WHEN Gaston arrived in Independence he went direct to St. Clare’s.
“Where the Dickens have you been, Gaston?”
“Jumping from Murphy to Manteo making love to hayseed statesmen.”
“What luck?”
“They’re all crazy. They swear they are going to have the United States establish a Sub-Treasury in Raleigh and issue Government script they can use as money on their pumpkins, or they are going to tear the nation to tatters and vote for a nigger for Governor if necessary!”
“Can’t you get into their fool heads that an alliance with the Republican party is the last way on earth for them to go about their Sub-Treasury schemes?”
“Can’t seem to do a thing with them. McLeod’s stuffed them full. I’m sick of it. I’ve a notion to let them go with the niggers and go to the devil. It’s growing on me that there must be another way out. I can’t get down in the dirt and prostitute my intellect and lie to these fools. We’ve got to get rid of the Negro.”
“A large job, old man.”
“Yes, it is, and thank God I’m done with it for a week. I’m going to heaven now for a few days. I ’ll see her in an hour. I rise on tireless wings!”
“Look out you don’t come down too suddenly. The earth may feel hard.”
“Bob, I’m going to risk it. I’m going to look fate squarely in the face and get my answer like a little man, for life or death.”
Mrs. Worth met Gaston and greeted him with warmest cordiality.
“We are charmed to welcome you to Oakwood again, Mr. Gaston.”
“I assure you, Mrs. Worth, I never saw a home so beautiful. I feel as though I am in paradise when I get here.”
“I hope to see more of you this time, I feel that I know you so much better since our talk at the Springs.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Worth.” He said this so simply and earnestly she could but feel his deep appreciation of her attitude of welcome.
“Sallie will be down in a minute.”
Gaston smiled in spite of himself.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I was just thinking how sweetly her name sounded on your lips.”
“Do you like these old-fashioned Southern names?”
“I think they are lovely.”
“Well, that’s my name too.”
Sallie suddenly stepped from the hall into the doorway.
“Now, Mama, there you are again carrying on with one of my beaux! I don’t know what I will do with you!”
Mrs. Worth actually blushed, sprang up and struck Sallie lightly on the arm with her fan exclaiming, “Oh! you sly thing, to stand out there and listen to what I said! Mr. Gaston I turn her over to you to punish her for such conduct.”
“Isn’t she a dear?” said Sallie when her mother was gone.
“I was charmed with her at the Springs, but the gracious way she made me feel at home this morning completely won my heart.”
“I can do anything with Mama. She’s the dearest mother that ever lived. She always seems to know intuitively my heart’s wish, and, if it’s best, give it to me, and if it’s not, she makes me cease to desire it. I wish I could manage Papa as easily.”
“I’m sure he idolises you, Miss Sallie.”
“He does, but when he lays the law down, that settles it. I can’t move him one inch.”
“That’s the way with forceful men, who do things in the world.”
“Well, I confess I like to have my own way sometimes. I wonder if you are like that?”
“I ’ll be frank with you. Somehow I never could be anything else if I tried. I don’t think a man of strong character will yield to every whim of a woman, whether wife or daughter.”
“I heard of a man the other day who whipped his wife,” she said in a far away tone of voice. “Come, my horse is ready, go with me for another ride to-day. I am going to take you across the river and show you a pretty drive over there.”
They were soon lost in the deep shadows of the stately pine forest that lay beyond the Catawba. The road was a cross-country narrow way that wound in and out around the big trees.
They jogged slowly along while he bathed his soul in the joy of her presence. Oh, to be alone and near her! There seemed to him a magic power in the touch of her dress as she sat in the little buggy so close by his side. For hours, again he lay at her feet and drank the wine of her beauty until his heart was drunk with love.
