When this crisis supervened, Lucien Royce was at New Helvetia Springs,
at the bowling-alley. His resolution that the beautiful girl, whom
he had learned to adore at a distance, should never see him again in
a guise so unworthy of him, of his true position in life, and of his
antecedents, collapsed one day in an incident which was a satiric
comment upon its importance. He met her unexpectedly in the mountain
woods, within a few miles of the Cove, one of a joyous young equestrian
party, and riding like the wind. The plainness of the black habit,
the hat, the high close white collar, seemed to embellish her beauty,
in that no adornments frivolously diverted the attention from the
perfection of its detail. The flush on her cheek, the light in her eye,
the lissome grace of her slender figure, all attested a breezy delight
in the swift motion; her smile shone down upon him like the sudden
revelation of a star in the midst of a closing cloud, when he sprang
forward and handed her the whip which she had dropped at the moment of
passing, before the cavalier at her side could dismount to recover it.
A polite inclination of the head, a murmur of thanks, a broadside of
those absolutely unrecognizing eyes, and she was gone.
She evidently had no remembrance of him. His alert intuition could have
detected it in her face if she had. For her he had no existence. He
thought, as he walked on into the silence and the wilderness, of his
resolution and his self-denial, and he laughed bitterly at the futility
of the one and the pangs of the other. He need never wince to be so
lowly placed, so mean, so humble, for she never thought of him. He need
not fear to go near her, to haunt, like the ghost he was, her ways in
life, for she would never look at him, she would never realize that he
was near; for most people are thus insensible of spectral influences.
When he sat for the first time on a bench against the wall, by the door
of the bowling-alley, with two or three mountaineers whose lethargic
curiosity--their venison or peaches having been sold--was excited in
a degree by the spectacle of the game of tenpins, he had much ado to
control the agitation that beset him, the pangs of humiliation. But
after this day he came often, availing himself of the special courtesy
observed by the players in providing a bench for the mountaineers,
as spectators, who were indeed never intrusive or out of place, and
generally of most listless and uninterested attitude toward the freaks
and frivolities of New Helvetia. This attention seemed a gracious
and kindly condescension, and flattered a conscious sentiment of
_noblesse oblige_. There were other spectators, of better quality, on
the opposite side of the long low building,--the elders among the
sojourners at New Helvetia Springs,--while down the centre, between the
two alleys, were the benches on which the players were ranged.
She was sometimes among these, always graceful and girlish, with a
look of innocence in her eyes like some sweet child’s, and wearing
her youth and beauty like a crown, with that unique touch of dignity
suggestive of a splendid future development, and that these days,
lovely though they might be, were not destined to be her best. One
might have pitied the hot envy he felt toward the youths who handed her
the balls and applauded her play, and hung about near her, and chatted
in the intervals,--so foolish, so hopeless, so bitter it was. Sometimes
he heard her responses: little of note, the talk of a girl of his day
and world, but animated with a sort of individuality, a something like
herself,--or did he fancy it was like no one else? He had met his
fate too late; this was the one woman in all the world for him. She
could have made of him anything she would. His heart stirred with a
vague impulse of reminiscent ambitions that might have been facts had
she come earlier. He loved her, and he felt that never before had he
loved. The slight spurious evanescent emotion, evoked from idleness
or folly or caprice, in sundry remembered episodes of his old world,
or evolved in the desert of his loneliness for Euphemia,--how vain,
how unreal, how ephemeral, how unjustified! But she who would have
been the supreme power in his life had come at last--and had come too
late. How truly he reasoned he knew well, as he sat in his humble garb
amongst his uncouth associates on the segregated bench, and heard the
thunder of the balls and the swift steps of the lightly passing figures
at the head of the alley; but surely he should not have been capable
of an added pang when he discerned, with a sense almost as impersonal
as if he were indeed the immaterial essence he claimed to be, her fate
in the identity of a lately arrived guest. This was a man of middle
height and slender, about thirty-five years of age, with a slight bald
spot on the top of his well-shaped head. He had a keen narrow face, an
inexpressive calm manner, and was evidently a personage of weight in
the world of men, sustaining a high social and financial consideration.
