THE PRETTY DAUGHTER OF THE MAYOR
The pretty girl whom Ordway had seen on the gravelled walk was Milly
Trend, the only child of the Mayor of Tappahannock. People said of
Jasper Trend that his daughter was the one soft spot in a heart that was
otherwise as small and hard as a silver dollar, and of Milly Trend the
same people said--well, that she was pretty. Her prettiness was
invariably the first and the last thing to be mentioned about her.
Whatever sterner qualities she may have possessed were utterly obscured
by an exterior which made one think of peach blossoms and spring
sunshine. She had a bunch of curls the colour of ripe corn, which she
wore tied back from her neck with a velvet ribbon; her eyes were the
eyes of a baby; and her mouth had an adorable little trick of closing
over her small, though slightly prominent teeth. The one flaw in her
face was this projection of her teeth, and when she looked at herself in
the glass it was her habit to bite her lips closely together until the
irregular ivory line was lost. It was this fault, perhaps, which kept
her prettiness, though it was superlative in its own degree, from ever
rising to the height of beauty. In Milly's opinion it had meant the
difference between the glory of a world-wide reputation and the lesser
honour of reigning as the acknowledged belle of Tappahannock. She
remembered that the magnificent manager of a theatrical company, a
gentleman who wore a fur-lined coat and a top hat all day long, had
almost lost his train while he stopped to look back at her on the
crowded platform of the station. Her heart had beat quickly at the
tribute, yet even in that dazzling minute she had felt a desperate
certainty that her single imperfection would decide her future. But for
her teeth, she was convinced to-day, that he might have returned.
If a woman cannot be a heroine in reality, perhaps the next best thing
is to look as if she might have been one in the age of romance; and this
was what Milly Trend's appearance suggested to perfection. Her manner of
dressing, the black velvet ribbon on her flaxen curls, her wide white
collars open at her soft throat, her floating sky-blue sashes and the
delicate peach bloom of her cheeks and lips--all these combined to
produce a poetic atmosphere about an exceedingly poetic little figure.
Being plain she would probably have made currant jelly for her pastor,
and have taught sedately in the infant class in Sunday school: being
pretty she read extravagant romances and dreamed strange adventures of
fascinating highwaymen on lonely roads.
But many a woman who has dreamed of a highwayman at eighteen has
compromised with a bank clerk at twenty-two. Even at Tappahannock--the
veriest prose piece of a town--romance might sometimes bud and blossom,
though it usually brought nothing more dangerous than respectability to
fruit. Milly had read Longfellow and _Lucille_, and her heroic ideal had
been taken bodily from one of Bulwer's novels. She had played the
graceful part of heroine in a hundred imaginary dramas; yet in actual
life she had been engaged for two years to a sandy-haired, freckled face
young fellow, who chewed tobacco, and bought the dry leaf in lots for a
factory in Richmond. From romance to reality is a hard distance, and the
most passionate dreamer is often the patient drudge of domestic service.
And yet even to-day Milly was not without secret misgivings as to the
wisdom of her choice. She knew he was not her hero, but in her short
visits to larger cities she had met no one who had come nearer her ideal
lover. To be sure she had seen this ideal, in highly coloured glimpses,
upon the stage--though these gallant gentlemen in trunks had never so
much as condescended to glance across the foot-lights to the little girl
in the dark third row of the balcony. Then, too, all the ladies upon the
stage were beautiful enough for any hero, and just here she was apt to
remember dismally the fatal projection of her teeth.
So, perhaps, after all, Harry Banks was as near Olympus as she could
hope to approach; and there was a mild consolation in the thought that
there was probably more sentiment in the inner than in the outward man.
Whatever came of it, she had learned that in a prose age it is safer to
think only in prose.