Once he opened his lips to tell her, and a great fear awed him into silence. He longed to pour out to her his passion, but feared her answer. He Had studied her every word and tone and look and hand-pressure since he had known her. He was sure she loved him. And yet he was not sure. She was so skilled in the science of self defence, so subtle a mistress of all the arts of polite society in which the soul’s deepest secrets are hid from the world, he was paralysed now as the moment drew near. He put it off another day and gave himself up to the pure delight of her face and form and voice and presence.
That evening when she entered the home her mother caught her hand and softly whispered, “Did he court you to-day, Sallie?”
She shook her head smilingly. “No, but I think he will to-morrow.”
St. Clare was sitting on his veranda awaiting Gaston’s return.
“What luck, old boy?” he eagerly asked.
“Couldn’t say a word. I ’ll do it to-morrow or die.”
“Shake hands partner. I’ve been there.”
“Bob, it’s a serious thing to run up against a little answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ that means life or death.”
“Feel like you’d rather live on hope a while, and let things drift, don’t you?”
“Exactly, I think I can understand for the first time in my life that awful look in a prisoner’s face on trial for his life, when he watches the lips of the foreman of the jury to catch the first letter of the verdict. I used to think that an interesting psychological study. By George, I feel I am his brother now.”
The next day was perfect. The warm life-giving sun of June was tempered by breezes that swept fresh and invigorating over the earth that had been drenched with showers in the night. The woods were ringing with the chorus of feathered throats chanting the old oratorio of life and love. Again Gaston and Sallie were jogging along the shady river road they had travelled on the first day she had taken him driving.
“Do you remember this road?” she asked.
“I ’ll never forget it. Along this road we hurried in the twilight to face your angry mother, and just one kiss smoothed her brow into a welcoming smile for me.”
“Well, I’m going to risk greater trouble to-day, and take you a mile or two further up the river to the old mill site at the rapids. It’s the most beautiful and romantic spot in the country. The river spreads out a quarter of a mile in width, and goes plunging and dashing down the rapids through thousands of projecting rocks, a mass of white foam as far as you can see. It’s full of tiny green islands with feras and rhododendron and wild grape vines, and their perfume sweetens the air for miles along the water. These little islands, some ten feet square, some an acre, are full of mocking-birds nesting there, though since the mills were burned during the war nobody has lived near. The songs of these birds seem tuned to the music of the river.”
“It must be a glimpse of fairy-land!” he exclaimed.
“I know you will be thrilled with its romantic beauty. It’s five miles from a house in any direction.”
Gaston was silent. He made a resolution in his soul that he would never leave that spot until he knew his fate. His heart began to thump now like a sledge-hammer. He looked down furtively at her and tried to imagine how she would look and what she would say when he should startle her first with some word of tender endearment or the sound of her name he had said over and over a thousand times in his heart, and aloud when alone, but never dared to use without its prefix.
She saw his abstraction and divined intuitively the current of emotions with which he was struggling, but pretended not to notice it. He tied the horse at the old mill, and they walked slowly down the bank of the river.
“That is my island,” she cried pointing out into the river. “That third one in the group running out from the point. We can step from one rock to another to it.”
It was indeed an entrancing spot. The island seemed all alone in the middle of the river when one was on it. It was not more than fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long, its length lying with the swift current. At the lower end of it a fine ash tree spread its dense shade, hanging far over the still waters that stood in smooth eddy at its roots. On the upper side of this tree lay a big boulder resting against its trunk and embedded in a mass of clean white sand the water had filtered and washed and thrown there on some spring flood.
She climbed on this rock, sat down, and leaned her bare head against its trunk.
“This is my throne,” she laughingly cried.
He leaned against the rock and looked up at her with eyes through which the yearning, the hunger, the joy, and the fear of all life were quivering. What a picture she made under the dark cool shadows! Her dress was again of spotless white that seemed now to have been woven out of the foam of the river. Her throat was bare, her cheeks flushed, and her wavy hair the wind had blown loose into a hundred stray ringlets about her face and neck. Her lips were trembling with a smile at his speechless admiration.
“You seem to have been struck dumb,” she said. “Isn’t this glorious?”
