veranda. Royce’s reminiscent eye, gazing upon it all as a fragment of the past as well as an evidence of the present, discerned that some crisis of moment impended in the continual conjugation of the verbs’amuser. The usual laborious idleness of fancy-work would hardly account for the unanimity with which feminine heads were bent above needles and threads and various sheer fabrics, or for the interest with which the New Helvetia youths watched the proceedings and self-sufficiently proffered advice, despite the ebullitions of laughter, scornful and superior, with which their sage counsel was invariably received. There was now and again an exclamation of triumph as a pair of conventionalized wings were held aloft, completed, fashioned of gauze and wire and profusely spangledwith silver. He caught a sudden flash of tinsel, and noted the special demonstrations of congratulation and great glee which ensued when one of the old ladies, fluttered with the anxiety of the inventor, successfully fitted a silver crown upon the golden locks of a poetic-faced young girl, a very Titania. The jocose hobbledehoy whom Royce had noted on the occasion of his previous excursion sat upon a step of the long flight leading from the veranda to the lawn, surrounded by half a dozen little maidens, and, armed with a needle and a long thread, affected to sew industriously, rewarded by their shrieking exclamations of delight in his funniness every time he grotesquely drew out the needle with a great curve of his long arm, or facetiously but futilely undertook to bite the thread.
With zealous gallantry sundry of the young men plied back and forth between the groups on the veranda to facilitate the exchange of silks and scissors, and occasionally trotted on similar errands, businesslike and brisk, down the plank walk to the store. Sometimes they asked here for the wrong thing. Sometimes they forgot utterly what they were to ask for, and a return trip was in order. Sometimes they demanded some article a stranger to invention, unheard of on sea or shore. Thus cruelly was their ignorance of fabric played upon by the ungrateful and freakish fair, and the little store rang with laughter at the discomfiture of the young Mercury so humbly bearing the messagesof the deities on the veranda; for the store was crowded, too, chiefly with ladies in the freshest of morning costumes, and Royce, as he paused at the door, realized that this was no time to claim the attention of the smooth-faced clerk. That functionary was as happy as a salesman ever gets to be. There was not a yard of any material or an article in his stock that did not stand a fair chance of immediate purchase as wearing apparel or stage properties. Tableaux, and a ball afterward in the dress of one of the final pictures, were in immediate contemplation, as Royce gathered from the talk. This was evidently an undertaking requiring some nerve on the part of its projectors, in so remote a place, where no opportunities of fancy costumes were attainable save what invention might contrive out of the resources of a modern summer wardrobe and the haphazard collections of a watering-place store. Perhaps this added element of jeopardy and doubt and discovery and the triumphs of ingenuity heightened the zest of an amusement which with all necessary appliances might have been vapid indeed.
Royce could not even read the titles of the books on the shelf at this distance, above the heads of the press, and he turned away to await a more convenient season, realizing that he had attracted naught but most casual notice, and feeling at ease to perceive, from one or two specimens to-day about the place, that mountaineers from the immediate vicinity were no rarity at New Helvetia;their errands to sell fruit to the guests or vegetables or venison to the hotel being doubtless often supplemented by a trifle of loitering to mark the developments of a life so foreign to their experience. As he strolled along the plank walk, his supersensitive consciousness was somewhat assuaged as by a sense of invisibility. Every one was too much absorbed to notice him, and he in his true self supported no responsibility, since poor Lucien Royce was dead, and John Leonard was merely a stray mountaineer, looking on wide-eyed at the doings of the grand folk.
From that portion of the building which he had learned contained the ballroom he heard the clatter of hammer and nails. The stage was probably in course of erection, and, idly following the sound along a low deserted piazza toward one of the wings, he stood at length in the doorway. He gazed in listlessly at the group of carpenters working at the staging, the frame being already up. A blond young man, in white flannel trousers and a pink-and-white-striped blazer, was descanting with knowingness and much easy confidence of manner upon the way in which the curtain should draw, while the proprietor, grave, saturnine, with a leaning toward simplicity of contrivance and economy in execution, listened in non-committal silence. The wind blew soft and free through the opposite windows. Royce looked critically at the floor of the ballroom. It was a good floor, a very good floor. Finally he turned, with only a gentlemelancholy in his forced renunciation of youthful amusements, with the kind of sentiment, the sense of far remove, which might animate the ghost of one untimely snatched away, now vaguely awaiting its ultimate fate. He continued to stroll along, entering presently the quadrangle, and noting here the grass and the trees and the broad walks; the romping children about the band-stand in the centre, dainty and fresh of costume and shrill of voice; the chatting groups of old colored nurses who supervised their play. One was pushing a perambulator, in which a precocious infant, totally ignoring passing adults, after the manner of his kind, fixed an eager, intent, curious gaze upon another infant in arms, who so returned this interested scrutiny that his soft neck, as he twisted it over the shoulder of his nurse, was in danger of dislocation.
