TO his dying day Gaston will never forget that ride to her home with Sallie Worth by his side. It was a perfect May day. The leaves on the trees were just grown and flashed in their green satin under the Southern sun, and every flower seemed in full bloom.
A great joy filled his heart with a sense of divine restfulness. He was unusually silent. And then she said something that made him open his eyes in new wonder.
“Don’t drive so fast Ben, and go around the longest way, I’m enjoying this.” She paused and a mischievous look came into her eyes as she saw his expression. “I’ve got the lion here by my side. I want to show all the girls in town that I’m the only one here to-day. It isn’t often I’ve a great man tied down fast like this.”
“Why did you spoil the first part of that pretty speech with the last?” he said with a frown.
“It was only your vanity that made me pause.”
“Could you read me like that?”
“Of course, all men are vain, much vainer than women.” Again there was a long silence.
They had reached the outskirts of the city now and were driving slowly through the deep shadows of a great forest.
“What beautiful trees!” he exclaimed.
“They are fine. Do you love big trees?”
“Yes, they always seem to me to have a soul. It used to make me almost cry to watch them fall beneath Nelse’s axe. I’d never have the heart to clear a piece of woods if I owned it.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that. Papa laughed at me when I said something of the sort when he wanted to cut these woods. He left them just to please me. They belong to our place. They hide the house till you get right up to the gate, but I love them.”
Again he looked into her eyes and was silent.
“Now, I come to think of it, you’re the only girl I’ve met to-day who hasn’t mentioned my speech. That’s strange.”
“How do you know that I’m not saving up something very pretty to say to you later about it?”
“Tell me now.”
“No, you’ve spoiled it by your vanity in asking.” She said this looking away carelessly.
“Then I ’ll interpret your silence as the highest compliment you can pay me. When words fail we are deeply moved.”
“Vanity of vanity, all is vanity saith the preacher!” she exclaimed lifting her pretty hands.
They turned through a high arched iron gateway, across which was written in gold letters, “Oakwood.”
On a gently rising hill on the banks of the Catawba river rose a splendid old Southern mansion, its big Greek columns gleaming through the green trees like polished ivory. A wide porch ran across the full width of the house behind the big pillars, and smaller columns supported the full sweep of a great balcony above. The house was built of brick with Portland cement finish, and the whole painted in two shades of old ivory, with moss-green roof and dark rich Pompeian red brick foundations. With its green background of magnolia trees it seemed like a huge block of solid ivory flashing in splendour from its throne on the hill. The drive wound down a little dale, around a great circle filled with shrubbery and flowers and up to the pillared porte-cochere.
“Oh! what a beautiful home!” Gaston exclaimed with feeling.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said with delight. “I love every brick in its walls, every tree and flower and blade of grass.”
“I’ve always dreamed of a home like that. Those big columns seem to link one to the past and add dignity and meaning to life.”
“Then you can understand how I love it, when I was born here and every nook and corner has its love message for me from the past that I have lived, as well as its wider meaning which you see.”
“The old South built beautiful homes, didn’t they? And that was one of the finest things about the proud old days,” he said.
“Yes, and the new South of which you spoke to-day will not forget this heritage of the old, when it comes to itself and shakes off its long suffering and poverty!”
Strange to hear that sort of a speech from a girl who loves society, dances divinely and dresses to kill. He thought of the words of his foster mother with a pang. He hoped she was joking about those things. But he had a strong suspicion from the consciousness of power with which she had tried once or twice to tease him that they were going to prove fatally true.
“Mother tells me you were in Baltimore, in that swell girls’ school on North Charles Street when I was a student at the University?”
“Yes, and we gave reception after reception to the Hopkins men and you never once honoured us with your presence.”
“But I didn’t know you were there, Miss Sallie.”
“Of course not. If you had, I wouldn’t speak to you now. They said you were a recluse. That you never went into society and didn’t speak to a woman for four years.”
“How did you hear that?”
“Bob St. Clare told me after I came home by way of apology for your bad manners in so shamefully neglecting a young woman from your own state.”
“I ’ll make amends, now.”
“Oh! I’m not suffering from loneliness as I did then. You know Bob put us up to inviting you to deliver the address. He said you were the only orator in North Carolina.”