“Beyond words, Miss Sallie. I didn’t know there was such a spot on the earth.”
“This is my favourite perch. Art and wealth could never make anything like this! I could come here and sit and dream all day alone if Mama would let me.”
He tried to begin the story of his love, but every time his tongue refused to move. He was trembling with nervous hesitation and began to dig a hole in the sand with his heel.
“What is the matter with you to-day? I never saw you so serious and moody.”
Just then a female mocking-bird in her modest dove-coloured dress lit on a swaying limb whose tips touched the still water of the eddy at their feet, and her proud mate with head erect, far up on the topmost twig of the ash struck softly the first note of his immortal love poem, the dropping song.
“Listen, he’s going to sing his dropping song!” he cried in a whisper.
And they listened. He sang his first stanza in a low dreamy voice, and then as the sweetness of his love and the glory of his triumph grew on his bird soul, he lifted his clear notes higher and higher until the woods on the banks of the river rang with its melody.
His mate turned her eyes upward and quietly twittered a sweet little answer.
His response rang like a silver trumpet far up in the sky! He sprang ten feet into the air and slowly dropped singing, singing his long trilling notes of melting sweetness. He stopped on the topmost twig, sat a moment, never ceasing his matchless song, and then began to fall downward from limb to limb toward his mate, pouring out his soul in mad abandonment of joy, but growing softer, sweeter, more tender as he drew nearer. They could see her tremble now with pride and love at his approach, as she glanced timidly upward, and answered him with maiden modesty. At last when he reached her side, his song was so low and sweet and dream-like it could scarcely be heard. He touched the tip of her beak with a bird kiss, they chirped, and flew away to the woods together.
Gaston determined to speak or die. His eyes were wet with unshed tears, and he was trembling from head to foot. He had meant to pour out his love for her like that bird in words of passionate beauty, but all he could do was to say with stammering voice low and tense with emotion, “Miss Sallie, I love you!”
He had meant to say “Sallie,” but at the last gasp of breath, as he spoke, his courage had failed. He did not look up at first. And when she was silent, he timidly looked up, fearing to hear the answer or read it in her face. She smiled at him and broke into a low peal of joyous laughter! And there was a note of joy in her laughter that was contagious.
“Please don’t laugh at me,” he stammered, smiling himself.
She buried her face in her hands and laughed again. She looked at him with her great blue eyes wide open, dancing with fun, and wet with tears.
“Do you know, it’s the funniest thing in the world, you are the sixth man who has made love to me on this rock within a year!” and again she laughed in his face.
“Look here, Miss Sallie, this is cruel!”
“Dear old rock. It’s enchanted. It never fails!” and she laughed softly again, and patted the rock with her hand.
“Surely you have tortured me long enough. Have some pity.”
“It is a pitiable sight to see a big eloquent man stammer and do silly things isn’t it?”
“Please give me your answer,” he cried still trembling.
“Oh! it’s not so serious as all that!” she said with dancing eyes.
“I’m in the dust at your feet.”
“You mean in the sand. Did you know that you dug a hole in that sand deep enough to bury me in? I thought once you were meditating murder by the expression on your face.”
“Please give me one earnest look from your eyes,” he pleaded.
“You’re a terrible disappointment,” she answered leaning back and putting her hands behind her head thoughtfully.
His heart stood still at this unexpected speech.
“How?” he slowly asked, looking down at the sand again.
“Because,” she said in her old tantalising tone, “I expected so much of you.”
“Then you don’t class me with the other poor devils at least?” he asked hopefully.
“No, no, they were handsome boys and made me beautiful speeches. But you are distinguished. You are a man that everybody would look at twice in a crowd. You are a famous young orator who can hold thousands breathless with eloquence. I thought you would make me the most beautiful speech. But you acted like a school boy, stammered, looked foolish, and pawed a hole in the ground!” Again she laughed.
“I confess, Miss Sallie, I was never so overwhelmed with terror and nervousness by an audience before.”