He did not take part in the game. He leaned against a pillar near her,
and bent over her, and talked to her in the intervals of her play. He
had apparently little affinity for youthful amusements, and spent much
of his time with her parents. His mission here was most undisguised,
and it seemed to the poor juggler that the fortunate suitor was but a
personified conventionality, whom no woman could truly love, and who
could truly love no woman.
When once Royce had acquired the sense of invisibility, he put no curb
on his poor and humble cravings to see her, to hear the sound of her
voice albeit she spoke only to others. Every day found him on the
mountaineers’ bench at the bowling-alley, sometimes alone, sometimes in
grotesque company, the ridicule, he knew, of the young and thoughtless;
and he had no care if he were ridiculed too. Sometimes she came, and
he was drearily happy. Frequently she was absent, and in dull despair
he sat and dreamed of her till the game was done. He grew to love the
inanimate things she touched, the dress she wore; he even loved best
that which she wore most often, and his heart lightened whenever he
recognized it, as if the sight of it were some boon of fate, and their
common preference for it a bond of sympathy. Once she came in late from
a walk in the woods, wearing white, with a purple cluster of the wild
verbena at her bosom. There was a blossom lying upon the floor after
the people were all gone. He saw it as it slipped down, and he waited,
and then, in the absolute solitude, with a furtive gesture he picked it
up, and after that he always wore it, folded in a bit of paper, over
his heart.
In the midst of this absorbing emotion Lucien Royce did not feel the
pangs of supplantation till the fact had been repeatedly driven home.
When, returning from New Helvetia, he would find Jack Ormsby sitting
on the steps of the cabin porch, talking to Euphemia, he welcomed as
a relief the opportunity to betake himself and his bitter brooding
thoughts down to the bank of the river, where he was wont to walk to
and fro under the white stars, heedless of the joyous voices floating
down to him, deaf to all save the inflections of a voice in his
memory. He began gradually to note with a dull surprise Euphemia’s
scant, overlooking glance when her eyes must needs turn toward him;
her indifferent manner,--even averse, it might seem; her disaffected
languor save when Jack Ormsby’s shadow fell athwart the door. In some
sort Royce had grown obtuse to all except the sentiment that enthralled
him. Under normal circumstances he would have detected instantly the
flimsy pretense with which she sought to stimulate his jealousy, to
restore his allegiance, to sustain her pride. She had not dreamed that
her hold upon his heart, gained only by reason of his loneliness and
despair and the distastefulness of his surroundings, had slackened
the instant a deep and real love took possession of him. She had not
divined this hopeless, silent love--from afar, from infinite lengths
of despair!--for another. She only knew that somehow he had grown
oblivious of her, and was much absent from her. This touched her pride,
her fatal pride! And thus she played off Jack Ormsby against him as
best she might, and held her head very high.
The sense of desertion inflicted upon him only a dull pain. He said
listlessly to himself, his pride untouched, that she had not really
loved him, that she had been merely fascinated for a time by the
novelty of the “readin’s,” and now she cared for them and him no more.
He recalled the readiness with which she had forsworn her earlier
lover, when his conscience had conflicted with her pride, and this
seeming fickleness was accented anew in the later change. Royce tacitly
acquiesced in it, no longer struggling as he had done at first with a
sense of loyalty to her, but giving himself up to his hopeless dream,
precious even in its conscious futility.
How long this quiescent state might have proved more pleasure than
pain it is hard to say. There suddenly came into its melancholy
serenities a wild tumult of uncertainty, a mad project, a patent
possibility that set his brain on fire and his heart plunging. He
argued within himself--with some doubting, denying, forbidding
instinct of self-immolation, as it seemed, that had somehow attained
full control of him in these days--that in one sense he was fully
the equal of Miss Fordyce, as well born, as well bred, as she, as
carefully trained in all the essentials that regulate polite society.