“Bob’s the best friend I ever had. We entered college together at fifteen, and became inseparable friends.”
He helped her from the carriage and she ran lightly up the high stoop.
“Now come here and look at the view of the river before Papa comes and begins to talk about the tremendous water power in the falls.”
He followed her to the end of the long porch overlooking the river. Behind the house the hill abruptly plunged downward to the waters’ edge in a mountainous cliff. The river wound around this cliff past the house, emerging into a valley where it described a graceful curve almost doubling on itself and rolled softly away amid green overhanging willows and towering sycamores till lost in the distance toward the blue spurs of King’s Mountain.
“A glorious view!” said Gaston, looking long and lovingly at the silver surface of the river.
“Do you love the water, Mr. Gaston?”
“Passionately. I was born among the hills, but the first time I saw the ocean sweeping over five miles of sand reefs and breaking in white thundering spray at my feet, I stood there on a sand dune on our wild coast and gazed entranced for an hour without moving. Of all the things God ever made on this earth I love the waters of the sea, and all moving water suggests it to me. That river says, I must hurry to the sea!”
“It is strange we should have such similar tastes, she said seriously. But it did not seem strange to him. Somehow he expected to find her agree with every whim and fancy of his nature.
“Now we will find Mama. She is such an invalid she rarely goes out. Papa will be home any minute.”
“We are glad to welcome you Mr. Gaston,” said her mother in a kindly manner. “I’m sure you’ve enjoyed the drive this beautiful day if Sallie hasn’t been trying to tease you. The boys say she’s very tiresome at times.”
“Why Mama, I’m surprised at you. The idea of such a thing! There’s not a word of truth in it, is there, Mr. Gaston?”
“Certainly not, Miss Sallie. I ’ll testify, Mrs. Worth, that your daughter has been simply charming.”
She ran to meet her father at the door. There was the sound of a hearty kiss, a little whispering, and the General stepped briskly into the parlour where she had left her guest.
“Pleased to welcome you to our home, young man. They say down town that you made the greatest speech ever heard in Independence. Sorry I missed it. We ’ll have you to dinner anyway. I knew your brave father in the army. And now I come, to think of it, I saw you once when you were a boy. I was struck with your resemblance to your father then, as now. You showed me the way down to Tom Camp’s house. Don’t you remember?”
“Certainly General, but I didn’t flatter myself that you would recall it.”
“I never forget a face. I hope you have been enjoying yourself?”
“More than I can express, sir.”
“I ’ll join you bye and bye,” said the General, taking leave.
“Now isn’t he a dear old Papa?” she said demurely.
“He certainly knows how to make a timid young man feel at home.”
“Are you timid?”
“Hadn’t you noticed it?”
“Well, hardly.” She shook her head and closed her eyes in the most tantalising way. “To see the cool insolence of conscious power with which you looked that great crowd in the face when you arose on that platform, I shouldn’t say I was struck with your timidity.”
“I was really trembling from head to foot.”
“I wonder how you would look if really cool!”
“Honestly, Miss Sallie, I never speak to any crowd without the intensest nervous excitement. I may put on a brave front, but it’s all on the surface.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said shaking her head.
She looked at his serious face a moment and was silent.
“It’s queer how we run out of something to say, isn’t it?” she asked at length.
“I hadn’t thought of it.”
“Come up to the observatory and I’ll show you Lord Cornwallis’ look-out when he had his headquarters here during the Revolution.”
She lifted her soft white skirts and led the way up the winding mahogany stairs into the observatory from which the surrounding country could be seen for miles.
“Here Lord Cornwallis waited in vain for Colonel Ferguson to join him with his regiment from King’s Mountain.”
“Where my great-grandfather was drawing around him his cordon of death with his fierce mountain men!” interrupted Gaston.
“Was your great-grandfather in that battle?”
“Yes, it was fought on his land, and his two-story log house with the rifle holes cut in the chimney jambs still stands.”
“Then we will shake hands again,” she cried with enthusiasm, “for we are both children of the Revolution!”
Gaston took her beautiful hand in his and held it lingeringly. Never in all his life had the mere touch of a human hand thrilled him with such strange power, How long he held it he could not tell but it was with a sort of hurt surprise he felt her gently withdraw it at last.
