The street in which the lecture hall stood began to wear the air of being a centre of interest some time before the doors of the building were opened. People who had not been able to obtain reserved seats wished to arrive early. The lectures which had begun by being popular had ended by being fashionable. At the outset an audience of sober, religious tendencies had attended them, but after the first one had been delivered other elements had presented themselves. There had been a sprinkling of serious scientific men, a prominent politician or so, some society women whose faces and toilettes were well-known and lavishly described in the newspapers. On this last night the audience was largely of the fashionable political world. Carriages drove up one after another and deposited well-dressed persons who might have been expected that night to appear at certain brilliant social functions, and who had come to hear “Repentance” instead.
“He has always had good audiences,” said a member of the Committee of Arrangement, “but he has never had one like this—in Washington at least. There is the Secretary of State with his wife and daughter. I believe the President is to be here. He has awakened an enormous interest. The house will be literally crammed. They are filling the aisle with seats already.”
Baird was in the small retiring-room which had been arranged for his convenience. His journey had somewhat fatigued him, and he was in the physical and mental condition to feel glad that this lecture was to be the last of the series. He was going back to Willowfield, though he was not to remain there. He had received a call from an important church in New York and had accepted it. He was endeavouring to make arrangements that Latimer could be near him. On his return this evening he had found a letter he had been expecting. It referred to Latimer, and he was anxious to talk it over with him. He wished he would come in, and felt a little restless over his delay, though he knew they would have time to say but few words to each other before it was time for the lecture to begin. He walked up and down the room looking down at the green carpet and thinking, his thoughts wandering vaguely to the little pursuant of the herd claim and the letters he had wanted to deliver. He smiled faintly, remembering the small frame in the over-large clothes and the bucolic countenance with its over-sharpness of expression.
The member of the committee looked into the room.
“They are beginning to turn people away from the doors,” he said. “Half the Cabinet is here—I never saw such an audience.”
As he went away smiling, someone passed him in entering the room. Baird, who was smiling also, changed his expression of courteous appreciation to a smile of greeting, for the man who had entered was Latimer.
He advanced, holding out his hand.
“I am glad you have come,” he began to say. “I wanted at least a word with you before I went on.”
Then his smile died out, leaving blank amazement which a breath’s space later was alarmed questioning. He recalled later how for a second he stood and stared. Latimer’s face was white and damp with sweat. Its lines were drawn and sunken deep. His eyes were fixed on the man before him with something which had a ghastly resemblance to an unsteady smile which was not a smile at all. He looked as if illness—or death—or madness had struck him. He did not seem a sane man, and yet a stillness so deadly was expressed by his whole being that it seemed to fill the small, neat, business-like green-room.
Baird strode towards him and seized him by the shoulder.
“What is it? What is it? What is it?” he cried out.
Latimer’s face did not alter in a line. He fumbled stiffly in his breast-pocket and held out some pieces of yellowed letter-paper—this being done stiffly, too. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. It seemed to search every corner of the room and echo there.
“See!” he said. “These are two letters. A man wrote them to a poor, half-mad child twenty years ago.”
The door opened, and the member of the committee looked in again, radiant with exultation.
“The audience waiting in such breathless silence that you might hear a pin drop. Two thousand of them, if there’s one. Ten minutes to eight.”
“Thank you,” answered Baird.
The door closed again and he stood looking at Latimer’s rigid hand and the papers.
“They were written to Margery,” went on Latimer. “Stamps found them in a chink in the logs. She had hidden them there that she might take them out and sob over and kiss them. I used to hear her in the middle of the night.”
Baird snatched them from his hand. He fell into a chair near the table and dropped his face upon the yellowed fragments, pressing them against his lips with awful sobbing sounds, as if he would wrest from them the kisses the long-dead girl had left there.
“I, too!” he cried. “I, too! Oh! my God! Margery!”
“Don’t say ‘God!’” said Latimer. “When she was dying, in an agony of fear, she said it. Not that word! Another!”
He said no other—and Latimer drew nearer to him.
“You wrote them,” he said. “They are written in your hand—in your words—I should know them anywhere. You may deny it. I could prove nothing. I do not want to prove anything. Deny it if you will.”