She would sustain no derogation if he could contrive an entrance to
her social circle, and meet her there as an equal. He had overheard
in the fragmentary gossip mention of people in New Orleans, familiars
of her circle, to whom he was well known. He did not doubt that his
father’s name and standing would be instantly recognized by her
father, Judge Archibald Fordyce,--the sojourners at New Helvetia were
identifiable to him now,--or indeed by any man of consequence of that
gentleman’s acquaintance. Under normal circumstances the formality of
an introduction would be a matter of course. If she had chanced to
spend a winter in St. Louis, Royce would doubtless have danced with her
on a dozen different occasions; he wondered blankly if he would then
have adequately valued the privilege! He felt now that he would give
his life for a touch of her hand, a look of her eyes fixed upon him
observingly; how the utter neutrality of her glance hurt him! He would
give his soul for the bliss of one waltz. He trembled as he realized
how possible, how easily and obviously practicable, this had become.
For the tableaux and fancy-dress ball had been so relished by the more
juvenile element of New Helvetia that the successor of that festivity
was already projected. This was to be a grotesquerie in calico costumes
and masks, chiefly of facetious characters. The masks were deemed
essential by the small designers of the entertainment, since the
secret of the various disguises had not been carefully kept, and these
vizards were ingenuously relied on to protect the incognito of certain
personages garbed, with the aid of sympathetic elders, as Dolly Varden,
Tilly Slowboy (with a rag-doll baby furnished with a head proof against
banging on door-frames or elbows), Sir John Falstaff, three feet high,
Robinson Crusoe, and similar celebrities. The whole affair was esteemed
a tedious superfluity by the youths of twenty and a few years upward,
already a trifle blasé, who sometimes lingered and talked and smoked in
the bowling-alley after the game was finished and the ladies had gone.
It was from overhearing this chat that Royce learned that although
the majority of the young fellows, tired with one effort of devising
costumes, had declined to go in calico and in character, still, in
deference to the style of the entertainment and the importunity of the
children who had projected it, they had agreed to attend in mask. Their
out-of-door attire of knickerbockers and flannel shirts and blazers
ought to be deemed, they thought, shabby enough to appease the “tacky”
requirements of the juvenile managers, who were pleased to call their
burlesque masquerade a “tacky party.”
Then it was that Royce realized his opportunity. The knickerbockers
and flannel shirt, the red-and-black blazer and russet shoes, in which
he had entered Etowah Cove, now stowed away in the roof-room of Tubal
Cain Sims’s house, were not more the worse for wear than much of such
attire at New Helvetia Springs after a few weeks of mountain rambles.
Ten minutes in the barbershop of the hotel, at a late hour when it
would be deserted by its ordinary patrons, would put him in trim for
the occasion, and doubtless its functionaries who had never seen him
would fancy him in this dress a newly arrived guest of the hotel or of
some of the New Helvetia summer cottagers. He had even a prevision of
the free and casual gesture with which he would hand an attendant a
quarter of a dollar and send across the road to the store for a mask.
And then--and then--he could feel already the rhythm of the waltz music
beating in every pulse; he breathed even now the breeze quickening in
the motion of the dance, endowed with the sweetness of the zephyrs
of the seventh heaven. It was she--she alone--whom he would care to
approach; the rest, they were as naught! One touch of her hand, the
rapture of one waltz, and he would be ready to throw himself over the
bluff; for he would have attained the uttermost happiness that earth
could bestow upon him now.
And suddenly he was ready to throw himself over the bluff that he
should even have dreamed this dream. For all that his pulses still
beat to the throb of that mute strain, that his eyes were alight with
an unrealized joy, that the half quiver, half smile of a visionary
expectation lingered at his lips, the red rush of indignant humiliation
covered his face and tingled to the very tips of his fingers. He was
far on the road between the Cove and the Springs, and he paused in the
solitude that he might analyze this thing, and see where he stood and
whither he was tending. He, of all men in the world, an intruder, a
partaker of pleasures designed exclusively for others! He to wear a
mask where he might not dare to show his face! He to scheme to secure
from her,--from _her_!--through false pretenses, under the mistake that
he was another, a notice, a word, chance phrases, the touch of her
confiding hand, the ecstasy of a waltz! He had no words for himself!