They had reached the parlour again, and he slowly fell into an easy chair.
“Do you dance, Miss Sallie?”
“Why yes, don’t you dance?”
“Never tried in my life.”
“Don’t you approve of dancing?”
“I never had time to think about it. It always seemed silly to me.”
“It’s great fun.”
“I’d take lessons if you would agree to teach me, and I could dance with you all the time, and keep all the other fellows away.”
“Well, I must say that’s doing fairly well for a timid young man’s first day’s acquaintance. What will you say when you once become fully self-possessed?” She lifted her high arched eyebrows and looked at him with those blue eyes full of tantalising fun until he had to look down at the floor to keep from saying more than he dared. When he looked up again he changed the subject.
“Miss Sallie, I feel like I’ve known you ever since I was born.” She blushed and made no reply.
Dinner was announced, and Gaston was amazed to see Allan McLeod enter chattering familiarly with the General. He seemed on the most intimate terms with the family and his eye lingered fondly on Sallie’s face in a way that somehow Gaston resented as an impertinence.
“I didn’t even know you were acquainted with the Hon. Allan McLeod, Miss Sallie,” said Gaston as they entered the parlour alone.
“Yes, he was a sort of ward of Papa’s when he was a boy. Papa hates his politics, but he has always been in and out almost like one of the family since I can remember. I think he’s’ a fascinating man, don’t you?”
“I do, but I don’t like him.”
“Well, he’s a great friend of mine, you mustn’t quarrel.”
Gaston went to the hotel with his brain in a whirl wondering just what she meant. It was nearly twelve o’clock before he left the General’s house. How he had passed these eleven hours he could not imagine. They seemed like eleven minutes in one way. In another he seemed to have lived a lifetime that day.
“By George, she’s an angel!” he kept saying over and over to himself as he climbed to his room forgetting the elevator.
WHEN Gaston tried to sleep, he found it impossible. His brain was on fire, every nerve quivering with some new mysterious power and his imagination soaring on tireless wings. He rolled and tossed an hour, then got up, and sat by his open window looking out over the city sleeping in the still white moonlight. He looked into the mirror and grinned.
“What is the matter with me!” he exclaimed. “I believe I’m going crazy.”
He sat down and tried to work the thing out by the formulas of cold reason. “It’s perfectly absurd to say I’m in love. My wild romancing about a passion that will grasp all life in its torrent sweep is only a boy’s day dream. The world is too prosy for that now.”
Yet in spite of this argument the room seemed as bright as day, and the moon was only a pale sister light to the radiance from the face of the girl he had seen that day. Her face seemed to him smiling close into his now. The light of her eyes was tender and soothing like the far away memory of his mother’s voice.
“It’s a passing fancy,” he said at last, after he had sat an hour dreaming and dreaming of scenes he dared not frame in words even alone. He stood by the window again.
“What a beautiful old world this is after all!” he thought as he gazed out on the tops of the oaks whose young leaves were softly sighing at the touch of the night winds. Turning his eye downward to the street he saw the men loading the morning papers into the wagons for the early mail.
“I wonder what sort of report of my speech they put in?” he exclaimed. Unable to sleep he hastily dressed, went down and bought a paper.
On the front page was a flattering portrait, two columns in width, with a report of his speech filling the entire page, and an editorial review of a column and a half. He was hailed as the coming man of the state in this editorial, which contained the most extravagant praise. He knew it was the best thing he had ever done, and he felt for the minute proud of himself and his achievement. This contemplation of his own greatness quieted his nerves and he fell asleep. He was awakened by the first rolling of carts on the pavements at dawn. He knew he had not slept more than two hours but he was as wide awake as though he had slept soundly all night.
“I must be threatened with that spell of fever Auntie has been worrying about since I was a boy!” he laughed as he slowly dressed.
“It’s now six o’clock, and my train don’t leave till nine,” he mused. “But am I going on that train, that’s the question?”
The fact was, now he came to think of it, there was no need of hurrying home. He would stay a while and look this mystery in the face until he was disillusioned. Besides he wanted to find out what McLeod’s visit meant. He had a vague feeling of uneasiness when he recalled the way McLeod had assumed about the General’s house. He had told Sallie he must hurry home on the morning’s train for no earthly reason than that he had intended to do so when he came.