Baird rose unsteadily. The papers were clutched in his hand. His face was marred by the unnaturalness of a man’s tears.
“Do you think I shall deny it?” he answered. “It is true. I have sat and listened to your talk of her and thought I should go quite mad. You have told me of her tortures, and I have listened. I did not know—surely she did not know herself—of the child—when I went away. It is no use saying to you—how should it be?—that I loved her—that I was frenzied by my love of her innocent sweetness!”
“No, there is no use,” answered Latimer, in a voice actually void of emotion, “but I daresay it is true.”
“There is no use in calling myself by any of the names invented for the men who bring about such tragedies. They are true of some men perhaps, but they were not true of me. I don’t know what was true of me. Something worse than has ever been put into words perhaps, for I loved her and I have loved her for twenty years. I would have given up my career—my life, anything she had asked!”
“But when she found you had acted a lie to her——”
“It seemed to fill her with the frantic terror of a child. I dare not approach her. I think she thought she would be struck dead by Heaven. Great God! how I understood your story of her prayers. And it was I—it was I!”
He turned on Latimer with a kind of ferocity.
“You have crucified me!” he cried out. “Let that comfort you. You have crucified me by her side, that I might see her die—that I might hear her low little piteous voice—that I might see her throes and terrors. And I love her—and remember every look of her loving child’s eyes—every curve and quiver of her mouth. Through all the years I have been crucified, knowing I had earned all that I felt.”
Latimer moved across the room, putting the table between them. He went and stood by the mantel. A murmur of impatient applause from the audience came through the door.
“You loved her,” he said, standing with his hand holding something in his breast. “And I loved you. She was the one brightness of my life when I was a boy and you were its one brightness when I was a man. You gave me a reason for living. I am not the kind of man to be my own reason. I needn’t tell you what you have been to me. You were the one man on earth I dared to confess to. I knew you would understand and that you knew what pity was.”
Baird groaned aloud. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief as he listened.
“I knew you were the one man I could trust. I could trust you. I could confide in you, and talk to you about Margery. One day you said to me that you had learned to love her and that we might have been brothers.”
“When I was left free I had but one thought,” Baird said, “to return to her—to atone, so far as atonement could be—to pray of her upon my knees. But she was dead—she was dead!”
“Yes, she was dead, and I had no one left to talk to about her. You were my one comfort and support and friend.”
He drew his hand out of his breast. Baird started and then stood quite quiet. The hand held a pistol.
“Are you going to kill me?” he said. “You know I asked you that once before.”
“No,” said Latimer, “I am not going to kill you. I am going to kill the man who loved you, and found you his reason for living. It’s all done with!”
“No! no!” shrieked Baird, and he hurled himself across the table like a madman. “No! You are not! No, Latimer! No! God! No!”
They were struggling together—Baird hung to his arm and tried to drag the pistol from his grasp. But it was no use; Latimer’s long, ill-hung limbs were the stronger. His fixed face did not change, but he wrenched himself free and flung Baird across the room. He set the pistol against his heart and pulled the trigger. He gave something like a leap and fell down.
The door opened for the returning member of the committee and the impatient applause of the audience came through it almost a roar.
Baird was struggling to rise as if his fall had stunned him. Latimer was stretched at full length, quite dead.
Tom walked up the staircase pondering deeply. The De Willoughby claim was before the House. Judge Rutherford was making his great speech, and the chief claimant might have been expected to be sitting breathless in one of the galleries. But he was not. He was going to Baird, who had sent for him, and Baird was sitting in the room in which Latimer lay dead with a bullet in his heart. He had been sitting there for hours, and when Tom had arrived at the house he had been told that Baird had asked that he should be taken to him in the death-chamber. He was sitting on a chair by the bed on which Latimer was stretched, rigid with a still face, which looked like a mask of yellow wax, appearing above the exceeding freshness of the turned-down linen sheet. Baird did not move as Tom entered, but continued to gaze at the dread thing with dull, drooping eyes. Tom went to him and laid his hand on his shoulder. He saw the man was stupefied.
“There’s nothing to say, Baird,” he said after a silence, “when it comes to this.”
“There is something for me to say,” Baird answered, very quietly. “I want to say it before him, while he lies there. I wonder if he will hear?”