“Tu’n roun’ yere, chile!” she admonished him as if he were capable of understanding, while she shifted him about in her arms to cut off the vision of the object of interest. “Twis’ off yer hade lak some ole owel, fus’ t’ing ye know; owel tu’n his hade ef ye circle roun’ him, an’ tu’n an’ tu’n till his ole fool hade drap off. Didn’ ye know dat, honey? Set disher way. Dat’s nice!”
She almost ran against the juggler as she rounded the corner. He caught the glance of her eye, informed with that contempt for the poor whites which is so marked a trait of negro character, as she walked on, swaying gently from side to side and crooning low to the baby.
He did not care to linger longer within the premises. He could not even enjoy the relapse into old sounds and sights in a guise in which he was thought so meanly of, and which so ill beseemed his birth and quality. When he issued from the quadrangle, at the lower end of the veranda, he found he was nearer the descent to the spring than to the store. He thought he would slip down that dank, bosky, deserted path, make a circuit through the woods, and thus regain the road homeward without risking further observation and the laceration of his quivering pride. False pride he thought it might be, but accoutred, alas, with sensitive fibres, with alert and elastic muscles for the writhings of torture, with delicate membranes to shrivel and scorch and sear as if it were quite genuine and a laudable possession.
The ferns with long wide-spreading fronds, and great mossy boulders amongst the dense undergrowth, pressed close on either hand, and the thick interlacing boughs of trees overarched the precipitous vista as he went down and down into its green-tinted glooms. Now and again it curved and sought a more level course, but outcropping ledges interposed, making the way rugged, and soon cliffs began to peer through the foliage, and on one side they overhung the path; on the other side a precipice lurked, glimpsed through boughs of trees whose trunks were fifty feet lower on a slope beneath. An abrupt turn,—the odor of ferns blended with moisture came delicately, elusivelyfragrant; a great fracture yawned amidst the rocks, and there, from a cleft stained deeply ochreous with the oxide of iron, a crystal-clear rill fell so continuously that it seemed to possess no faculty of motion in its limpid interlacings and plaitings as of silver threads; only below, where the natural stone basin—hewn out by the constant beating of the current on the solid rock—overflowed, could the momentum and power of the water be inferred from its swift escape, bounding over the precipice and rushing off in great haste for the valley. The proprietor had had the good taste to preserve the woodland character of the place intact. No sign that civilization had ever intruded here did Royce mark, as he looked about, save a book on a rock hard by. Some one had sought this sylvan solitude for a quiet hour in the fascinations of its pages.
He hesitated a moment, then advanced cautiously and laid his hand upon it. How long, how long—it seemed as if in another existence—since he had had a book like this in his hand! He caught its title eagerly, and the name of the author. They were new to him. He turned the pages with alert interest. The book had been published since the date of his exile. Once more he fluttered the leaves, and, like some famished, thirsting wretch drinking in great eager gulps, he began to absorb the contents, his eyes glowing like coals, his breath hot, his hands trembling with nervous haste, knowing that his time for thisdraught of elixir, this refreshment of his soul, was brief, so brief. It would never do, for a man so humbly clad as he was, to be caught reading with evident delight a scholarly book like this. When at last he threw himself down amongst the thick and fragrant mint beside the rock, his shoulders supported on an outcropping ledge, his hat fallen on the ground, he had forgotten all thought of caution, he was not conscious how the time sped by. His eyes were alight, moving swiftly from side to side of the page. His face glowed with responsive enthusiasm to the high thought of the author. His troubles had done much to chasten its expression and had chiseled its features. It had never been so serious, so intelligent, so refined, as now. He did not see how the shadows shifted, till in this umbrageous retreat a glittering lance of sunlight pierced the green gloom. He was not even aware of another presence, a sudden entrance. A young lady, climbing up from the precipitous slope below, started abruptly at sight of him, jeopardizing her already uncertain footing, then stared for an instant in blank amazement.