So after breakfast he wrote her a little note.
“My Dear Miss Worth,
“My train left me. Will you have compassion on a stranger in a strange city and let me call to see you again to-day? Charles Gaston.”
He waited impatiently until he heard his train leave, and then told the boy to make tracks for the General’s house.
A peal of laughter rang through the hall when Sallie’s dancing eyes read that note.
“Oh! the storyteller!” she cried.
And this was the answer she sent back.
“Certainly. Come out at once. I ’ll take you buggy driving all by myself over a lovely road up the river. I do this in acknowledgment of the gracious flattery you pay me in the story you told about the train. Of course I know you waited till the train left before you sent the note. Sallie Worth.”
“Now I wonder if that young rascal of a boy told her I wrote that note an hour ago? I ’ll wring his neck if he did. Come here boy!”
The negro came up grinning in hopes of another quarter.
“Did you tell that young lady anything about when I wrote that note?”
“Na-sah! Nebber tole her nuffin. She des laugh and laugh fit ter kill herse’f des quick es she reads de note.”
Gaston smiled and threw him another tip.
“Yassah, she’s a knowin’ lady, sho’s you bawn, I been dar lots er times fo’ dis!”
Gaston was tempted to ask him for whom he carried those former messages. He walked with bounding steps, his being tingling to his finger tips with the joy of living. The avenue leading the full length of the city toward the General’s house was two miles long before it reached the woods at the gate. It seemed only a step this morning.
As he passed through the cool shade of the woods a squirrel was playing hide and seek with his mate on the old crooked fence beside the road. His little nimble mistress flew up a great tree to its topmost bough and chattered and laughed at her lover as he scrambled swiftly after her. She waited until he was just reaching out his arm to grasp her, and then with another scream of laughter leaped straight out into the air to another tree top, and then another and another until lost in the heart of the forest.
“I wonder if that’s going to be my fate!” he mused as he turned into the gateway.
Again the majestic beauty of that gleaming mass of ivory on the hill with its green background swept his soul with its power. It seemed a different shade of colour now that he saw it with the sun at another angle. Its surface seemed to have the soft sheen of creamy velvet.
He paused and sighed, “Why should I be so poor! If I only had a house like that I’d turn that big banquet hall on the left wing into a library, and I’d ask no higher heaven.”
And he fell to wondering if it would really be worth the having without the face and voice of the girl who was there within waiting for him. No, he was sure of it this morning for the first time in his life. The certainty of this conviction brought to his heart a feeling of loneliness and despair. When he thought of his abject poverty and the long years of struggle before him, and of that beautiful accomplished young woman rich, petted, the belle of the city, the gulf that separated their lives seemed impassable.
“I’m playing with fire!” he said to himself as he looked up at the graceful pillars with their carved and fluted capitals. “Well, let it be so. Let me live life to its deepest depths and its highest reach. It is better to love and lose than never to love at all.” And he walked into the cool hall with the ease and assurance of its master.
Sallie greeted him with the kindliest grace.
“I’m so glad you stayed to-day, Mr. Gaston. I should have been really chagrined to think I made so slight an impression on you that you could walk deliberately away on a pre-arranged schedule. I am not used to being treated so lightly.”
He tried to make some answer to this half serious banter, but was so absorbed in just looking at her he said nothing.
She was dressed in a morning gown of a soft red material, trimmed with old cream lace. The material of a woman’s dress had never interested him before. He knew calico from silk, but beyond that he never ventured an opinion. To colour alone he was responsive. This combination of red and creamy white, with the bodice cut low showing the lines of her beautiful white shoulders and the great mass of dark hair rising in graceful curves from her full round neck heightened her beauty to an extraordinary degree. As she walked, the clinging folds of her dress, outlining her queenly figure, seemed part of her very being and to be imbued with her soul. He was dazzled with the new revelation of her power over him.
“Have you no apology, sir, for pretending that you were going home this morning?” she said seating herself by his side.
“You didn’t ask me to stay with fervour.”
“It ought not to have been necessary.”
“Didn’t you really know I was not going?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
“Yes, you see I’m twenty-one years old, and I’ve seen such things happen before!” she purred this slowly and burst into laughter.