He was an exile and penniless. He had no identity. He could reveal
himself only to be falsely suspected of a vile robbery in a position of
great trust; any lapse of caution would consign him to years of unjust
imprisonment in a felon’s cell. He was the very sport of a cruel fate.
He had naught left of all the lavish earthly endowments with which
he had begun life save his own estimate of his own sense of honor.
But this was still precious to him. Bereft as he was, he was still a
gentleman at heart. He claimed that,--he demanded of himself his own
recognition as such. Never again, he determined, as he began to walk
slowly along the road once more, never again should expert sophistries
tempt him. He would not argue his equality with her, his birth, his
education, the social position of his people. It was enough to reflect
that if she knew all she would shrink from him. He would not again
seek refuge in the impossibility that his identity could be discovered
as a guest at the ball. He would not plead as a set-off against the
deception how innocent its intention, how transient, how venial a thing
it was. And lest in his loneliness,--for since the atmosphere of his
old world had once more inflated his lungs he was as isolated in the
Sims household, he found its air as hard to breathe, as if he were in
an exhausted receiver,--in his despair, in the hardship of his lot, in
the deep misery of the first true, earnest, and utterly hopeless love
of his life, some fever of wild enterprise should rise like a delirium
in his brain, and confuse his sense of right and wrong, and palsy his
capacity for resistance, and counsel disguise, and destroy his reverent
appreciation of what was due to her, he would put it beyond his power
ever to masquerade in the likeness of his own self and the status
of his own true position in the world; he would render it necessary
that he should always appear before her in the absolutely false and
contemptible rôle of a country boor, an uncouth, unlettered clown.
At the paradox of this conclusion he burst into a grim laugh; then--for
he would no longer meddle with these subtle distinctions of right and
wrong, where, in the metamorphoses of deduction, the false became
true, and interchangeably the true was false--he began to run, and in
the strong vivacity of his pride in his physical prowess he was able
to reflect that better time was seldom made by an amateur, unless for
a short spurt, than the pace he kept all the way to the Sims cabin.
He would not let himself think while in the roof-room he rolled the
jaunty suit into a bundle. He set his teeth and breathed hard as he
recognized a certain pleasure which his finger-tips derived from the
very touch of the soft, fine texture of the cloth, and realized how
tenuous was the quality of his resolution, how quick he must needs be
to carry into effect the conclusions of his sober judgment, lest he
waver anew. He was out again and a mile away before he began to debate
the disposition which it would be best to make of the bundle under his
arm. He recalled with a momentary regret Mrs. Sims’s kitchen fire, over
which doubtless Euphemia was now bending, busy with the johnny-cake
for the evening meal. He dismissed the thought on the instant. The
feminine ideas of economy would never suffer the destruction of so
much good all-wool gear, whatever its rescue might cost in the future.
Moreover, it would be inexplicable. He could get a spade and bury
the bundle,--and dig it up, too, the next time this mad, unworthy
temptation should assail him. He could throw it into the river,--and
fish it out again.
Suddenly he remembered the lime-kiln. The greater portion of its
product had been used long ago, but the residue still lay unslaked in
the dry cavern, and more than once, in passing, he had noted the great
boulder rolled to the aperture and securely closing it against the
entrance of air and moisture. The place was in the immediate vicinity,
and somehow, although he had been here often since, the predominant
impression in his mind, when he reached the jutting promontory of rock
and gazed down at the sea of foliage in the Cove, that surely had once
known the ebb and flow of tides other than the spring bourgeonings
and the autumn desiccations, was the reminiscence of that early time
in Etowah Cove when he had stood here in the white glare from the
lime-kiln and watched that strange anamorphosis of the lime-burner’s
face through the shimmering medium of the uprising heat. He seemed to
see it again,--all unaware that now, in its normal proportions, that
face looked down upon him from the height of the cliff above, although
its fright, its surprise, its crafty intimations, its malevolence,
distorted it hardly less than the strange effects of the writhing
currents of heat and air in that dark night so long ago.