“He may.”
“It would not do any good to anyone if he did,” Baird said. “The blackness of it all lies in that—that he would not be helped, she would not be helped—I should not.”
Baird got up at once, stiffly and unsteadily. He stood upright, the lithe-limbed slender form, which was so much admired upon the platform, held rigidly. His face looked lined and haggard.
“No other man shall feel an affection for me—I think you are beginning to feel an affection for me—under a false impression. That man loved me for long years, and I loved him. I think I helped him to something that was as near happiness as his nature would allow him to feel. God knows I owed it to him. I was one of those who repented too late. That is why I have preached of repentance. I have done it with a secret, frenzied hope.”
“Did he know your reason?” asked Tom.
“Not until last night. When he knew it, he killed himself.”
“Because—?” began Tom.
“Because he had loved and trusted me for half a lifetime—because I was the one human creature to whom he had confided the tragedy of his life—knowing he would be sure of comprehension and sympathy. It was to me he poured forth the story of that poor child. You saw her die. She was his sister. And I——”
Tom turned and looked at the face of the dead man and then, slowly, to the face of the living one, who stood before him.
“You—were the man?” he said.
“Yes.”
Tom turned to the dead man again. He put his big, warm hand with a curiously suggestive movement—a movement somehow suggesting protection—upon the stiff, clasped fingers.
“No, poor fellow!” he said, as if speaking to him. “You—no, no, there was nothing but this—for you. God have mercy on us.”
“No,” said Baird, “there was nothing else for him. I know that. Everything was whirled away. I had hours last night thinking there is nothing else for me. Perhaps there is not. But first I shall take his body back to his mother. I must tell her lies. This is the result of an accident. That is what I shall tell her. She is a little old woman who will not live long. I must take care of her—and let her talk to me about her son who loved me—and her daughter.”
He began to walk up and down the room.
“A man does not live—for fifteen years—side by side with another—that other loving him wholly—and see the blackness of his own deed laid bare—and hear again and again of the woe he has wrought—he does not live so in peace.”
“No,” answered Tom.
“I tell you—” wildly—“I tell you there have been hours—as he has talked to me of her—when the cold sweat has stood upon my flesh.”
He came back to Tom. He was frantic with agonised restlessness.
“In all the cruelty of it,” he cried, “there seems to have been one human pitying soul. It was yours. You were tender to her in those last hours. You were merciful—you held her hand when she died.”
“Yes,” said Tom, in a somewhat husky voice, since he remembered it so well, “she was frightened. Her little hand was cold. I took it in mine and told her not to be afraid.”
Baird flung out his own hand with a movement of passionate feeling—then let it fall at his side.
“We shall not meet again,” he said, “you will not want to see me.”
Big Tom gave him a long, steady look.
“Good Lord, man!” he said, after it, “am I the man to judge another? I’ve made nothing of life.”
“You have done no creature a wrong,” Baird said. “And you have helped some to happiness.”
“Well,” admitted Big Tom, “perhaps that’s true. But I’ve been a lumbering failure myself. I’ve just judgment enough now to know that there’s nothing a man can say about a thing like this—nothing—and just sense enough not to try to say it.”
“If you go back to North Carolina,” asked Baird, “may I come to see you—and to see her? She need never know.”
“I shouldn’t want her to know,” Tom answered, “but you may come. We shall go back, and I intend to let those two young ones set up a Garden of Eden of their own. It will be a good thing to look on at. Yes, you may come.”
“That is mercifulness,” said Baird, and this time when he put out his hand he did not withdraw it, and Tom gave it a strong, sober clasp which expressed more than one emotion.
When Tom returned to the little house near Dupont Circle, Uncle Matt wore a rigidly repressed air as he opened the door, and Miss Burford stood in the hall as if waiting for something. Her ringlets were shaken by a light tremor.
“We have either won the claim this afternoon or lost it,” Tom said to himself, having glanced at both of them and exchanged the usual greeting.
Judge Rutherford was striding up and down the sitting-room, but it was Sheba who was deputed to tell the news.
She did it in a little scene which reminded him of her childhood. She drew him to a chair and sat down on his knee, clasping both slim, tender arms round his neck, tears suddenly rushing into her eyes.