“And just one girl to hear!”
“Yes, but she counts more with me than all the other millions, and one kind look from her eyes I would hold dearer at this moment than a conquered world’s applause.”
“That’s fine! That’s something like it. Say more!” she cried.
His face clouded and he looked earnestly at her.
“Come, come, Miss Sallie, this is too cruel. I have torn my heart’s deepest secrets open to you, and tremblingly laid my life at your feet, and you are laughing at me. I have paid you the highest homage one human soul can offer another. Surely I deserve better than this?”
“There, you do. Forgive me. I have seen so much shallow love making, I am never quite sure a boy’s in dead earnest.” She spoke now with seriousness.
“You cannot doubt my earnestness. I have spoken to you this morning the first words of love that ever passed my lips. One chamber of my soul has always been sacred. It was the throne room of Love, reserved for the One Woman waiting for me somewhere whom I should find. I would not allow an angel to enter it, and I hid it from the face of God. I have opened it this morning. It is yours.”
She softly slipped her hand in his, and tremblingly said, while a tear stole down her cheek, “I do love you!”
He bent over her hand and kissed it, and kissed it, while his frame shook with uncontrollable emotion. Then looking up through his dimmed eyes, he said, “My darling, that was the sweetest music, that sentence, that I shall ever hear in this world or in all the worlds beyond it in eternity!”
“When did you first begin to love me?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But I loved you the first moment you looked into my face while I was speaking that day. And I recognised you instantly as the Dream of my Soul. I have loved you for ever, ages before we were born in this world, somewhere, our souls met and knew and loved. And I’ve been looking for you ever since. When I saw you there in the crowd that day looking up at me with those beautiful blue eyes, I felt like shouting ‘I have found her! I have found her!’ and rushing to your side lest I should not see you again.”
“It is strange—this feeling that we have known each other forever. The moment you touched my hand that first day, a sense of perfect content and joy in living came over me. I couldn’t remember the time when I hadn’t known you. You seemed so much a part of my inmost thoughts and every day life. I laughed this morning from sheer madness of joy when you told me your love. I knew you were going to tell me to-day. You tried yesterday, but I held you back. I wanted you to tell me here at this beautiful spot, that the music of this water might always sing its chorus with the memory of your words.”
“Let me kiss your lips once!” he pleaded.
“No, you shall hold my hand and kiss that. Your touch thrills every nerve of my being like wine. It is enough. I promised Mama I would never allow a man to kiss me without asking her. And we are like loving comrades. I couldn’t violate a promise to her. I will, when she says so.”
“Then I ’ll ask her. I know she’s on my side.”
“Yes, I believe she loves you because I do.”
“What did you whisper to her that night, when we came late, and you said she would be angry?”
“Told her I loved you.”
“If I could only have caught that whisper then! You don’t know how it delights me to think your mother likes me. I couldn’t help loving her. It seems to me a divine seal on our lives.”
“Yes, and what specially delights me is, you have completely captured Papa, and he’s so hard to please.”
“You don’t say so!”
“Yes, he’s been preaching you at me ever since you came the first time. I pretended to be indifferent to draw him out. He would say, ‘Now Sallie, there’s a man for you,—no pretty dude, but a man, with a kingly eye and a big brain. That’s the kind of a man who does things in the world and makes history for smaller men to read.’ And then I’d say just to aggravate him, ‘But Papa he’s as poor as Job’s turkey!’”
“Then you ought to have heard him, ‘Well, what of it! You can begin in a cabin like your mother and I did. He’s got a better start than I had, for he has a better training.’”
“I am certainly glad to hear that!” Gaston cried with elation.
“You may be. For Papa is a man of such intense likes and dislikes. The first thing that made my heart flutter with fear was that he might not like you. He loves me intensely. And I love him devotedly. I could not marry without his consent. You are so entirely different from any other beau I ever had, I couldn’t imagine what Papa would think of you. You wear such a serious face, never go into society, care nothing for fine clothes, and are so careless that you even hung your feet out of the buggy that first day I took you to drive. I was glad to have you in the woods and not in town. The boys would have guyed me to death. In fact you are the contradiction of the average man I have known, and of all the men I thought as a girl I’d marry some day. I am so glad Papa likes you.”