“Now, Miss Sallie, that’s cruel to throw me down in a heap of dead dogs I don’t even know.”
“Don’t you like dogs?”
“Four legged ones, yes. But I like my friends alive.”
“Oh! It didn’t kill any of them. They are all strong and hearty. But if you’re so domestic in your tastes why haven’t you settled in life?”
“Been waiting to find the woman of my dreams.”
“And you haven’t found her?”
“Not up to yesterday.”
“Oh! I forgot,” she said archly, “you’re so timid.”
“Honestly, I was.”
“Up to yesterday!” she murmured. “Well, tell me what your dreams demanded? What kind of a creature must she be?”
“I have forgotten.”
“What! Forgotten the dreams of your ideal woman?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Yesterday.”
“Thanks. We are getting on beautifully, aren’t we? You will get over your timidity in time, I’m sure.”
He smiled, looked down at the pattern of the carpet and did not speak for some minutes. His soul was thrilled and satisfied in her presence. As he lifted his eyes from the floor they rested on the piano.
“Will you play for me, Miss Sallie? Auntie says you play delightfully.”
“Auntie? Who is Auntie?”
“Mrs. Durham, my foster mother, of course. Excuse my unconscious assumption of your familiarity with all my antecedents. I can’t get over the impression that I have known you all my life.”
“And that reminds me that I started to say something to you yesterday that was perfectly ridiculous, but caught myself in time.”
“I wish you had said it.”
“Mrs. Durham is a great flatterer of those she loves. She thinks I can play. But I’m the veriest amateur.”
“Let me be the judge.”
She was looking over her music, and he had opened the piano.
“I ’ll play for you with pleasure. Sit there in that big arm chair. I’m sorry I tired you so early in the day with my chatter.”
And before he could protest her fingers were touching the piano with the ease of the born musician.
He sat enraptured as he watched the sinuous grace with which her fingers touched the ivory keys and heard their answering cry which seemed the breath of her own soul in echo.
She had an easy apparently careless touch. To old familiar music she gave a charm that was new, adding something indefinable to the musician’s thought that gave luminous power to its interpretation. He had no knowledge of the technique of music, but now he knew that she was improvising. The piano was the voice of her own beautiful soul, and it was pulsing with a tenderness that melted him to tears.
Suddenly the music ceased, and she turned her face full on his before he could brush away a big tear that rolled down. She flushed, closed the piano, and quietly resumed her place by his side.
“And, now, you haven’t told me how well I played. You’re the first young man so careless.”
“I have told you.”
“How?”
“The way you told me yesterday that you understood me—with a tear.”
“I appreciate it more than words.”
“So did I,” he slowly said. Again there was a long silence.
“But we do love to hear folks say in words what they think sometimes. I confess I was immensely elated over the fine things the paper said about me this morning.”
“It’s a wonder too. Our editor is a cranky sort of fellow. I was afraid he’d say a lot of mean things about you. But Papa says you swallowed him whole.”
“Did you wish him to say kind things about me?”
“Of course,” she said, and then the look of mischief came back in her eye. “Were you not our guest? I should have felt like whipping him if he hadn’t said nice things.”
“Then I ’ll tell you what I think about your playing. You gave those strings a soul for the first time for me, beautiful, living, throbbing, that spoke a message of its own. The piece you improvised, I shall never forget. Such music seems to me the grasping of the infinite by hands that touch the impalpable and bringing it for a moment within the sphere of matter that a kindred soul may hear and see and feel.”
She started to make some reply but her lips quivered and she looked away across the valley at the river and made no answer.
At dinner the General was in his most genial mood, laughing and joking, and drawing out Gaston on politics and cotton-mill developments, and trying with all his might to tease his daughter.
As he took his departure for the mills, he said, “Young man, I’d ask you to go with me and look at the machinery, but I see it’s no use. I heard her twisting you around her fingers with that piano a while ago.”
“Papa, don’t be so silly!’ cried Sallie, slipping her arm around him, putting one hand over his mouth, and kissing him.
“Go on to your work. I ’ll entertain Mr. Gaston.”
“Indeed you will!” he shouted, throwing her another kiss as he left.
“He’s the dearest father any girl ever had in this world. I know you loved yours, didn’t you, Mr. Gaston?”
