The street upon which the Palace Hotel fronted formed the south side of
the Square and ran west to the edge of the town, where it turned to the
south for a quarter of a mile or more, then bent to the west again. Some
distance from this second turn, there stood, fronting close on the road,
a large brick house, the most pretentious mansion in Carlow County.
And yet it was a homelike place, with its red-brick walls embowered in
masses of cool Virginia creeper, and a comfortable veranda crossing the
broad front, while half a hundred stalwart sentinels of elm and beech
and poplar stood guard around it. The front walk was bordered by
geraniums and hollyhocks; and honeysuckle climbed the pillars of the
porch. Behind the house there was a shady little orchard; and, back of
the orchard, an old-fashioned, very fragrant rose-garden, divided by a
long grape arbor, extended to the shallow waters of a wandering creek;
and on the bank a rustic seat was placed, beneath the sycamores.
From the first bend of the road, where it left the town and became
(after some indecision) a country highway--called the pike--rather than
a proud city boulevard, a pathway led through the fields to end at some
pasture bars opposite the brick house.
John Harkless was leaning on the pasture bars. The stars were wan, and
the full moon shone over the fields. Meadows and woodlands lay quiet
under the old, sweet marvel of a June night. In the wide monotony of
the flat lands, there sometimes comes a feeling that the whole earth is
stretched out before one. To-night it seemed to lie so, in the pathos of
silent beauty, all passive and still; yet breathing an antique message,
sad, mysterious, reassuring. But there had come a divine melody adrift
on the air. Through the open windows it floated. Indoors some one struck
a peal of silver chords, like a harp touched by a lover, and a woman's
voice was lifted. John Harkless leaned on the pasture bars and listened
with upraised head and parted lips.
“To thy chamber window roving, love hath led my feet.”
The Lord sent manna to the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Harkless had been five years in Plattville, and a woman's voice singing
Schubert's serenade came to him at last as he stood by the pasture bars
of Jones's field and listened and rested his dazzled eyes on the big,
white face of the moon.
How long had it been since he had heard a song, or any discourse of
music other than that furnished by the Plattville Band--not that he had
not taste for a brass band! But music that he loved always gave him an
ache of delight and the twinge of reminiscences of old, gay days gone
forever. To-night his memory leaped to the last day of a June gone seven
years; to a morning when the little estuary waves twinkled in the bright
sun about the boat in which he sat, the trim launch that brought a
cheery party ashore from their schooner to the Casino landing at Winter
Harbor, far up on the Maine coast.
It was the happiest of those last irresponsible days before he struck
into his work in the world and became a failure. To-night he saw the
picture as plainly as if it were yesterday; no reminiscence had risen so
keenly before his eyes for years: pretty Mrs. Van Skuyt sitting beside
him--pretty Mrs. Van Skuyt and her roses! What had become of her? He
saw the crowd of friends waiting on the pier for their arrival, and
the dozen or so emblazoned classmates (it was in the time of brilliant
flannels) who suddenly sent up a volley of college cheers in his
honor--how plainly the dear, old, young faces rose up before him
to-night, the men from whose lives he had slipped! Dearest and jolliest
of the faces was that of Tom Meredith, clubmate, classmate, his closest
friend, the thin, red-headed third baseman; he could see Tom's mouth
opened at least a yard, it seemed, such was his frantic vociferousness.
Again and again the cheers rang out, “Harkless! Harkless!” on the end of
them. In those days everybody (particularly his classmates) thought he
would be minister to England in a few years, and the orchestra on the
Casino porch was playing “The Conquering Hero,” in his honor, and at the
behest of Tom Meredith, he knew.