“You and Rupert are rich men, Uncle Tom, darling,” she said. “The claim has passed. You are rich. You need never be troubled about mortgages again.”
He was conscious of a tremendous shock of relief. He folded her in his arms as if she had been a baby.
“Thank the Lord!” he said. “I didn’t know I should be so glad of it.”
The unobtrusive funeral cortége had turned the corner of Bank Street and disappeared from view almost an hour ago. In the front room of the house in which had lived the man just carried to his grave, the gentle old woman who had been his mother sat and looked with pathetic patience at Miss Amory Starkweather as the rough winds of the New England early spring rushed up the empty thoroughfare and whirled through the yet unleafed trees. Miss Amory had remained after the other people had gone away, and she was listening to the wind, too.
“We are both old women,” she had said. “We have both lived long enough to have passed through afternoons like this more than once before. Howsoever bad other hours may be, it seems to me that these are always the worst.”
“Just after—everything—has been taken away,” Mrs. Latimer said now; “the house seems so empty. Faith,” tremulously, “even Faith can’t help you not to feel that everything has gone—such a long, long way off.”
She did not wipe away the tear that fell on her cheek. She looked very small and meek in her deep mourning. She presented to Miss Amory’s imagination the figure of a lovable child grown old without having lost its child temperament.
“But I must not complain,” she went on, with an effort to smile at Miss Amory’s ugly old intelligently sympathetic countenance. “It must have been all over in a second, and he could have felt no pain at all. Death by accident is always an awful shock to those left behind; but it must scarcely be like death to—those who go. He was quite well; he had just bought the pistol and took it out to show to Mr. Baird. Mr. Baird himself did not understand how it happened.”
“It is nearly always so—that no one quite sees how it is done,” Miss Amory answered. “Do not let yourself think of it.”
She was sitting quite near to Mrs. Latimer, and she leaned forward and put her hand over the cold, little, shrivelled one lying on the lap of the mourning-dress.
“Though it was so sudden,” she said, “it was an end not unlike Margery’s—the slipping out of life without realising that the last hour had come.”
“Yes; I have thought that, too.”
She looked up at the portrait on the wall—the portrait of the bright girl-face. Her own face lighted into a smile.
“It is so strange to think that they are together again,” she said. “They will have so much to tell each other.”
“Yes,” said Miss Amory; “yes.”
She got up herself and went and stood before the picture. Mrs. Latimer rose and came and stood beside her.
“Mr. Baird has been with me every day,” she said. “He has been like a son to me.”
A carriage drew up before the house, and, as the occupant got out, both women turned to look.
Mrs. Latimer turned a shade paler.
“They have got back from the funeral,” she said. “It is Mr. Baird.”
Then came the ring at the front door, the footsteps in the passage, and Baird came into the room. He was haggard and looked broken and old, but his manner was very gentle when he went to the little old woman and took her hands.
“I think he scarcely knew he had so many friends at Janney’s Mills,” he said. “A great many of them came. When I turned away the earth was covered with flowers.”
He drew her to a chair and sat by her. She put her white head on his arm and cried.
“He was always so sad,” she said. “He thought people never cared for him. But he was good—he was good. I felt sure they must love him a little. It will be better for him—now.”
Miss Amory spoke from her place before the fire, where she stood rigidly, with a baffled look on her face. Her voice was low and hoarse.
“Yes,” she said, with eager pitifulness. “It will be better now.”
The little mother lifted her wet face, still clinging to Baird’s arm as she looked up at him.
“And I have it to remember,” she sobbed, “that you—you were his friend, and that for years you made him happier than he had ever been. He said you gave him a reason for living.”
Baird was ashen pale. She stooped and softly kissed the back of his hand.
“Somehow,” she said, “you seemed even to comfort him for Margery. He seemed to bear it better after he knew you. I shall not feel as if they were quite gone away from me while I can talk to you about them. You will spare an hour now and then to come and sit with me?” She looked round the plain, respectable little room with a quiet finality. “I am too old and tired to live long,” she added.
It was Baird who kissed her hand now, with a fervour almost passion. Miss Amory started at sight of his action, and at the sound of the voice in which he spoke.
