Judge Briscoe smiled grimly and leaned on his shot-gun in the moonlight
by the veranda. He and William Todd had been trampling down the
elder-bushes, and returning to the house, found Minnie alone on the
porch. “Safe?” he said to his daughter, who turned an anxious face upon
him. “They'll be safe enough now, and in our garden.”
“Maybe I oughtn't to have let them go,” she returned, nervously.
“Pooh! They're all right; that scalawag's half-way to Six-Cross-Roads by
this time, isn't he, William?”
“He tuck up the fence like a scared rabbit,” Mr. Todd responded, looking
into his hat to avoid meeting the eyes of the lady. “I didn't have no
call to toller, and he knowed how to run, I reckon. Time Mr. Harkless
come out the yard again, he was near out o' sight, and we see him take
across the road to the wedge-woods, near half-a-mile up. Somebody else
with him then--looked like a kid. Must 'a' cut acrost the field to join
him. They're fur enough towards home by this.”
“Did Miss Helen shake hands with you four or five times?” asked Briscoe,
chuckling.
“No. Why?”
“Because Harkless did. My hand aches, and I guess William's does, too;
he nearly shook our arms off when we told him he'd been a fool. Seemed
to do him good. I told him he ought to hire somebody to take a shot at
him every morning before breakfast--not that it's any joking matter,”
the old gentleman finished, thoughtfully.
“I should say not,” said William, with a deep frown and a jerk of his
head toward the rear of the house. “_He_ jokes about it enough. Wouldn't
even promise to carry a gun after this. Said he wouldn't know how to use
it. Never shot one off since he was a boy, on the Fourth of July. This
is the third time he's be'n shot at this year, but he says the others
was at a--a--what'd he call it?”
“'A merely complimentary range,'” Briscoe supplied. He handed William a
cigar and bit the end off another himself. “Minnie, you better go in the
house and read, I expect--unless you want to go down the creek and join
those folks.”
“_Me_!” she responded. “I know when to stay away, I guess. Do go and put
that terrible gun up.”
“No,” said Briscoe, lighting his cigar, deliberately. “It's all safe;
there's no question of that; but maybe William and I better go out and
take a smoke in the orchard as long as they stay down at the creek.”
In the garden, shafts of white light pierced the bordering trees and
fell where June roses lifted their heads to breathe the mild night
breeze, and here, through summer spells, the editor of the “Herald” and
the lady who had run to him at the pasture bars strolled down a path
trembling with shadows to where the shallow creek tinkled over the
pebbles. They walked slowly, with an air of being well-accustomed
friends and comrades, and for some reason it did not strike either of
them as unnatural or extraordinary. They came to a bench on the bank,
and he made a great fuss dusting the seat for her with his black slouch
hat. Then he regretted the hat--it was a shabby old hat of a Carlow
County fashion.
It was a long bench, and he seated himself rather remotely toward the
end opposite her, suddenly realizing that he had walked very close to
her, coming down the narrow garden path. Neither knew that neither had
spoken since they left the veranda; and it had taken them a long time to
come through the little orchard and the garden. She rested her chin
on her hand, leaning forward and looking steadily at the creek. Her
laughter had quite gone; her attitude seemed a little wistful and a
little sad. He noted that her hair curled over her brow in a way he had
not pictured in the lady of his dreams; this was so much lovelier. He
did not care for tall girls; he had not cared for them for almost
half an hour. It was so much more beautiful to be dainty and small and
piquant. He had no notion that he was sighing in a way that would have
put a furnace to shame, but he turned his eyes from her because he
feared that if he looked longer he might blurt out some speech about
her beauty. His glance rested on the bank; but its diameter included
the edge of her white skirt and the tip of a little, white, high-heeled
slipper that peeped out beneath it; and he had to look away from that,
too, to keep from telling her that he meant to advocate a law compelling
all women to wear crisp, white gowns and white slippers on moonlight
nights.
She picked a long spear of grass from the turf before her, twisted it
absently in her fingers, then turned to him slowly. Her lips parted
as if to speak. Then she turned away again. The action was so odd, and
somehow, as she did it, so adorable, and the preserved silence was such
a bond between them, that for his life he could not have helped moving
half-way up the bench toward her.
“What is it?” he asked; and he spoke in a whisper he might have used at
the bedside of a dying friend. He would not have laughed if he had known
he did so. She twisted the spear of grass into a little ball and threw
it at a stone in the water before she answered.