The young man hesitated once more. He had a certain conscientious
reverence for property and order; it was with a distinct wrench of
volition that he would destroy aught of even small value. But as he
seated himself on the ledge, shaking out the natty black-and-red
blazer, he recognized the melody that was mechanically murmuring
through his lips,--again, still again, the measures of a waltz, that
waltz through whose enchanted rhythms he had fancied that he and she
might dreamily drift together. He sprang to his feet in a panic. With
one mighty effort he flung the great boulder aside. Hastily he dropped
the garments with the shoes, belt, and long blue hose, into the cavern,
and with a staff stirred the depths of the lime till it rose above
them. More than once he was fain to step back from the scorching air
and the smarting white powder that came in puffs from the interior.
“That’s enough,” he muttered mockingly after a moment, as he stood with
his muscles relaxed, sick with the sentiment of the renunciation of the
world which the demolition of the sophisticated garb included in its
significance. “I cannot undertake to dance with any fine lady in this
toggery now; she’d think I had come straight from hell. And,” with a
swift change of countenance, “so I have!--so I have!”
Then, with his habitual carefulness where any commercial interest,
however small, was concerned, he roused himself, wrenched the great
boulder back into its place, noting here and there a crevice, and
filling it with smaller stones and earth that no air might gain
admission; and, with one final close scrutiny of the entrance, he took
his way into the dense laurel and the gathering dusk, all unaware of
the peering, suspicious, frightened face and angry eyes that watched
him from the summit of the cliff above.
The discipline of life had certain subduing effects on Lucien Royce.
He felt very much tamed when next he took a seat upon the bench placed
aside in the corner of the bowling-alley, to affect to watch the game,
but in truth to give his humble despair what added pain it might
deem pleasure and clutch as solace, by the sight of her smiles won
by happier men, the sound of her voice, the meagre realities of the
day to supplement the lavish and fantastic visions of his dreams. He
had reached the point where expectation fails. He looked only for the
eventless routine of the alley,--the hour of amusement for the others,
the lingering separation, the silence of the deserted building, and
the living on the recollection of a glance of the eye, a turn of the
head, a displaced tendril of hair, softly curling, until to-morrow, or
the next day, or the next, should give him the precious privilege of
making such observations for the sustenance of his soul through another
interval of absence. Suddenly, his heart, dully beating on through
these dreary days, began to throb wildly, and he gazed with quickening
interest at the scene before him: the long narrow shell of a building
with the frequent windows where the green leaves looked in, the brown
unplastered walls, the dark rafters rising into the shadowy roof,
and the crossing of the great beams into which records of phenomenal
successions of ten strikes had been cut by the vaunting winners of
matches, with their names and the dates of the event, the year of the
Lord methodically affixed, as if these deeds were such as were to be
cherished by posterity. Down the smooth and shining alley a ball was
rolling. Miss Gertrude Fordyce, wearing a sheer green-and-white dress
of simple lawn and a broad hat trimmed with ferns, was standing at the
head of the alley, about to receive her second ball from the hands of a
blond young cavalier in white flannels. Royce had seen him often since
the morning when he had observed him giving his valuable advice as to
the erection of the stage in the ballroom, and knew that he was Millden
Seymour, just admitted to the bar, with a reputation for talent, an
intelligent face, and a smooth and polished _bonhomie_ of manner; he
was given to witty sayings, and was a little too intent upon the one
he was exploiting at this moment to notice that the pins at the further
end of the alley had not been set up, the hotel functionary detailed
for that duty not having arrived. Miss Fordyce hesitated, with the ball
in her hand, in momentary embarrassment, the color in her cheeks and a
laugh in her eyes.
Royce sprang up, and running lightly down by the side of the alley
placed the pins in readiness to receive her second ball; then stood
soberly aside, his hat in his hand, as if to watch the execution of the
missile.
“How very polite!” said one of the chaperons over her knitting to
another. “I often notice that young man. He seems to take so much
interest in the game.”
This trifling dévoir, however, which Royce had not hesitated to
offer to a lady, savored of servility in its appropriation by a man.