That evening when they reached the house, she hurried through the hall to her mother who was standing on the back porch. There was the sudden swish of a dress, a kiss, another! and another! And then the low murmur of a mother’s voice like the crooning over a baby.
WHEN Gaston reached his home that night St. Clare had gone to bed. It was one o’clock. He could not sleep yet, so he sat in the window and tried to realise his great happiness, as he looked out on the green lawn with its white gravelled walk glistening in the full moon.
“The world is beautiful, life is sweet, and God is good!” he cried in an ecstasy of joy.
He sat there in the moonlight for an hour dreaming of his love and the great strenuous life of achievement he would live with her to inspire him. It seemed too good to be true. And yet it was the largest living fact. Like throbbing music the words were ringing in his heart keeping time with the rhythm of its beat, “I do love you!” And then he did something he had not done for years.—not since his boyhood,—he knelt in the silence of the moonlit room and prayed. Love the great Revealer had led him into the presence of God. The impulse was spontaneous and resistless. “Lord, I have seen Thy face, heard Thy voice, and felt the touch of Thy hand to-day! I bless and praise Thee! Forgive my doubts and fears and sins, cleanse and make me worthy of her whom Thou has sent as Thy messenger!” So he poured out his soul.
Next morning he grasped St. Clare’s hand as he entered the room. “Bob, I’m the happiest man in the world!”
“Congratulations! You look it.”
“She loves me! I’d like to climb up on the top of this house and shout it until all earth and heaven could hear and be glad with me!”
“Well, don’t do it, my boy. See her father first!”
“She says he likes me.”
“Then you’re elected.”
“I’m going to tackle him before I go home.”
“Don’t rush him. There’s a superstition prevalent here that the old gentleman has no idea of ever letting his daughter leave that home, and that he will never give his consent, when driven to the wall, unless his son-inlaw that is to be, will agree to settle down there and take his place in those big mills. He has two great loves, his daughter and his mills, and he don’t mean to let either one of them go if he can help it.”
“Do you believe it’s true?”
“Yes, I do. How do you like the idea?”
“It’s not my style. I’ve a pretty clear idea of what I’m going to do in this world.”
“Well, you’d better begin to haul in your silk sails, and study cotton goods, is my advice.”
“I ’ll manage him.”
“I don’t know about it, but if you’ve got her, you’re the first man that ever got far enough to measure himself with the General. I wish you luck.”
“You the same, old chum. May you conquer Boston and all the Pilgrim Fathers!”
“Thanks. The vision of one of them disturbs my dreams. One will be enough.”
Then followed six golden days on the banks of the Catawba. Every day he insisted with boyish enthusiasm on returning to that rock and seating her on her throne. He called her his queen, and worshipped at her feet.
He had the friendliest little chat with her mother, and told her how he loved her daughter and hoped for her approval. She answered with frankness that she was glad, and would love him as her own son, but that she disapproved of kissing and extravagant love-making until they were ready to be married, and their engagement duly announced.
So he could only hold Sallie’s hand and kiss the tips of her fingers and the little dimples where they joined the hand, and sometimes he would hold it against his own cheek while she smiled at him.
But when they rode homeward one evening he dared to put his arm behind her, high on the phaeton’s leather cushion, as they were going down a hill, and then lowered it a little as they started up the grade. She leaned back and found it there. At first she nestled against it very timidly and then trustingly. She looked into his face and both smiled.
“Isn’t that nice, Sallie?”
“Yes, it is,—I don’t think Mama would mind that, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I never promised not to lean back in a phaeton, did I?”
“Certainly not, and it’s all right.”