On the morning upon which Ordway had first passed her gate, she had
left the breakfast table at the postman's call, and had run down the
gravelled walk to receive a letter from Mr. Banks, who was off on a
short business trip for his firm. With the letter in her hand she had
turned to find Ordway's blue eyes fixed in careless admiration upon her
figure; and for one breathless instant she had felt her insatiable dream
rise again and clutch at her heart. Some subtle distinction in his
appearance--an unlikeness to the masculine portion of Tappahannock--had
caught her eye in spite of his common and ill-fitting clothes. Though
she had known few men of his class, the sensitive perceptions of the
girl had made her instantly aware of the difference between him and
Harry Banks. For a moment her extravagant fancy dwelt on his figure--on
this distinction which she had noticed, on his square dark face and the
singular effect of his bright blue eyes. Then turning back in the yard,
she went slowly up the gravelled walk, while she read with a vague
feeling of disappointment the love letter written laboriously by Mr.
Banks. It was, doubtless, but the average love letter of the average
plain young man, but to Milly in her rosy world of fiction, it appeared
suddenly as if there had protruded upon her attention one of the great,
ugly, wholesome facts of life. What was the use, she wondered, in being
beautiful if her love letters were to be filled with enthusiastic
accounts of her lover's prowess in the tobacco market?
At the breakfast table Jasper Trend was pouring maple syrup on the
buckwheat cakes he had piled on his plate, and at the girl's entrance he
spoke without removing his gaze from the plated silver pitcher in his
hand.
"Any letters, daughter?" he inquired, carefully running his knife along
the mouth of the pitcher to catch the last drop of syrup.
"One," said Milly, as she sat down beside the coffee pot and looked at
her father with a ripple of annoyance in her babyish eyes.
"I reckon I can guess about that all right," remarked Jasper with his
cackling chuckle, which was as little related to a sense of humour as
was the beating of a tin plate. He was a long, scraggy man, with drab
hair that grew in scallops on his narrow forehead and a large nose where
the prominent red veins turned purple when he became excited.
"There's a stranger in town, father," said Milly as she gave him his
second cup of coffee. "I think he is boarding at Mrs. Twine's."
"A drummer, I reckon--thar're a plenty of 'em about this season."
"No, I don't believe he is a drummer--he isn't--isn't quite so sparky
looking. But I wish you wouldn't say 'thar,' father. You promised me you
wouldn't do it."
"Well, it ain't stood in the way of my getting on," returned Jasper
without resentment. Had Milly told him to shave his head, he might have
protested freely, but in the end he would have gone out obediently to
his barber. Yet people outside said that he ground the wages of his
workers in the cotton mills down to starvation point, and that he had
been elected Mayor not through popularity, but through terror. It was
rumoured even that he stood with his wealth behind the syndicate of
saloons which was giving an ugly local character to the town. But
whatever his public vices may have been, his private life was securely
hedged about by the paternal virtues.
"I can't place him, but I'm sure he isn't a 'buyer,'" repeated Milly,
after a moment's devotion to the sugar bowl.
"Well, I'll let you know when I see him," responded Jasper as he left
the table and got into his overcoat, while Milly jumped up to wrap his
neck in a blue spotted muffler.
When he had gone from the house, she took out her lover's letter again,
but it proved, on a second trial, even more unsatisfactory than she had
found it to be at her first reading. As a schoolgirl Milly had known
every attribute of her divinity from the chivalry of his soul to the
shining gloss upon his boots--but to-day there remained to her only the
despairing conviction that he was unlike Banks. Banks appeared to her
suddenly in the hard prosaic light in which he, on his own account,
probably viewed his tobacco. Even her trousseau and the lace of her
wedding gown ceased to afford her the shadow of consolation, since she
remembered that neither of these accessories would occupy in marriage
quite so prominent a place as Banks.
The next day Ordway passed at the same hour, still on the opposite side
of the street. After this she began to watch regularly for his figure,
looking for it when it appeared on Mrs. Twine's little porch, and
following it wistfully until it was lost beyond the new brick church at
the corner. She was not aware of cultivating a facile sentiment about
the stranger, but place a riotous imagination in an empty house and it
requires little effort to weave a romance from the opposite side of the
street. Distance, that subtle magnifier of attachments, had come to her
aid now as it had failed her in the person of Harry Banks. Even from
across the street it was impossible to invest Mr. Banks with any quality
which might have suggested an historic background or a mysterious past.