Nevertheless, he was far too discreet, too well aware of what was due
to Miss Fordyce, to allow the attention to seem a personal tribute from
him. He silently cursed his officiousness, notwithstanding, as he bent
down to set the tenpins in place for the second player, who happened to
be the smart young cavalier. Only with an effort Royce conserved his
blithe air and a certain amiable alacrity as through a round or two of
the game he continued to set up the pins; but when the flustered and
hurried bell-boy whose duty he had performed came panting in, Royce
could have broken the recreant’s head with right good will, and would
not restrain a tendency to relapse into his old gait and pose, which
had no savor of meekness, as he sauntered up the side of the alley to
his former seat beside the mountaineers, who had gazed stolidly at his
performance.
Royce noted that one or two of the more athletic of the young men had
followed his movements with attention. “Confound you!” he said to
himself irritably. “I am man enough to throw you over that beam, and
you are hardly so stupid as to fail to know it.”
Miss Fordyce had not turned her eyes toward him,--no more, he said to
himself, than if he had been the side of the wall. And notwithstanding
the insignia of civilization thrust out of sight into the quicklime
and the significance of their destruction, and the flagellant anguish
of the discipline of hopelessness and humiliation, he felt this as a
burning injustice and grief, and the next instant asked himself in
disdain what could such a man gain if she should look at him in his
lowly and humble estate?
Royce brooded gloomily upon these ideas during the rest of the game;
and when the crowd had departed, and he had risen to take leave of the
scene that he lived by, he noticed, with only the sense that his way
was blocked, several of the young men lingering about the door. They
had been glancing at him, and as one of them,--it was Seymour,--in a
very propitiatory manner, approached him, he became suddenly aware
that they had been discussing the appropriateness of offering him a
gratuity for setting up the tenpins in the heat and dust while they
played. Seymour was holding out their joint contributions in his hand;
but his affability was petrified upon his countenance as his mild eyes
caught the fiery glance which Royce flung at the group, and marked the
furious flush which suffused neck and face and ears as he realized
their intention. It was a moment of mutual embarrassment. They meant no
offense, and he knew it. Had he been what he seemed, it would have been
shabby in the last degree to accept such timely offices with no tender
of remuneration. Royce’s ready tact served to slacken the tension.
“Here,” he said abruptly, but despite his easy manner his voice
trembled, “let me show you something.”
He took a silver quarter of a dollar from the handful of small change
still mechanically extended, and, turning to a table which held a tray
with glasses, he played the trick with the goblet and the bit of money
that had interested the captain of the ill-fated steamboat on the night
when Lucien Royce perished so miserably to the world. It was with a
good-natured feigning of interest that the young men pressed round,
at first, all willing to aid the salving of the honest pride which
their offering had evidently so lacerated. But this gave way to an
excitement that had rarely been paralleled at New Helvetia Springs, as
feat succeeded feat. The juggler was soon eager to get away, having
served his purpose of eluding their bounty, but this was more difficult
than he had anticipated. He feared troublesome questions, but beyond
a “Say, how in thunder did you learn all this?” there were none; and
the laconic response, “From a traveling fellow,” seemed to allay their
curiosity.