Toward the end of the week the General began to show him a grave friendly interest. He invited Gaston to go over the mills with him. The mills were located back of the wooded cliffs a quarter of a mile up the river. There were now four magnificent brick buildings stretching out over the river bottoms at right angles to its current. And there was a big dye house, a ginning house and a cotton-seed oil mill. The General stood on the hill top and proudly pointed it out to him.
“Isn’t that a grand sight, young man! We employ 2,000 hands down there, and consume hundreds of bales of cotton a day. We began here after the war without a cent, except our faith, and this magnificent water power. Now look!”
“You have certainly done a great work,” said Gaston, “I had no idea you had so many industries in the enclosure.”
“Yes, I sit down here on the hill some nights in the moonlight and look into this valley, and the hum of that machinery is like ravishing music. The machinery seems to me to be a living thing, with millions of fingers of steel and a great throbbing soul. I dream of the day when those swift fingers will weave their fabrics of gold and clothe the whole South in splendour!—the South I love, and for which I fought, and have yearned over through all these years. Ah! young man, I wish you boys of brain and genius would quit throwing yourselves away in law and dirty politics, and devote your powers to the South’s development!”
“Yes, but General, the people of the South had to go into politics instead of business on account of the enfranchisement of the Negro. It was a matter of life and death.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“No, sir, but others did for you.”
“How?” he asked incredulously, with just a touch of wounded pride.
“Well how many negroes do you employ in these mills?”
“None. We don’t allow a negro to come inside the enclosure.”
“Precisely so. You have prospered because you have got rid of the Negro.”
“I’ve simply let the Negro alone. Let others do the same.”
“But everybody can’t do it. There are now nine millions of them. You’ve simply shifted the burden on others’ shoulders. You haven’t solved the problem.”
“If we had less politics and more business, we would be better off.”
“But the trouble is, General, we can’t have more business until politics have settled some things.”
“Bah! You’re throwing yourself away in politics, young man! There’s nothing in it but dirt and disappointment.”
“To me, sir, politics is a religion.”
“Religion! Politics! I didn’t know you could ever mix ’em. I thought they were about as far apart as heaven is from hell!” exclaimed the General.
“They ought not to be sir, whatever the terrible facts, I believe that the Government is the organised virtue of the community, and that politics is religion in action. It may be a poor sort of religion, but it is the best we are capable of as members of society.”
“Well, that’s a new idea.”
“It’s coming to be more and more recognised by thoughtful men, General. I believe that the State is now the only organ through which the whole people can search for righteousness, and that the progress of the world depends more than ever on its integrity and purity.”
“Well, you’ve cut out a big job for yourself, if that’s your ideal. My idea of politics is a pig pen. The way to clean it is to kill the pigs.”
Gaston laughed and shook his head.
When they returned from the mills, Mrs. Worth drew the General into her room.
“Did he ask you for Sallie?”
“No, the young galoot never mentioned her name. I thought he would. But I must have scared him.”
“You didn’t quarrel over anything?”
“No! But I found out he had a mind of his own.”
“So have you, sir.”
WHY didn’t you ask him yesterday?” cried Sallie, as she entered the parlour the next morning.
“Darling, I was scared out of my wits. We got crossways on some questions we were discussing, and he snorted at me once, and every time I tried to screw up my courage to speak, a lump got in my throat and I gave it up. I thought I’d wait a day or two until he should be in a better humour.”
“He’s gone away to-day,” she said with disappointment.
“I’m glad of it, I ’ll write him a letter.”
“If you had asked him yesterday it would have been all right. He told me so when he left this morning, with a very tender tremor in his voice.”
“But it will be all right, sweetheart, when I write.”
“I wanted my ring,” she whispered.
“You shall have it,” he said, as he seized her hand and led her to a seat.
“Have you got it with you?” she asked with excitement. “Let me see it quick.”
He drew the little box from his pocket, withdrew the ring, concealing it in his hand, slipped it on her finger and kissed it. She threw her hand up into the light to see it.