There were other pretty ladies besides Mrs. Van Skuyt in the launch-load
from the yacht, but, as they touched the pier, pretty girls, or pretty
women, or jovial gentlemen, all were overlooked in the wild scramble the
college men made for their hero. They haled him forth, set him on high,
bore him on their shoulders, shouting “Skal to the Viking!” and carried
him up the wooded bluff to the Casino. He heard Mrs. Van Skuyt say,
“Oh, we're used to it; we've put in at several other places where he
had friends!” He struggled manfully to be set down, but his triumphal
procession swept on. He heard bystanders telling each other, “It's that
young Harkless, 'the Great Harkless,' they're all so mad about”; and
while it pleased him a little to hear such things, they always made him
laugh a great deal. He had never understood his popularity: he had
been chief editor of the university daily, and he had done a little in
athletics, and the rest of his distinction lay in college offices his
mates had heaped upon him without his being able to comprehend why they
did it. And yet, somehow, and in spite of himself, they had convinced
him that the world was his oyster; that it would open for him at a
touch. He could not help seeing how the Freshmen looked at him, how the
Sophomores jumped off the narrow campus walks to let him pass; he could
not help knowing that he was the great man of his time, so that “The
Great Harkless” came to be one of the traditions of the university. He
remembered the wild progress they made for him up the slope that morning
at Winter Harbor, how the people baked on, and laughed, and clapped
their hands. But at the veranda edge he had noticed a little form
disappearing around a corner of the building; a young girl running away
as fast as she could.
“See there!” he said, as the tribe set him down, “You have frightened
the populace.” And Tom Meredith stopped shouting long enough to answer,
“It's my little cousin, overcome with emotion. She's been counting the
hours till you came--been hearing of you from me and others for a good
while; and hasn't been able to talk or think of anything else. She's
only fifteen, and the crucial moment is too much for her--the Great
Harkless has arrived, and she has fled.”
He remembered other incidents of his greatness, of the glory that now
struck him as rarely comical; he hoped he hadn't taken it too seriously
then, in the flush of his youth. Maybe, after all, he had been a,
big-headed boy, but he must have bottled up his conceit tightly enough,
or the other boys would have detected it and abhorred him. He was
inclined to believe that he had not been very much set up by the pomp
they made for him. At all events, that day at Winter Harbor had been
beautiful, full of the laughter of friends and music; for there was a
musicale at the Casino in the afternoon.
But the present hour grew on him as he leaned on the pasture bars, and
suddenly his memories sped; and the voice that was singing Schubert's
serenade across the way touched him with the urgent, personal appeal
that a present beauty always had for him. It was a soprano; and without
tremolo, yet came to his ear with a certain tremulous sweetness; it was
soft and slender, but the listener knew it could be lifted with fullness
and power if the singer would. It spoke only of the song, yet the
listener thought of the singer. Under the moon thoughts run into dreams,
and he dreamed that the owner of the voice, she who quoted “The Walrus
and the Carpenter” on Fisbee's notes, was one to laugh with you and weep
with you; yet her laughter would be tempered with sorrow, and her tears
with laughter.
When the song was ended, he struck the rail he leaned upon a sharp blow
with his open hand. There swept over him a feeling that he had stood
precisely where he stood now, on such a night, a thousand years ago, had
heard that voice and that song, had listened and been moved by the song,
and the night, just as he was moved now.
He had long known himself for a sentimentalist; he had almost given up
trying to cure himself. And he knew himself for a born lover; he had
always been in love with some one. In his earlier youth his affections
had been so constantly inconstant that he finally came to settle
with his self-respect by recognizing in himself a fine constancy that
worshipped one woman always--it was only the shifting image of her that
changed! Somewhere (he dreamed, whimsically indulgent of the fancy; yet
mocking himself for it) there was a girl whom he had never seen, who
waited till he should come. She was Everything. Until he found her,
he could not help adoring others who possessed little pieces and
suggestions of her--her brilliancy, her courage, her short upper lip,
“like a curled roseleaf,” or her dear voice, or her pure profile. He had
no recollection of any lady who had quite her eyes.
He had never passed a lovely stranger on the street, in the old days,
without a thrill of delight and warmth. If he never saw her again, and
the vision only lasted the time it takes a lady to cross the sidewalk
from a shop door to a carriage, he was always a little in love with her,
because she bore about her, somewhere, as did every pretty girl he ever
saw, a suggestion of the far-away divinity. One does not pass lovely
strangers in the streets of Plattville. Miss Briscoe was pretty, but not
at all in the way that Harkless dreamed. For five years the lover in
him that had loved so often had been starved of all but dreams. Only at
twilight and dusk in the summer, when, strolling, he caught sight of a
woman's skirt, far up the village street--half-outlined in the
darkness under the cathedral arch of meeting branches--this romancer
of petticoats could sigh a true lover's sigh, and, if he kept enough
distance between, fly a yearning fancy that his lady wandered there.