“Talk to me as you would have talked to him,” he said. “Think of me as you would have thought of him. Let me—in God’s name, let me do what there is left me!”
Miss Amory’s carriage had waited before the gate, and when she went out to it Baird went with her.
After he had put her into it he stood a moment on the pavement and looked at her.
“I want to come with you,” he said. “May I?”
“Yes,” she answered, and made room for him at her side.
But he took the seat opposite to her and leaned back, shutting his eyes while Miss Amory’s rested upon him. The life and beauty which had been such ever-present characteristics of his personality seemed to have left him never to return. Miss Amory’s old nerves were strung taut. She had passed through many phases of feeling with regard to him as the years had gone by. During those years she had believed that she knew a hidden thing of him known by no other person. She had felt herself a sort of silent detective in the form of an astute old New England gentlewoman. She had abhorred and horribly pitied him. She had the clear judicial mind which must inevitably see the tragic pitifulness of things. She had thought too much to be able to indulge in the primitive luxury of unqualified condemnation. As she watched him to-day during their drive through the streets, she realised that she beheld a kind of suffering not coming under the head of any ordinary classification. It was a hopeless, ghastly thing, a breaking up of life, a tearing loose of all the cords to which a man might anchor his existence.
When they reached the house and entered the parlour, she went to her chair and sat down—and waited. She knew she was waiting, and believed she knew what for. In a vague way she had always felt that an hour like this would come to them. They were somehow curiously akin. Baird began to walk to and fro. His lips were trembling. Presently he turned towards the rigid figure in the chair and stood still.
“It was not an accident,” he said. “He killed himself.”
“That I felt sure of,” Miss Amory answered. “Tell me why he did it.”
Baird began to tremble a little himself.
“Yes, I will,” he said. “I must. I suppose—there is a sort of hysteric luxury in—confession. He did it because there was nothing else left. The foundations of his world had been torn from under his feet. Everything was gone.” His voice broke into a savage cry. “Oh! in one short lifetime—the black misery a man can bring about!”
“Yes,” said Miss Amory.
He threw himself into a chair near her.
“For years—years,” he said, “he hid a secret.” Miss Amory bent forward. She felt she must help him a little—for pity’s sake.
“Was it the secret of Margery?” she half whispered.
“Did you know it?”
“When a woman has spent a long life alone, thinking—thinking,” she answered, “she has had time to learn to observe and to work at problems. The day she fainted in the street and I took her home in my carriage, I began to fear—to guess. She was not only a girl who was ill—she was a child who was being killed with some horror; she was heart-breaking. I used to go and see her. In the end I knew.”
“I—did not,” he said, looking at her with haggard eyes.
There was a long pause. She knew he had told her all in the one sentence—all she had guessed.
“She did not know I knew,” she went on, presently. “She believed no one knew. Oh, I tell you again, she was heart-breaking! She did not know that there were wild moments when she dropped words that could be linked into facts and formed into a chain.”
“Had you formed it,” he asked, “when you wrote and told me she had died?”
“Yes. It had led me to you—to nothing more. I felt death had saved her from what would have been worse. It seemed as if—the blackest devil—would be glad to know.”
“I am the blackest devil, perhaps,” he said, with stony helplessness, “but when I received your letter I was grovelling on my knees praying that I might get back to her—and atone—as far as a black devil could.”
“And she was dead,” said Miss Amory, wringing her hands together on her lap; “dead—dead.”
She stopped suddenly and turned on him. “He killed himself,” she cried, “because he found out that it was you!”
“Yes. I was the one man he loved—he had told his secret to me—to me!—the black devil. Now—now I must go to his mother, day after day, and be her son—because I was his friend—and knew his love for Margery—and of her sweetness—and her happy, peaceful death. He used to talk to me for hours; she—poor, tender soul—will talk to me again—of Margery—Margery—Margery—and of Lucien, whose one happiness I was.”
“It will—almost—be—enough,” said Miss Amory, slowly.
“Yes,” he answered; “it will almost be enough—even for a black devil.”
And he turned on his chair and laid his face on his folded arms and sobbed like a woman.