“Oh! it is glorious! It’s the big green diamond Hiddenite I saw at the Exposition! It is the most beautiful stone I ever saw, and the only one of its kind in size and colour in the world. Professor Hidden told me so. I tried to get Papa to buy it for me. But he laughed at me, and said it was childish extravagance. Charlie dear, how could you get it?”
“That’s a little secret. But there are to be no secrets between us any more. I had a little hoard saved from my mother’s estate for the greatest need of my life. I confess my extravagance.”
“You are a matchless lover. I’m the proudest and happiest girl that breathes.”
“Nothing is too good for you, I wish I could make a greater sacrifice.”
“Wait, till I show it to Mama,” and she flew to her mother’s room. She returned immediately, looking at the ring and kissing it.
“Couldn’t show it to her, she had company,” she said. “Allan is talking to her.”
“Let’s get out of the house, dear. I hate that man like a rattlesnake.”
“Don’t be silly, I never cared a snap for him.”
“I know you didn’t, but there is a poison about him that taints the air for me. Get your horse and let’s go to our place at the old mill.”
They soon reached the spot, and with a laugh she sprang upon the rock and took her seat against the tree.
“Now, dear, humour this whim of mine. I’ve grown superstitious since you’ve made me happy. I have a presentiment of evil because that man was in the house. I am going to take the ring off and put it on your hand again out here where only the eyes of our birds will see, and the river we love will hear.”
“That will be nicer. I somehow feel that my life is built on this dear old rock,” she answered soberly.
He took the ring off her finger, dipped it in the white foam of the river, kissed it, and placed it on her hand.
“Now the spell is broken, isn’t it?” she cried, holding it out in the sunlight a moment to catch the flash of its green diamond depth.
“I’ve another token for you. This, you will not even show to your mother or father.” She bent low over a tiny package he unfolded.
“This is the first medal I won at college,” he continued—“the first victory of my life. It was the force that determined my character. It gave me an inflexible will. I worked at a tremendous disadvantage. Others were two years ahead of me in study for the contest. I locked myself up in my room day and night for ten months, and took just enough food and sleep for strength to work. I worked seventeen hours a day, except Sundays, for ten months without an hour of play. I won it brilliantly. Every line cut on its gold surface stands for a thousand aches of my body. Every little pearl set in it, grew in a pain of that struggle which set its seal on my inmost life. I came out of those ten months a man. I have never known the whims of a boy since.”
“And you engraved something on the back to me!”
“Yes, can’t you read it?”
“My eyes are dim,” she whispered.
“It is this—In the hand of manhood’s tenderest love I bring to thee my boyhood’s brightest dream. I was a man when I woke, but I have never lived till you taught me. Keep this as a pledge of eternal love. It’s the only little trinket I ever possessed. The world will see our ring. Don’t let them see this. It is the seal of your sovereignty of my soul in life, in death, and beyond. Will you make me this eternal pledge?”
“Unto the uttermost!” she murmured.
“Unto the uttermost!” he solemnly echoed.
“And now, what can I say or do for you when you show me in this spirit of prodigal sacrifice how dear I am in your eyes?”
“Those words from your lips are enough,” he declared.
“I ’ll give you more. I’m going to give you just a little bit of myself. I haven’t asked Mama, but we are engaged now—come closer.”
She placed her beautiful arms around his neck and pressed her lips upon his in the first rapturous kiss of love.
“No,—no more. It is enough,” she protested.
HE was at home now, waiting impatiently for the General’s answer to his letter. Two weeks had passed and he had not received it. But she had explained in her letters that her father had returned the day he left, had a talk with McLeod, and left on important business. They were expecting his return at any moment.
It was a new revelation of life he found in their first love letters. He never knew that he could write before. He sat for hours at his desk in his law office and poured out to her his dreams, hopes and ambitions. All the poetry of youth, and the passion and beauty of life, he put into those letters.