So precarious was the footing where she had paused, however, that there was no safe choice but to continue her ascent. He did not heed more the rustle of her garments, as she struggled to the level ground, than the rustle of the leaves, or the rattle of the little avalanche of gravel as her foot upon the verge dislodged the pebbles. Only when the shaft of sunlight struck full upon her white piquédress, and the reflected glare was flung over the page of the book and into his eyes with that refulgent quality which a thick white fabric takes from the sun, he glanced up at the dazzling apparition with a galvanic start which jarred his every fibre. He stared at her for one moment as if he were in a dream; he had come from so far,—so very far! Then he grasped his troublous identity, and sprang to his feet in great embarrassment.
“I must apologize,” he said, with his most courteous intonation, “for taking the liberty of reading your book.”
“Not at all,” she murmured civilly, but still looking at him in much surprise and with intent eyes.
Those eyes were blue and soft and lustrous; the lashes were long and black; the eyebrows were so fine, so perfect, so delicately arched, that they might have justified the writing of sonnets in their praise. That delicate small Roman nose one knew instinctively she derived from a father who had followed its prototype from one worldly advancement to another, and into positions of special financial trusts and high commercial consideration. It would give distinction to her face in the years to come, when her fresh and delicate lips should fade, and that fluctuating sea-shell pink hue should no longer embellish her cheek. Her complexion was very fair. Her hair, densely black, showed under the brim of the white sailor hat set straight on her small head. She was tall and slender, andwore her simple dress with an effect of finished elegance. She had an air of much refinement and unconscious dignity, and although, from her alert volant pose, he inferred that she was ready to terminate the interview, she did not move at once when he had tendered the book and she had taken it in her hand.
“I merely intended to glance at the title,” he went on, still overwhelmed to be caught in this literary poaching, and hampered by the consciousness that his manner and his assumed identity had become strangely at variance. “But I grew so much interested that I—I—quite lost myself.”
She had some thought in mind as she looked down at the book in her gloved hand, then at him. The blood stung his cheek as he divined it. In pity for his evident poverty and hankering for the volume, she would fain have bid him keep it. But with an exacting sense of conventionality, she said suavely, though with impersonal inexpressiveness, “It is no matter. I am glad it entertained you. Good-morning.”
He bowed with distant and unpresuming politeness, and as she walked, with a fine poise and a quick elastic gait, along the shadowy green path, vanishing at the first turn, he felt the blood beating in his temples with such marked pulsation that he could have counted the strokes as he stood.
Did she deem him, then, only a common mountaineer, a graceless unlettered lout? She rated him as less than the dust beneath her feet. Hecould not endure that she should think of him thus. How could she be so obtuse as to fail to see that he was a gentleman for all his shabby gear! It was in him for a moment to hasten after her and reveal his name and quality, that she might not look at him as a creature of no worth, a being of a different sphere, hardly allied even to the species she represented.
He was following on her path, when the reflex sentiment struck him. “Am I mad?” he said to himself. “Have I lost all sense of caution and self-preservation?”
He stood panting and silent, the wounded look in his eyes so intense that by some subtle sympathetic influence they hurt him, as if in the tension of a strain upon them, and he passed his hand across them as he took his way back to the spring.
Did he wish the lady to recognize his station in life, and speculate touching his name? He was fortunate in that she was so young, for to those of more experience the incongruities of the interest manifested by an uncouth and ignorant mountaineer in a metaphysical book like that might indeed advertise mystery and provoke inquiry. Was he hurt because the lady, noting his flagrant poverty, had evidently wished to bestow upon him the volume which he had been reading with such delight,—so little to her, so infinite to him? And should he not appreciate her delicate sense of the appropriate, that had forbidden this generosity, consideringher youth, and the fact that he was a stranger and seemingly a rustic clown? He rather wondered at the scholarly bent of her taste in literature, and her avoidance of the mirthful scenes of the veranda, that she might spend the morning in thought so fresh, so deep, so expansive. It hardly seemed apposite to her age and the tale that the thermometer told, for this was a book for study. There was something simple-hearted in his acceptance of this high intellectual ideal which all at once she represented to him. A few months ago he might have scoffed at it as a pose; he would at least have surmised the fact,—a mistake had been caused by a similarity of binding with that of a popular novel of the day with which she had hoped to while away the time in the cool recesses beside the spring, and thus the volume had been thrown discarded on the rock, while she climbed the slopes searching for the Chilhowee lily.