He was flagrantly, almost outrageously himself; in no fictitious
circumstances could he have appeared as anything except the unvarnished
fact that he was. No legendary light could have glorified his features
or improved the set of his trousers--which had taken their shape and
substance from the legs within. With these features and in these
trousers, she felt that he must usurp the sacred precincts where her
dream had dwelt. "It would all be so easy if one could only be born
where one belongs," she cried out hopelessly, in the unconscious
utterance of a philosophy larger than her own.
And so as the week went by, she allowed her rosy fancies to surround the
figure that passed three times daily along the sidewalk across the way.
In the morning he walked by with a swinging stride; at midday he passed
rapidly, absorbed in thought; in the evening he came back slowly,
sometimes stopping to watch the sunset from the brow of the hill. Not
since the first morning had he turned his blue eyes toward Milly's gate.
At the end of the month Mr. Banks returned to Tappahannock from a
business trip through the tobacco districts. He was an ugly, freckled
face, sandy-haired young fellow--an excellent judge of tobacco--with a
simple soul that attired itself in large checks, usually of a black and
white variety. On the day of his first visit to Milly he wore a crimson
necktie pierced by a scarf-pin bearing a turtle-dove in diamonds.
"Who's that fellow over there?" he inquired as Ordway came up the hill
to his dinner. "I wonder if he's the chap Hudge was telling me about at
breakfast?"
"Oh, I don't know," answered Milly, in a voice that sounded flat in her
own ears. "Nobody knows anything about him, father says. But what was
Hudge telling you?" she asked, impelled by a devouring yet timid
curiosity.
"Well, if he's the man I mean, he seems to be a kind of revivalist out
of a job--or something or other queer. Hudge says he broke up a fight
last Saturday evening in Kelly's saloon--that's the place you've never
heard the name of, I reckon," he added hesitatingly, "it's where all the
factory hands gather after work on Saturday to drink up their week's
wages."
For once Milly's interest was stronger than her modesty.
"And did he fight?" she demanded in a suspense that was almost
breathless.
"He wasn't there, you know--only passing along the street outside, at
least that's what they say--when the rumpus broke out. Then he went in
through the window and----"
"And?" repeated Milly, with an entrancing vision of heroic blows, for
beneath her soft exterior the blood of the primitive woman flowed.
"And preached!" finished Banks, with a prodigious burst of merriment.
"Preached?" gasped Milly, "do you mean a sermon?"
"Not a regular sermon, but he spoke just like a preacher for a solid
hour. Before he'd finished the men who were drunk were crying like
babies and the men who weren't were breaking their necks to sign the
pledge--at any rate that's something like the tale they tell. There was
never such speaking (Hudge says he was there) heard before in
Tappahannock, and Kelly is as mad as a hornet because he swears the town
is going dry."
"And he didn't strike a single blow?" asked Milly, with a feeling of
disappointment.
"Why, he had those drunken fools all blubbering like kids," said Banks,
"and then when it was over he got hold of Kit Berry (he started the row,
you know) and carried him all the way home to the little cottage in the
hollow across the town where Kit lives with his mother. Next Sunday if
it's fine there's going to be an open air meeting in Baxter's field."
There was a sore little spot in Milly's heart, a vague sentiment of
disenchantment. Her house of dreams, which she had reared so patiently,
stood cold and tenantless once more.
"Did you ever find out his name?" she asked, with a last courageous
hope.
"Smith," replied Banks, with luminous simplicity. "The boys have
nick-named him 'Ten Commandment Smith.'"
"Ten Commandment Smith?" echoed Milly in a lifeless voice. Her house of
dreams had tottered at the blow and fallen from its foundation stone.