The springtime sunshine had been smiling upon Talbot’s Cross-roads all the day. It was not hot, but warm, and its beauty was added to by the little soft winds which passed through the branches of the blossoming apple and pear trees and shook the fragrance from them. The brown earth was sweet and odorous, as it had been on the Sunday morning Sheba had knelt and kissed it, and the garden had covered itself, as then, with hyacinths and daffodils and white narcissus.
During the last weeks the Cross-roads had existed in something like a state of delirium. People rode in from the mountains and returned to their homes after hours of conversation, semi-stupefied with enjoyment. Tom D’Willerby had won his claims. After months of mystified discouragement, in which the Cross-roads seemed to have lost him in a vague and distant darkness, life had seemed to begin again. Nobody was sufficiently analytical of mind to realise in what measure big Tom D’Willerby had been the centre of the community, which was scattered over miles of mountain road and wood and clearing. But when he had disappeared many things seemed to melt away with him. In fact, a large, shrewd humanity was missing.
“I’ll be doggered,” had been a remark of Mr. Doty’s in the autumn, “ef crops hes done es well sence he went.”
There had been endless talk of the villanous tendencies of Government officials, and of the tricks played whose end was to defraud honest and long-suffering claimants of their rights. There had even been dark hours when it had seemed possible that the vitiating effect of Washington life might cause deterioration in the character of even the most upright. Could Tom himself stand it, and what would be its effect on Sheba?
But when the outlook was the most inauspicious, Fortune’s wheel had swept round once and all was changed.
A letter brought the news—a simple enough letter from Tom himself. The claim was won. They were coming back to Hamlin County, he and Sheba and Rupert De Willoughby. Sheba and Rupert were to be married and spend the first weeks of their honeymoon on the side of the mountain which had enclosed the world the child Sheba had first known.
On this particular day every man and woman who had known and played with her appeared at the Cross-roads. There had not been a large number of them perhaps, but gathered together at and about the Post-office and about the house and garden, they formed a crowd, as crowds are counted in scattered communities. They embodied excitement enough to have exhilarated a much larger body of people. Half a dozen women had been helping Aunt Mornin for days. The house wore a gala air, and the cellar was stored with offerings of cake and home-made luxuries. The garden was a mass of radiant scented bloom of spring. Mis’ Doty sat at the open window of the kitchen and, looking out on nodding daffodils, apple-blossom, and pink peach-flower warmed in the sun, actually chuckled as she joyfully sniffled the air.
“The way them things smells,” she said, “an’ the hummin’ o’ them bees goin’ about as ef the world hadn’t nothin’ but flowers an’ honey in it, seems like it was all jest got up for them two young uns. Lordy, I do declar’, it’s a plum sight.”
“That bin a heap got up for ’em, seems like,” said Molly Hollister, smiling at the nearest apple-tree as if it were a particular friend. “Fust off, they’re dead in love with each other, an’ we uns all knows how that makes people feel—even in the dead o’ winter, an’ when they ain’t a penny in their pockets; they’re as good-hearted as they kin be—an’ es hansum’—an’ they’re rich, an’ they was married this mornin’, an’ they’re comin’ home with Tom D’Willerby to a place an’ folks that loves ’em—an’ the very country an’ the things that grows seems as if they was dressed out for a weddin’. An’ it’s Sheba as Tom took me to look at lyin’ in her little old wooden cradle in the room behind the store.”
She laughed, as she said it, a little hysteric laugh, with suddenly moist eyes. She was an emotional creature.
The road had been watched steadily for many hours before any arrival could have been legitimately expected. It gave restless interest—something to do. At noon one of Molly Hollister’s boys came running breathlessly up the road, waving his hat.
“They’re a-comin’!” he shouted. “They’re a-comin’! They’re in a fine carriage.”
“Let Tom D’Willerby alone for havin’ the finest team in Hamlin,” said Mr. Doty, with a neighbourly grin.
Almost immediately the carriage was to be seen. The horses lifted their feet high, and stepped at a pace which was felt worthy of the occasion. Uncle Matt drove. Rupert and Sheba sat side by side. They looked very young and beautiful, and rather shy. They had only been married a few hours, and were bewildered by the new radiance of things. Big Tom humanely endeavoured not to look at them, but found it difficult to avert his eyes for any length of time. There was that about them which drew his gaze back in spite of himself.