The fire of humiliation still scorched his eyes, and his deep depression was patent in his face and figure, when he reached the Sims house at last, and threw himself down in a chair in the passage. One elbow was on the back of the chair, and he rested his chin in his hand as he looked out gloomily at the mountains that limited his world, and wished that he had never seen them and might never see them again. The house was full of the odor of frying bacon, for there was no whiff of wind in the Cove. The rooms were close and hot, and the sun lay half across the floor, and burnt,and shimmered, and dazzled the eye. The suffocating odor of the blistering clapboards of the roof, and of the reserves of breathless heat stored in the attic, penetrated the spaces below. Jane Ann Sims sat melting by degrees in the doorway, where, if a draught were possible to the atmosphere from any of the four quarters, she might be in its direct route. Meantime she nodded oblivious, and her great head and broad face dripping with moisture wabbled helplessly on her bosom.
Euphemia, coming out suddenly with a pan of peas to shell for dinner, and seeking a respite from the heat of the fire, caught sight of Royce with a radiant look of delight to which for his life he could not respond. She was pallid and limp with the work of preparing dinner, and even in the poetic entanglements of her curling shining hair she brought that most persistent aroma of the frying-pan. The coarse florid calico, the misshapen little brogans which she adjusted on the rung of her chair as she tilted it back against the wall with the pan in her lap, her drawling voice, the lapses of her ignorant speech, her utter lack of all the graces of training and culture, impressed him anew with the urgency of a fresh discovery.
“What air it ez ails you-uns?” she demanded, with a certain anxiety in her eyes. “Ye hev acted sorter cur’ous all this week. Do you-uns feel sick ennywhars?”
“Lord, no!” exclaimed the juggler irritably; “there’s nothing the matter with me.”
She looked at him in amazement for a moment; he had had no words for her of late but honeyed praise. The change was sudden and bitter. There was an appealing protest in her frightened eyes, and the color rushed to her face.
He had no affinities for the rôle of fickle-minded lover, and he was hardly likely to seek to palliate the cruelty of inconstancy. He took extreme pride in being a man of his word. The sense of honor, which was all the religion he had and chiefly active commercially, was evident too in his personal affairs. Was it her fault, he argued, his poor little love, that she was so hopelessly rustic? Had he not sought her when she was averse to him, and won her heart from a man she loved, who would never have thought himself too good for her? He would not apologize, however. He would not let her think that he had been vexed into hasty speech by the mere sight of her, the sound of her voice.
“You just keep that up,” he said, conserving an expression of animosity before which she visibly quaked, “and you’ll have Mrs. Sims brewing her infernal herb teas for me in about three minutes and a quarter. I want you to stop talking about my being ill, short off.”
As she gazed at him she burst into a little trill of treble laughter, that had nevertheless the suggestion of tears ready to be shed, in the extremity of her relief.
“I have walked twenty miles to-day, and it’sa goodish tramp in the heat of the day,—over to New Helvetia and back; and I’m fagged out, that’s all.”
Her equilibrium was restored once more, and her eyes were radiant with the joy of loving and being loved. Yet she paused suddenly, her hand—he winced that he should notice how rough and large it was, the nails blunt and short and broad—resting motionless on the edge of the pan, as she said, “I wisht ye would gin up goin’ ter that thar hotel. Ye look strange ter-day,”—her eyes searched his face as if for an interpretation of something troublous, daunting,—“so strange! so strange!”
“How?” he demanded angrily, knitting his brows.
“Ez ef—ef ye bed been ’witched somehows,” she answered, “like I ’low folks mus’ look ez view a witch in the woods an’ git under some unyearthly spell. The woods air powerful thick over to’des New Helveshy, an’ folks ’low they air fairly roamin’ with witches an’ sech. I ain’t goin’ ter gin my cornsent fur ye ter go through ’em no mo’.”
She pressed a pod softly, and the peas flew out and rattled in the pan, and the tension was at an end. He felt that she was far too acute, however. He was sorry she had ever known of his visits to New Helvetia. She should suppose them discontinued. He certainly coveted no feminine espionage.
He could not escape the thought of the place now. The face of the beautiful stranger was before his eyes every waking hour; and there were many, for the nights had lost their balm of sleep. The tones of her voice sounded in his ear. The delicate values of her refined bearing, the suggestions of culture and charm and high breeding which breathed from her presence like a perfume, had enthralled his senses as might the subtle and aerial potencies of ether. He had no more volition. He could not resist. Yet it was not, he stipulated, this stranger whom he adored. It was what she represented. He perceived at last that for him the artificialities of life were the realities. Even his own cherished gifts were matters of sedulous cultivation of certain natural aptitudes, the training of which was more remarkable than the endowment; and indeed, of what worth the latent talent without that culture which gives it use, and in fact recognized being at all? The status had an inherent integral value, the human creature was its mere incident. Nature was naught to him. The triumphs of the world are the uses man has made of nature; the forces that have lifted him from plane to plane, and sublimated the mere intelligence, which he shares with the beast, into intellectuality, which is the extremest development of mind.