“Do you know, Mr. Harkless, you and I haven't 'met,' have we? Didn't we
forget to be presented to each other?”
“I beg your pardon. Miss Sherwood. In the perturbation of comedy I
forgot.”
“It was melodrama, wasn't it?” she said. He laughed, but she shook her
head.
“Comedy,” he answered, “except your part of it, which you shouldn't have
done. It was not arranged in honor of 'visiting ladies.' But you
mustn't think me a comedian. Truly, I didn't plan it. My friend from
Six-Cross-Roads must be given the credit of devising the scene-though
you divined it!”
“It was a little too picturesque, I think. I know about Six-Cross-Roads.
Please tell me what you mean to do.”
“Nothing. What should I?”
“You mean that you will keep on letting them shoot at you, until
they--until you--” She struck the bench angrily with her hand.
“There's no summer theatre in Six-Cross-Roads; there's not even a
church. Why shouldn't they?” he asked gravely. “During the long and
tedious evenings it cheers the poor Cross-Reader's soul to drop over
here and take a shot at me. It whiles away dull care for him, and he has
the additional exercise of running all the way home.”
“Ah!” she cried indignantly, “they told me you always answered like
this!”
“Well, you see the Cross-Roads efforts have proved so purely hygienic
for me. As a patriot I have sometimes felt extreme mortification that
such bad marksmanship should exist in the county, but I console
myself with the thought that their best shots are unhappily in the
penitentiary.”
“There are many left. Can't you understand that they will organize again
and come in a body, as they did before you broke them up? And then, if
they come on a night when they know you are wandering out of town----”
“You have not the advantage of an intimate study of the most exclusive
people of the Cross-Roads, Miss Sherwood. There are about twenty
gentlemen who remain in that neighborhood while their relatives sojourn
under discipline. If you had the entree over there, you would understand
that these twenty could not gather themselves into a company and march
the seven miles without physical debate in the ranks. They are not
precisely amiable people, even amongst themselves. They would quarrel
and shoot each other to pieces long before they got here.”
“But they worked in a company once.”
“Never for seven miles. Four miles was their radius. Five would see them
all dead.”
She struck the bench again. “Oh, you laugh at me! You make a joke of
your own life and death, and laugh at everything! Have five years of
Plattville taught you to do that?”
“I laugh only at taking the poor Cross-Roaders too seriously. I don't
laugh at your running into fire to help a fellow-mortal.”
“I knew there wasn't any risk. I knew he had to stop to load before he
shot again.”
“He did shoot again. If I had known you before to-night--I--” His tone
changed and he spoke gravely. “I am at your feet in worship of your
philanthropy. It's so much finer to risk your life for a stranger than
for a friend.”
“That is rather a man's point of view, isn't it?”
“You risked yours for a man you had never seen before.”
“Oh, no! I saw you at the lecture; I heard you introduce the Honorable
Mr. Halloway.”
“Then I don't understand your wishing to save me.”
She smiled unwillingly, and turned her gray eyes upon him with troubled
sunniness, and, under the kindness of her regard, he set a watch upon
his lips, though he knew it might not avail him. He had driveled along
respectably so far, he thought, but he had the sentimental longings of
years, starved of expression, culminating in his heart. She continued to
look at him, wistfully, searchingly, gently. Then her eyes traveled over
his big frame from his shoes (a patch of moonlight fell on them; they
were dusty; he drew them under the bench with a shudder) to his broad
shoulders (he shook the stoop out of them). She stretched her small
hands toward him in contrast, and broke into the most delicious low
laughter in the world. At this sound he knew the watch on his lips was
worthless. It was a question of minutes till he should present himself
to her eyes as a sentimental and susceptible imbecile. He knew it. He
was in wild spirits.
“Could you realize that one of your dangers might be a shaking?” she
cried. “Is your seriousness a lost art?” Her laughter ceased suddenly.
“Ah, no. I understand. Thiers said the French laugh always, in order not
to weep. I haven't lived here five years. I should laugh too, if I were
you.”
“Look at the moon,” he responded. “We Plattvillains own that with the
best of metropolitans, and, for my part, I see more of it here. You do
not appreciate us. We have large landscapes in the heart of the city,
and what other capital possesses advantages like that? Next winter the
railway station is to have a new stove for the waiting-room. Heaven
itself is one of our suburbs--it is so close that all one has to do is
to die. You insist upon my being French, you see, and I know you
are fond of nonsense. How did you happen to put 'The Walrus and the
Carpenter' at the bottom of a page of Fisbee's notes?”