He wrote to her every day and she answered every other day. She wrote in half tearful apology that her mother disapproved of a daily letter, and she added wistfully, “I should like to write to you twice a day. Take the will for the deed, and as you love me, be sure to continue yours daily.”
And on the days the letter came, with eager trembling hands he seized it, without waiting for the rest of his mail or his papers. With set face, and quick nervous step, he would mount the stairs to his office, lock his door and sit down to devour it. He would hold it in his hands sometimes for ten minutes just to laugh and muse over it and try to guess what new trick of phrase she had used to express her love. He was surprised at her brilliance and wit. He had not held her so deep a thinker on the serious things of life as these letters had showed, nor had he noticed how keen her sense of humour. He was so busy looking at her beautiful face, and drinking the love-light from her eyes, he had overlooked these things when with her. Now they flashed on him as a new treasure, that would enrich his life.
At the end of two weeks when the General had not answered his letter he began to grow nervous. A vague feeling of fear grew on him. Something had happened to darken his future. He felt it by a subtle telepathy of sympathetic thought. He was gloomy and depressed all day after he had received and feasted on the wittiest letter she had ever written. What could it mean he asked himself a thousand times—some shadow had fallen across their lives. He knew it as clearly as if the revelation of its misery were already unfolded.
He went to the post-office on the next day he was to receive a letter, crushed with a sense of foreboding. He waited until the mail was all distributed and the general delivery window flung open before he approached his box. He was afraid to look at her letter. He slowly opened the box.
There was nothing in it!
“Sam, you’re not holding out my letter to tease me, old boy?” he asked pathetically.
Sam was about to joke him about the uncertainties of love, when his eye rested on his drawn face.
“Lord no, Charlie,” he protested, “you know I wouldn’t treat you like that.”
“Then look again, you may have dropped it.”
Sam turned and looked carefully over the floor, over and under his desks and tables and returned.
“No, but it may have been thrown into the wrong bag by that fool mail clerk on the train. You may get it to-morrow.”
He turned away and walked to his office, forgetting his key in the open box. The vague sense of calamity that weighed on his heart for the past two days, now became a reality.
He sat in his office all the afternoon in a dull stupor of suspense. He tried to read her last letter over. But the pages would get blurred and fade out of sight, and he would wake to find he had been staring at one sentence for an hour.
He knew his foster mother would be all sympathy and tenderness if he told her, but somehow he hadn’t the heart. She had led him to his love. He had been so boyishly and frankly happy boasting to her of his success, he sickened at the thought of telling her. He went out for a walk in the woods, and lay down alone beside a brook like a wounded animal.
The next day he watched his box again with the hope that Sam’s guess might be right, and the missing letter would come. But, instead of the big square-cut envelope he had waited for, he received a bulky letter in an old-fashioned masculine handwriting with the post mark of Independence, and a mill mark in the upper left hand corner.
He did not have to look twice at that letter. It was the sealed verdict of his jury. He locked his office door. It was long and rambling, full of a kindly sympathy expressed in a restrained manner. He could not believe at first that so outspoken a man as the General could have written it. The substance of its meaning, however, was plain enough. He meant to say that as he was not in a position to make a suitable home at present for a wife, and as he disapproved of long engagements, it seemed better that no engagement should be entered into or announced.
He stared at this letter for an hour, trying to grasp the mystery that lay back of its halting, half-contradictory sentences. He did not know till long afterwards that the General had written it with two blue eyes tearfully watching him, and waiting to read it; that now and then there was the sound of a great sob, and two arms were around his neck, and a still white face lying on his shoulder, and that tears had washed all the harshness and emphasis out of what he had meant to write, and all but blotted out any meaning to what he did write.
But withal it was clear enough in its import. It meant that the General had haltingly but authoritatively denied his suit. He instantly made up his mind to ask an interview at his home, and know plainly all his reasons for this change of attitude. He wrote his letter and posted it immediately by return mail. He knew that the request would precipitate a crisis, and he trembled at the outcome. Either her father would hesitate and receive him, or end it with a crash of his imperious will.