As he argued thus abstractly, the longing to see her again grew resistless. Not himself to be seen, and never, never again by her! He would onlylook at her from afar, as one—even so humble a wretch—might gaze at some masterpiece of the artist’s craft, might kneel in abasement and self-abnegation before some noble shrine. He craved to see her in her splendid young loveliness and girlish enjoyment, in gala attire, at the grand fête on which the youth of New Helvetia were expending their ingenuity of invention and expansive energy. Even prudence could not say him nay. Did fate grudge him a glimpse that he might gain at the door, or while between the dances she walked with her partner on the moonlit veranda? Who would note a flitting ghost, congener of the shadow, lurking in the deep glooms beneath the trees and looking wistfully at the world from which he had been snatched away?
It was with a lacerating sense of renunciation that he parted with each instant of the time during the momentous evening when he might have beheld her in the tableaux; for he could with certainty fix upon the place she occupied, having gathered from the talk at the store the date and order of the festivities. But he could not rid himself of the Sims family. It had been vaguely borne in upon Mrs. Sims that he was growing tired of them, and in sudden alarm lest Euphemia’s happiness prove precarious, and with that disposition to assume the blame not properly chargeable to one’s self which is common to some good people, who perceive no turpitude in lying when the deceit is practiced only on themselves, she made herself believe that thechange was merely because she had been remiss in her attentions to her guest, and had treated him too much and too informally as one of the family. She smiled broadly upon him, with each of her many dimples in evidence, which had never won upon him, even in the days of his blandest contentment. She detained him in conversation. She requested that he would favor her with the exact rendition of the air to which he sang the words of Rock of Ages, one Sunday morning when he had heard the bells of the St. Louis church towers ringing from out the misty west; and as he dully complied, his tones breaking more than once, she accommodatingly wheezed along with him, quite secure of his commendation. For Jane Ann Sims had been a “plumb special singer” when she was young and slim, and no matter how intelligent a woman may be, she never outgrows her attractions—in her own eyes.
At last the house was still, and the juggler, having endured an agony of suspense in his determination to suppress all demonstrations of interest in New Helvetia, lest the intuition of the two women should divine the cause from even so slight indicia as might baffle reason, found himself free from question and surmise and comment. He was off in the darkness, with a furtive noiseless speed, like some wild errant thing of the night, native to the woods. He had a sense of the shadow and of the sheen of a fair young moon in the wilderness; he knew that the air was dank andcool and that the dew fell; he took note mechanically of the savage densities of the wilds when he heard the shrill blood-curdling quavering of a catamount’s scream, and he laid his grasp on the handle of a sharp bowie-knife that he wore in his belt, which he had bought for a juggling trick that he had not played at the curtailed performance in the schoolhouse, and he wished that it were instead Tubal Cain’s shooting-iron. But beyond this his mind was a blank. He did not think; he did not feel; his every capacity was concentrated upon his gait and the speed that he made. He did not know how short a time had elapsed when the series of points of yellow light from the ballroom windows, like a chain of glowing topaz, shone through the black darkness and the misty tremulous dimness of the moon. His teeth were set; he was fit to fall; he paused only a moment, leaning on the rail of the bridge to draw a deep breath and relax his muscles. Then he came on, swift, silent, steady, to the veranda.
Around the doors, outside the ballroom, were crowded figures, whose dusky faces and ivory teeth caught the light from within and attested the enjoyment of the servants of the place as spectators of the scene. He saw through an aperture, as one of them moved aside, a humble back bench against the wall, on which sat two or three of the mountaineers of the vicinity, calmly and stolidly looking on, without more facial expression of opinion than Indians might have manifested. He would notjoin this group, lest she might notice him in their company, which he repudiated, as if his similarity of aspect were not his reliance to save all that he and men of his kind held dear. The windows were too high from the ground to afford a glimpse of the interior; he stood irresolute for a moment, with the strains of the waltz music vibrating in his very heart-strings. Suddenly he marked how the ground rose toward the further end of the building. The last two windows evidently were partially blockaded by the slope so close without, and could serve only purposes of ventilation. Responsive to the thought, he climbed the steep slant, dark, dewy, and solitary, and, lying in the soft lush grass, looked down upon the illuminated ballroom.