“Was it? How were you sure it was I?”
“In Carlow County!”
“He might have written it himself.”
“Fisbee has never in his life read anything lighter than cuneiform
inscriptions.”
“Miss Briscoe----”
“She doesn't read Lewis Carroll; and it was not her hand. What made you
write it on Fisbee's manuscript?”
“He was with us this afternoon, and I teased him a little about your
heading. 'Business and the Cradle, the Altar, and the Tomb,' isn't it?
And he said it had always troubled him, but that you thought it good.
So do I. He asked me if I could think of anything that you might like
better, to put in place of it, and I wrote, 'The time has come,' because
it was the only thing I could think of that was as appropriate and as
fetching as your headlines. He was perfectly dear about it. He was so
serious; he said he feared it wouldn't be acceptable. I didn't notice
that the paper he handed me to write on was part of his notes, nor
did he, I think. Afterward, he put it back in his pocket. It wasn't a
message.”
“I'm not so sure he did not notice. He is very wise. Do you know,
somehow, I have the impression that the old fellow wanted me to meet
you.”
“How dear and good of him!” She spoke earnestly, and her face was
suffused with a warm light. There was no doubt about her meaning what
she said.
“It was,” John answered, unsteadily. “He knew how great was my need of a
few moments' companionableness with--with----”
“No,” she interrupted. “I meant dear and good to me, because I think he
was thinking of me, and it was for my sake he wanted us to meet.”
It would have been hard to convince a woman, if she had overheard this
speech, that Miss Sherwood's humility was not the calculated affectation
of a coquette. Sometimes a man's unsuspicion is wiser, and Harkless knew
that she was not flirting with him. In addition, he was not a fatuous
man; he did not extend the implication of her words nearly so far as she
would have had him.
“But I had met you,” said he, “long ago.”
“What!” she cried, and her eyes danced. “You actually remember?”
“Yes; do you?” he answered. “I stood in Jones's field and heard you
singing, and I remembered. It was a long time since I had heard you
sing:
“'I was a ruffler of Flanders,
And fought for a florin's hire.
You were the dame of my captain
And sang to my heart's desire.'
“But that is the balladist's notion. The truth is that you were a lady
at the Court of Clovis, and I was a heathen captive. I heard you sing a
Christian hymn--and asked for baptism.” By a great effort he managed to
look as if he did not mean it.
But she did not seem over-pleased with his fancy, for, the surprise
fading from her face, “Oh, that was the way you remembered!” she said.
“Perhaps it was not that way alone. You won't despise me for being
mawkish to-night?” he asked. “I haven't had the chance for so long.”
The night air wrapped them warmly, and the balm of the little breezes
that stirred the foliage around them was the smell of damask roses from
the garden. The creek tinkled over the pebbles at their feet, and a
drowsy bird, half-wakened by the moon, crooned languorously in the
sycamores. The girl looked out at the flashing water through downcast
lashes. “Is it because it is so transient that beauty is pathetic?” she
said; “because we can never come back to it in quite the same way? I am
a sentimental girl. If you are born so, it is never entirely teased
out of you, is it? Besides, to-night is all a dream. It isn't real, you
know. You couldn't be mawkish.”
Her tone was gentle as a caress, and it made him tingle to his
finger-tips. “How do you know?” he asked in a low voice.
“I just know. Do you think I'm very 'bold and forward'?” she said,
dreamily.
“It was your song I wanted to be sentimental about. I am like one 'who
through long days of toil'--only that doesn't quite apply--'and nights
devoid of ease'--but I can't claim that one doesn't sleep well here; it
is Plattville's specialty--like one who
“'Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.'”
“Those blessed old lines!” she said. “Once a thing is music or poetry,
all the hand-organs and elocutionists in the world cannot ruin it, can
they? Yes; to live here, out of the world, giving up the world, doing
good and working for others, working for a community as you do----”
“I am not quite shameless,” he interrupted, smilingly. “I was given a
life sentence for incompetency, and I've served five years of it, which
have been made much happier than my deserts.”
“No,” she persisted, “that is your way of talking of yourself; I know
you would always 'run yourself down,' if one paid any attention to it.
But to give up the world, to drop out of it without regret, to come
here and do what you have done, and to live the life that must be so
desperately dry and dull for a man of your sort, and yet to have the
kind of heart that makes wonderful melodies sing in itself--oh!” she
cried, “I say that is fine!”