Ever since his university days the image of her had been growing
more and more distinct. He had completely settled his mind as to her
appearance and her voice. She was tall, almost too tall, he was sure of
that; and out of his consciousness there had grown a sweet and vivacious
young face that he knew was hers. Her hair was light-brown with gold
lustres (he reveled in the gold lustres, on the proper theory that when
your fancy is painting a picture you may as well go in for the whole
thing and make it sumptuous), and her eyes were gray. They were very
earnest, and yet they sparkled and laughed to him companionably; and
sometimes he had smiled back upon her. The Undine danced before him
through the lonely years, on fair nights in his walks, and came to sit
by his fire on winter evenings when he stared alone at the embers.
And to-night, here in Plattville, he heard a voice he had waited for
long, one that his fickle memory told him he had never heard before.
But, listening, he knew better--he had heard it long ago, though when
and how, he did not know, as rich and true, and ineffably tender as now.
He threw a sop to his common sense. “Miss Sherwood is a little thing”
(the image was so surely tall) “with a bumpy forehead and spectacles,”
he said to himself, “or else a provincial young lady with big eyes
to pose at you.” Then he felt the ridiculousness of looking after his
common sense on a moonlight night in June; also, he knew that he lied.
The song had ceased, but the musician lingered, and the keys were
touched to plaintive harmonies new to him. He had come to Plattville
before “Cavalleria Rusticana” was sung at Rome, and now, entranced, he
heard the “Intermezzo” for the first time. Listening to this, he feared
to move lest he should wake from a summer-night's dream.
A ragged little shadow flitted down the path behind him, and from a
solitary apple-tree, standing like a lonely ghost in the middle of
the field, came the _woo_ of a screech owl--twice. It was
answered--twice--from a clump of elder-bushes that grew in a
fence-corner fifty yards west of the pasture bars. Then the barrel of a
squirrel rifle issued, lifted out of the white elder-blossoms, and
lay along the fence. The music in the house across the way ceased, and
Harkless saw two white dresses come out through the long parlor windows
to the veranda.
“It will be cooler out here,” came the voice of the singer clearly
through the quiet. “What a night!”
John vaulted the bars and started to cross the road. They saw him from
the veranda, and Miss Briscoe called to him in welcome. As his tall
figure stood out plainly in the bright light against the white dust,
a streak of fire leaped from the elder-blossoms and there rang out the
sharp report of a rifle. There were two screams from the veranda. One
white figure ran into the house. The other, a little one with a gauzy
wrap streaming behind, came flying out into the moonlight--straight to
Harkless. There was a second report; the rifle-shot was answered by
a revolver. William Todd had risen up, apparently from nowhere, and,
kneeling by the pasture bars, fired at the flash of the rifle.
“Jump fer the shadder, Mr. Harkless,” he shouted; “he's in them elders,”
and then: “Fer God's sake, comeback!”
Empty-handed as he was, the editor dashed for the treacherous elder-bush
as fast as his long legs could carry him; but, before he had taken six
strides, a hand clutched his sleeve, and a girl's voice quavered from
close behind him:
“Don't run like that, Mr. Harkless; I can't keep up!” He wheeled about,
and confronted a vision, a dainty little figure about five feet high, a
flushed and lovely face, hair and draperies disarranged and flying. He
stamped his foot with rage. “Get back in the house!” he cried.
“You mustn't go,” she panted. “It's the only way to stop you.”
“Go back to the house!” he shouted, savagely.
“Will you come?”
“Fer God's sake,” cried William Todd, “come back! Keep out of the road.”
He was emptying his revolver at the clump of elder, the uproar of his
firing blasting the night. Some one screamed from the house:
“Helen! Helen!”
John seized the girl's wrists roughly; her gray eyes flashed into his
defiantly. “Will you go?” he roared.
“No!”
He dropped her wrists, caught her up in his arms as if she had been a
kitten, and leaped into the shadow of the trees that leaned over the
road from the yard. The rifle rang out again, and the little ball
whistled venomously overhead. Harkless ran along the fence and turned in
at the gate.
A loose strand of the girl's hair blew across his cheek, and in the moon
her head shone with gold. She had light-brown hair and gray eyes and a
short upper lip like a curled rose-leaf. He set her down on the veranda
steps. Both of them laughed wildly.
“But you came with me!” she gasped triumphantly.
“I always thought you were tall,” he answered; and there was afterward a
time when he had to agree that this was a somewhat vague reply.