At first he did not see her. With his heart thumping much after the fashion of the bass viol, till it seemed to beat in his ears, he gazed on the details of a scene such as he had thought never to look upon again. He recognized with a sort of community spirit and pleasure how well the frolicsome youth had utilized their slender opportunities, so far from the emporiums of civilization. Great branching ferns had adequately enough supplied the place of palms, their fronds waving lightly from the walls in every whirling breeze from the flight of the dance. Infinite lengths of vines—the Virginia creeper, the ground ivy, and the wild grape—twined about the pillars, and festooned the ceiling, the band-stand, and the chandeliers. For the first time he was made awareof the decorative values of the blackberry, when it is red, and, paradoxically, green. The unripe scarlet clusters were everywhere massed amidst the vines with an effect as brilliant as holly. All the aisles of the surrounding woods had been explored for wild flowers. Here and there were tables laden with great masses of delicate blossoms, and from time to time young couples paused in their aimless strolling back and forth,—for the music had ceased for the nonce,—and examined specimens, and disputed over varieties, and apparently disparaged one another’s slender scraps of botany.
The band, high in their cage,—prosperous, pompous darkies, of lofty manners, but entertaining with an air of courteous condescension any request which might be preferred, in regard to the music, by the young guests of the hotel,—looked down upon the scene complacently. Against the walls were ranged the chaperons in their most festal black attire, enhanced by fine old lace and fragile glittering fans and a somewhat dazzling display of diamonds. The portly husbands and fathers, fitting very snugly in their dress suits, hovered about these borders with that freshened relish of scenes of youthful festivity which somehow seems increased in proportion as the possibility and privilege of participation are withdrawn. Some of the younger gentlemen also wore merely the ordinary evening dress, the difficulty of evolving a fancy costume, or a secret aversion to the characters they had represented in the tableaux,warranting this departure from the spirit of the occasion.
Everywhere, however, the younger feminine element blossomed out in poetic guise. Here and there fluttered fairies with the silver-flecked game wings that Royce had seen a-making, and Titania still wore her crown, although Bottom had thrown his pasteboard head out of the window, and was now a grave and sedate young American citizen. Red Riding-Hood and the Wolf still made the grand tour in amicable company, and Pocahontas, in a fawn-tinted cycling-skirt and leggings and a red blanket bedizened with all the borrowed beads and feathers that the Springs could afford, was esteemed characteristic indeed. Davy Crockett had a real coonskin cap which he had bought for lucre from a mountaineer, and which he intended to take home as a souvenir of the Great Smokies, although he was fain to carry it now by the tail because of the heat; but he invariably put it on and drew himself up to his tableau estimate of importance whenever one of the elderly ladies clutched at him, as he passed, to inquire if he were certainly sure that the long and ancient flintlock (borrowed) which he bore over his shoulder was unloaded. There had evidently been a tableau representing Flora’s court or similar blooming theme, since so many personified flowers were wasting their sweetness on the unobservant and unaccustomed air. The wild rose was in several shades of fleecy pink, festooned with her own garlands.A wallflower—a dashing blonde—was in brown and yellow, and had half the men in the room around her.
Suddenly—Lucien Royce’s heart gave a great throb and seemed to stand still, for, on the arm of her last partner, coming slowly down the room until she stood in the full glow of the nearest chandelier, all in white, in shining white satin, with a grace and dignity which embellished her youth, was she whom he had so longed to see. Her bare arms and shoulders were of a soft whiteness that made the tone of the satin by contrast glazing and hard. Her delicate head, with its black hair arranged close and high, had the pose of a lily on its stalk. Scattered amid the dense dark tresses diamonds glittered and quivered like dewdrops. Her face had that flower-like look not uncommon among the type of the very fair women with dark hair from the extreme South. Over the white satin was some filmy thin material, like the delicate tissues of a corolla; and only when he had marked these liliaceous similitudes did he observe that it was the Chilhowee lily which she had chosen to represent. Now and again that most ethereal flower showed amongst the folds of her skirt. A cluster as fragile as a dream lay on her bosom, and in her hand she carried a single blossom, poetic and perfect, trembling on its long stalk.
There rose upon the air a soft welling out of the music. The band was playing “Home, SweetHome.” She had moved out of the range of his vision. There was a murmur of voices on the veranda as the crowd emerged. The lights were abruptly quenched in darkness. And he laid his head face downward in the deep grass and wished he might never lift it again.