“You do not understand,” he returned, sadly, wishing, before her, to
be unmercifully just to himself. “I came here because I couldn't make
a living anywhere else. And the 'wonderful melodies'--I have known you
only one evening--and the melodies--” He rose to his feet and took a few
steps toward the garden. “Come,” he said. “Let me take you back. Let us
go before I--” he finished with a helpless laugh.
She stood by the bench, one hand resting on it; she stood all in the
tremulant shadow. She moved one step toward him, and a single, long
sliver of light pierced the sycamores and fell upon her head. He gasped.
“What was it about the melodies?” she said.
“Nothing! I don't know how to thank you for this evening that you have
given me. I--I suppose you are leaving to-morrow. No one ever stays
here.--I----”
“What about the melodies?”
He gave it up. “The moon makes people insane!” he cried.
“If that is true,” she returned, “then you need not be more afraid than
I, because 'people' is plural. What were you saying about----”
“I _had_ heard them--in my heart. When I heard your voice to-night, I
knew that it was you who sang them there--had been singing them for me
always.”
“So!” she cried, gaily. “All that debate about a pretty speech!” Then,
sinking before him in a deep courtesy, “I am beholden to you,” she said.
“Do you think that no man ever made a little flattery for me before
to-night?”
At the edge of the orchard, where they could keep an unseen watch on
the garden and the bank of the creek. Judge Briscoe and Mr. Todd were
ensconced under an apple-tree, the former still armed with his shot-gun.
When the two young people got up from their bench, the two men rose
hastily, and then sauntered slowly toward them. When they met, Harkless
shook each of them cordially by the hand, without seeming to know it.
“We were coming to look for you,” explained the judge. “William was
afraid to go home alone; thought some one might take him for Mr.
Harkless and shoot him before he got into town. Can you come out with
young Willetts in the morning, Harkless,” he went on, “and go with the
ladies to see the parade? And Minnie wants you to stay to dinner and go
to the show with them in the afternoon.”
Harkless seized his hand and shook it fervently, and then laughed
heartily, as he accepted the invitation.
At the gate, Miss Sherwood extended her hand to him and said politely,
and with some flavor of mockery: “Good-night, Mr. Harkless. I do not
leave to-morrow. I am very glad to have met you.”
“We are going to keep her all summer if we can,” said Minnie, weaving
her arm about her friend's waist. “You'll come in the morning?”
“Good-night, Miss Sherwood,” he returned, hilariously. “It has been such
a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for saving my life. It was
very good of you indeed. Yes, in the morning. Good-night--good-night.”
He shook hands with them all again, including Mr. Todd, who was going
with him.
He laughed most of the way home, and Mr. Todd walked at his side in
amazement. The Herald Building was a decrepit frame structure on Main
Street; it had once been a small warehouse and was now sadly in need of
paint. Closely adjoining it, in a large, blank-looking yard, stood a low
brick cottage, over which the second story of the warehouse leaned in an
effect of tipsy affection that had reminded Harkless, when he first saw
it, of an old Sunday-school book wood-cut of an inebriated parent under
convoy of a devoted child. The title to these two buildings and the
blank yard had been included in the purchase of the “Herald”; and the
cottage was Harkless's home.
There was a light burning upstairs in the “Herald” office. From the
street a broad, tumble-down stairway ran up on the outside of the
building to the second floor, and at the stairway railing John turned
and shook his companion warmly by the hand.
“Good-night, William,” he said. “It was plucky of you to join in that
muss, to-night. I shan't forget it.”
“I jest happened to come along,” replied the other, drowsily; then, with
a portentous yawn, he asked: “Ain't ye goin' to bed?”
“No; Parker wouldn't allow it.”
“Well,” observed William, with another yawn, which bade fair to expose
the veritable soul of him, “I d'know how ye stand it. It's closte on
eleven o'clock. Good-night.”
John went up the steps, singing aloud:
“For to-night we'll merry, merry be,
For to-night we'll merry, merry be,”
and stopped on the sagging platform at the top of the stairs and gave
the moon good-night with a wave of the hand and friendly laughter. At
that it suddenly struck him that he was twenty-nine years of age;
that he had laughed a great deal that evening; that he had laughed and
laughed over things not in the least humorous, like an excited schoolboy
making his first formal call; that he had shaken hands with Miss Briscoe
when he left her, as if he should never see her again; that he had taken
Miss Sherwood's hand twice in one very temporary parting; that he had
shaken the judge's hand five times, and William's four!
“Idiot!” he cried. “What has happened to me?” Then he shook his fist at
the moon and went in to work--he thought.