“Mine was killed in battle, Miss Sallie. I never knew him. But I had the most beautiful mother that ever lived. I lost her when a mere boy. And the world has never been the same since. I envy you.”
“I forgot. Forgive me,” she softly said, looking up into his face with tenderness.
“If I had only had a sister! How my heart used to ache when I’d see other boys playing with a sister! My poor little starved soul was so hungry, I would go off in the woods sometimes and cry for hours.”
“I wish I had known you when you were a little boy,—I can’t conceive of a dignified orator swaying thousands running around as a barefooted boy. But you must have gone barefooted for I think Papa said so, didn’t he?”
“Indeed I did, and sometimes I am afraid for the very good reason I didn’t have any shoes.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have worn them if you had. I always wanted to be a boy just to go barefooted. I think girls lose so much of a child’s life by having to wear shoes.”
“But you never knew what it meant to want shoes and not be able to have them,” he said, looking at the shining tips of her slippers peeping from the edge of her dress.
“No, but I never thought these things made a great difference in our lives after all. I believe it is what we are, not what we have, that gives life meaning.”
He looked at her intently.
“I must get ready now for our drive. The horse will be here in ten minutes. Enjoy the view on the porch until I am ready,” and she bounded up the stairs to her room.
In a few minutes she was by his side again dressed in spotless white as he had seen her first. She lifted the lines over the sleek horse, and he dashed swiftly down the drive.
Oh! the peace and bliss of that drive along the lonely river road by its cool green banks!
How he poured out to her his inmost thoughts—things he had not dared to whisper alone with himself and God! And then he wondered why he had thus laid bare his secret dreams to this girl he had known but twenty-four hours. Nonsense, down in his soul he knew he had known her forever. Before the world was made, ages and ages ago in eternity he had known her. He turned to her now drawn by a resistless force as a plant turns toward the sunlight for its life. How he could talk that day! All he had ever known of art and beauty, all he knew of the deep truths of life, were on his lips leaping forth in simple but impassioned words. For hours he lay at her feet where she sat on a rock, high up on the cliffs overlooking the river and poured out his heart like a child. And she listened with a dreamy look as though to the music of a master.
At last she sprang to her feet and looked at her watch.
“Oh! Mama will be furious. It will be after sundown before we can get home. We must hurry.”
“I ’ll make it all right with your Mama,” he replied as though he were skilled in meeting such emergencies.
“Don’t you speak to her. It ’ll be all I can do to manage her.”
The twilight was gathering when they reached the house, and an angry anxious mother was waiting high up on the stoop.
“Watch me smooth every wrinkle out of her brow now!” she whispered as she flew up the steps.
Before her mother could say a word, a white hand was on her mouth and pretty lips were whispering something in her ears she had never heard before. There was the sound of a kiss and he heard Sallie say, “Not a word!” And the mother greeted him with a smile and a curiously searching look. She chatted pleasantly until her daughter returned from her room, and then left her. Again it was nearly twelve o’clock before he reached the hotel.
The next morning Bob St. Clare broke in on him before he was out of bed.
“Look here, you sly dog, what are you doing slipping and sliding around here yet?”
“Bob, you’re the man I want to see. Tell me all you know about the Worths.”
“The Worths? Which one?”
“There’s only one so far as I can see.”
“Well, you may find out there’s two if you should happen to collide with the General.”
“Does he cut up at times?”
“He’s all right till he turns on you, and then you want to find shelter.”
“Did you ever run up against him?”
“No, I never got that far. He’s hail-fellow-well-met with every youngster in town. He will laugh and joke about his daughter until he thinks she is in earnest about a fellow, and then he swoops down on him like a hawk. I ’ll bet a hundred dollars he’s playing you now for all you’re worth against the latest favourite. But Miss Sallie—she’s an angel!”
“Look here, Bob, you’re not in love with her?”
“Well, I’m convalescing at present my boy. Every boy in the town has been there, but I don’t believe she cares a snap for a man of us unless it’s that big redheaded McLeod. I can’t make his position out exactly.”
“Did she jolt you hard when you hit the ground?”
“Easiest thing you ever saw. She has a supreme genius for painless cruelty. When the time comes she can pull your eye-tooth out in such a delicate friendly way you will have to swear she hasn’t hurt you.”