“That’s old Tom!” he heard familiar voices proclaim, as they drew near the Post-office. “Howdy, Tom! Howdy, Sheby! Wish ye much joy! Wish ye much joy!”
Then the horses stopped, and the crowd of long-known faces surged near and were all about the carriage. The clamour of the greeting voices, the grasping of one hand after another seemed to Sheba and Rupert like something happening in a dream. They were too far away from earth to feel it real just now, though it was part of the happiness of things—like the sunshine and the soft wind and the look in Tom’s eyes, when, amid hand-shakes and congratulations, and welcoming laughter, he himself laughed back in his old way.
“Ye look jest like ye used ter, Tom—jest like ye used ter,” cried Jake Doty. “Ye hain’t changed a durned bit!”
How did the day pass? Who knows? What does it matter? It was full of strange beauty, and strange happiness, and strange life for two young souls at least. People came and went, congratulating, wondering, rejoicing. Talbot’s Cross-roads felt that it had vicariously come into the possession of wealth and dignity of position. Among the many visitors, Mrs. Stamps rode up on a clay-bank mare. She was attired in the black calico riding-skirt and sunbonnet which represented the mourning garb of the mountain relict.
“I’m a widder,” she said to big Tom, in a tone not unresigned. “Ye got yer claim through, but Stamps hadn’t no influence, an’ he was took off by pneumony. Ketched cold runnin’ to Linthicum, I guess. His landlady was a honest enough critter. She found a roll o’ five hundred dollars hid in his bed when she went to lay him out, an’ she sent it back to me. Lord knows whar he got it from—I don’t. But it come in mighty handy.”
By sunset the welcoming crowd had broken up and melted away into the mountains. Horses and ox-waggons had been mounted and ridden or driven homeward. The Post-office was closed; no one was to be seen in the porch. No one was to be seen anywhere except in the garden among the blossoms where Rupert and Sheba walked under the fragrance of the trees, talking to each other in low, softly broken words.
Tom sat in the porch and watched the moon rise in a sea of silver. The scents the wind wafted to him, the occasional sound of a far-off night-bird, the rustle of the leaves brought things back to him—things he had felt in his youth. There had been nights like this in the days when he had been a big, clumsy young fellow, wild with hopeless love for Delia Vanuxem. On such nights the air had been full of this night breath of flowers, the birds had stirred in their nests with just such sounds, the moon had mounted, as it did to-night, higher and higher in a sky it thrilled a man’s soul to lift his face to.
“Yes, it was all like this,” he said, leaning back and clasping his big hands behind his head. “Just like this! And those two out there are living it over again, only they’ve been fairly treated, and they are trembling with the joy of it. They’re pretty safe,” he ended. “They’re pretty safe. They’ve had a fair show.”
Rupert and Sheba walked slowly side by side. They saw and felt everything. If a bird stirred with a sleepy sound, they stopped to listen and smiled tremulously at each other. More than once Sheba knelt down and hid her face among the flowers, kissing them. Her arms were full of white blossoms. She and Rupert had made white garlands for her hair and waist, such as she had worn the night he had first seen her standing on her little balcony. When Rupert held her to his side, the scent from their crushed petals filled the air they breathed. The early night was at its stillest and fairest, and the moonlight seemed to flood all the world, when Sheba stopped and looked up, speaking softly:
“Shall we go now?” she said. “The moon will be shining down between the pines. It will be so quiet.”
“Yes,” he answered. “Let us go now.”
They had planned weeks ago the things they were going to do. They were going to say good-night to the small mound at Blair’s Hollow.
When they left their horses at the foot of the hill even the pines could not look darkly under the fair light. The balmy air passing through their branches made a sound as if it was hushing a child to sleep.
The little mound lay in the soft brightness of clear moonbeams. Sheba knelt beside it and began to lay her bridal blossoms on the grass-covered earth. Rupert stood and watched her. His heart beat with a reverent, rapturous tremor. She looked like a young angel.
She bent down and laid her cheek upon the grass; her arm was thrown out as if she clasped something to her girl’s breast. She spoke in a whisper—thrilled with love. “I am happy,” she said. “I am happy. Oh, do you hear? Do you hear?”