“You still go?”
“Lord yes, we all do,—sort of a congress of the lost meet down there. They all hang on. She keeps the friendship of every poor devil she kills.”
“You know you make the cold chills run down my back when you talk like that.”
“Are you in love with her, Gaston?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
“Then what in the thunder have you been doing out there two days and nights, if you haven’t made love to her?”
“Just basking in the sun.”
“Well, you are a fool. Eleven hours the first day, and fifteen hours yesterday. Confound you, don’t you know a dozen fellows in town are cursing you for all they can think of?”
“What about?”
“Why for trying to hog the whole time, day and night. She won’t let a mother’s son of them come near till you’re gone.”
“Well, that’s immense!” exclaimed Gaston slapping his friend on the back.
“Don’t be too sure. She’s just sizing you up. She’s done the same thing a dozen times before.”
“I don’t believe it.”
And he didn’t go home until the end of the week when the last cent of his money was gone.
HE was on the train at last homeward bound. Gazing out of the window of the car he was trying to find where he stood. He must be in love. He faced the remarkable fact that he had spent a whole week in Independence at an expensive hotel, and squandered every cent of the small fee he had received for his address in what would be otherwise a perfectly senseless manner.
Yet he felt rich. He was sure he had never spent money so wisely and economically in his life. Beyond the shadow of a doubt he was in love,—desperately and hopelessly committed to this one girl for life. He said it in his heart with a shout of triumph. Life was not a sterile desert of brute work. It was true. Love the magician of the ages, lived in this world of lost faiths and dead religions.
Now that he was leaving he felt a tingling impulse to leap off the train, cut across the fields and run back to her—and he laughed aloud, just as the train came to a sudden stop, and everybody looked at him and smiled.
A drummer looked up from a novel he was reading and said, “It is a fine day, partner, isn’t it?”
“Never saw a finer,” answered Gaston with another laugh.
He dwelt long and greedily on the consciousness of this new vitalising secret he felt for the first time throbbing in his soul. He bathed his heart in its warmth until he could feel the red blood rush to the ends of his fingers with its new fever. He breathed its perfume until every nerve quivered. “I have never lived before. No matter now if I die, I have lived!” he said slowly and reverently.
He wondered long and wistfully what was in her heart while this wild tumult was going on in him. He wondered if it were possible she loved him. It seemed too good to be true. He was afraid to believe it. And yet his whole soul with every power of his being cried out that she did. He could not have been mistaken in the message he read in the liquid depths of her eyes, and the delicate tenderness of her voice. Words may say nothing, but these signs are the language of the universal. Still, others had been equally sure, and been deceived. Might not he too make the fatal mistake? It was possible. And there was the pain.
She had not uttered a single word in all the hours they spent together that might not be interpreted in a conventional meaningless way.
Yet he had given to every one of these words a soul meaning that spoke directly to his inner being and not his ear.
He had never spoken a word of shallow love-making to a woman in his life. To him love was too holy a mystery. It would have been the blasphemy of the Holy Ghost—a sin that would not be forgiven in this world or the world to come. His college mates had called him a crank on this subject. But he shut his lips in a way that always closed the argument, and they let him alone with his Idol.
“I am afraid yet to put it to the test!” he said at last. “I must have time to reveal my best self to her. I must see her again, live close to her day by day, and bring to bear on her every power of body and soul I possess.” Mrs. Durham met him with dancing eyes. “Oh, I’ve heard from you, sir!”
“Kiss me Auntie, and be kind. I’m in the last stages of delirium!”
He took her hands both in his and looked at her long. “How good you’ve been to me, Auntie, in all the past. You never looked so beautiful as to-day. I want to thank you for every word you’ve said to Miss Sallie for me. It may have helped just a little anyway.”
“Well you are in the last stages!” she exclaimed gleefully.
“And you are glad of it?”
“Of course, I am, it will make a man of you.”
“But suppose I lose?”
She was silent a moment and then slipped her arm gently about him, drew down his ear and whispered, “You shall not lose—I’ve set my heart on it.”
He pressed her hands and said, “How like my sweet mother’s voice was that!”
And then they fell to discussing plans for giving Miss Sallie and her friend a jolly time at the Springs.
“But Auntie, these plans don’t seem to me exactly what I’d like. You see I want to be the whole thing. It may be hopelessly selfish, but I can’t help it.”
“Well that isn’t best.”
“Say Auntie, what do I look like anyway? How would you describe my make up? Let’s get at the weak spots and splint them up a little. You know, I never seriously cared a rap before about my looks.”
“Well”—she answered, slowly regarding him, “I ’ll be perfectly frank with you.
“You are tall—at least two inches taller than the average man, and your muscular body gives one the impression of power. You have black hair, dark-brown eyes that look out from your shaggy straight eye-brows with a piercing light.”
“You think the brows too shaggy?”
“No, I like them. They suggest reserve power and brain capacity.”
“Good, I never thought of that.”
“You have a face that is massive, almost leonine, and a square-cut determined mouth, that always clean shaven, sometimes looks too grim.”
“I ’ll remember that and look pleasant.”
“You have a big hand and sometimes shake hands too strongly. You have a handsome aristocratic foot when you wear decent shoes. You often walk humpshouldered, and sit so too.”
“I ’ll brace up.”
“You have deep vertical wrinkles between your eyes just where your straight eyebrows meet.”
“Heavens, I didn’t know I had wrinkles!”
“Yes, but they mean habits of thought like your stooping shoulders, I don’t object to such wrinkles in a man’s face. But the best feature of all your stock is your eye. Your big brown eyes are about the only perfect thing about you. There’s infinite tenderness in them. Now and then they gleam with a hidden fire that tells of enthusiasm, thought, will, character, and dauntless courage.”
She looked and they were misty with tears.
He pressed her hand. “Auntie, I didn’t know how much you’ve loved me all these years. How love opens one’s eyes!”
“You have a high temper, plenty of pride, and are given to looking on the dark side of things too quickly. You lack poise of character and sureness of touch yet, but with it all, yours is a masterful nature.”
“One you think that a perfect woman could love?”
“There are no perfect women; but I ’ll match you against any woman I know. So there, now, take courage.”
“I will,” he gravely answered.
He hurried to his office and read his mail. There were two letters retaining his services for jury work in important cases. His heart leaped at the sign of coming success. What a new meaning love gave to every event in life.
He turned to his books, and began immediately a searching study of every question involved in these cases. He would carry the court by storm. He would lead the jury spellbound by his eloquence to a certain verdict. How clear his brain! He felt he was alive to his finger-tips, and argus-eyed.
He worked hour after hour without the slightest fatigue or knowledge of the flight of time. He looked up at last with surprise to find it was night, and was startled by the voice of the Preacher calling him from below.
“What’s the matter with you? Mrs. Durham sent me to find you. She was afraid you had gone up on the roof and walked off.”
“I ’ll be ready in a minute, Doctor,” he called from the window.
“I haven’t known you to take to law so violently in four years. What’s up? Got a capital case?”
“Yes, I believe I have. It’s a matter of life and death to one poor soul anyhow.”
“Now, honour bright haven’t you been working all this afternoon on a love-letter that you’ve just finished and addressed to Independence?”
“‘No sir. To tell you the fact, I didn’t dare to ask her to write to me. I knew I couldn’t control a pen.”
“My boy, I wish you success with all my heart. It makes me young again to look into your face. I’ve had my supper, when you’ve finished your confab with your Auntie, come out here in the square to the seat under the old oak, I want to talk to you on some important business.”
“What have you been doing,” asked Mrs. Durham.
“Building a home for her!” he cried in a whisper. He went behind the chair where his foster mother sat pouring his tea, bent low and kissed her high white forehead. “My own Mother! I ’ll never call you Auntie again!”
Tears sprang to her eyes, and she kissed his hand, tenderly holding it to her lips.
“Ah! Love is a wonder worker, isn’t he Charlie?”
“Yes, and I can’t realise the joy that lifts and inspires me when I think that I am one of the elect. It’s too good to be true. I have been initiated into the great secret. I have tasted the water of Life. I shall not see Death.”
She looked at him with pride. “I knew you would make a matchless lover. I envy Sallie her young eyes and ears!”
“You need not envy her. You will never grow old.”
“So much the worse if we miss the dreams that fill the souls of the young,” she said with an accent of sorrowful pride.