After a little he forgot their ill-starred benevolence; his spirits
expanded in this youthful society, the tone of which was native to
him, and from which he had long been an outcast. He began to reflect
subacutely that the idea of a fugitive from justice would not occur to
men of their social position so readily as to the mountaineers, who
were of a more restricted field of speculation and limited knowledge
of the world. He might seem to these summer sojourners, perhaps,
a man educated beyond his prospects in life and his station, and
ashamed of both; such types are not altogether unknown. Or perhaps
he might be rusticating in this humble fashion, being a person of
small means, or a man with some malady, attracted here like others
in search of health, but of a lower grade of society. “For they tell
me,” he said satirically to himself, “that such people have lungs and
livers like the best of us!” He might be a native touched by some
unhallowed ambition, and, having tried his luck in the outer world,
flung back upon his despised beginnings and out of a job. He might
be the schoolmaster in the Cove, of a vastly higher grade than the
native product, doubtless, but these young fellows were uninterested
and unobservant, and hardly likely to evolve accurate distinctions. He
felt sure that the idea of crime would occur to these gay butterflies
the most remotely of all the possible solutions of the anomalies of his
presence and his garb. He began to give himself up unconsciously to
the mild pleasure of their association; their chatter, incongruously
enough, revived his energies and solaced his feelings like some suave
balm. But he experienced a quick repulsion and a start of secret
terror when two or three, having consulted apart for a few moments,
joined the group again, and called upon him to admire their “cheek,”
as they phrased it, in the proposition they were about to make,--no
less than that he should consent to perform some of his wonderful
feats of sleight of hand at an entertainment which they proposed to
give at New Helvetia. They explained to him, as if he had not grievous
cause to know already, that the young ladies had devised a series of
tableaux followed by a ball; that the children had scored a stunning
success in a “tacky party;” that the married people had preëmpted the
not very original idea of a _fête champêtre_, and to preclude any
unmannerly jumping of their claim had fixed the date, wind and weather
permitting, and had formally bidden the guests, all the summer birds
at New Helvetia Springs. And now it devolved upon the young men to
do their part toward whiling away time for the general pleasure,--a
task for which, oddly enough, they were not so well equipped as one
might imagine. They were going to give a dramatic entertainment upon
the stage which had been erected for the tableaux in the ballroom, and
which still stood, it being cheaper, the proprietor had remarked, to
leave it there than to erect it anew; for no one could be sure when
the young people would want it again. There would be college songs
first, glees and so forth, and they made much of the prestige of a
banjo-player in their ranks. Some acrobatic feats by the more athletic
youths were contemplated, but much uneasiness was felt because a
budding littérateur--this was again Mr. Seymour--was giving token of a
total breakdown in a farce he was writing for the occasion, entitled
“The New Woman,” which, although beginning with aplomb and brilliancy,
showed no signs of reaching a conclusion,--a flattering tribute to the
permanence of the subject. Mr. Seymour might not have it completed by
the date fixed. The skill of this amateur prestidigitator would serve
to fill the breach if the playwright should not be ready; and even
if inspiration should smile upon him and bring him in at the finish,
the jugglery would enliven the long waits while the scenes were being
prepared and the costumes changed.
Royce, with a sudden accession of prudence, refused plumply; a
sentiment of recoil possessed him. He felt the pressure of the surprise
and the uncertainty like a positive pain as he sat perched on the
high window-sill, and gazed out into the blank unresponsiveness of the
undergrowth of the forest, wilting in the heat of a hazy noon. The
young men forbore to urge him; that delicate point of offering money,
obviously so very nettling to his pride, which seemed altogether a
superfluous luxury for a man in his position, hampered them. He might,
however, be in the habit of giving exhibitions for pay; for aught they
knew, the discussion of the honorarium was in order. But they had been
schooled by the incident of the morning; even the quarter of a dollar
which had lent itself to the nimble gyrations of legerdemain had found
its way by some unimagined art of jugglery into the pocket of its
owner, and Millden Seymour, who had a bland proclivity to smooth rough
places and enjoy a refined peace of mind, was swearing by all his gods
that it should stay there until more appropriately elicited.
An odd thing it was, Royce was feeling, that without a moment’s
hesitation he should accept the box receipts of the “show” in the Cove,
on which he had subsisted for weeks, and yet in his uttermost necessity
he could not have brooked appearing as a juggler before the sojourners
at New Helvetia Springs for his own benefit. The one audience
represented the general public, he supposed, and was far from him. The
other he felt as his own status, his set; and he could as soon have
handed around the hat, after one of the snug little bachelor dinners
he used to be so fond of giving in St. Louis, as ask remuneration for
his assistance in this amateur entertainment of the young butterflies
at New Helvetia.
He burst into abrupt and sardonic laughter as he divined their
line of cogitation, and realized how little they could imagine the
incongruities of his responsive mental processes. In the quick change
from a pondering gravity to this repellent gayety there was something
of the atmosphere of a rude rebuff, and a certain dignity and distance
informed the manner of the few who still lounged about with their
cigars. Royce hastened to nullify this. They had shown much courtesy
to one of his low degree, and although he knew--from experience, poor
fellow--that it was prompted not so much by a perception of his deserts
as by a realization of their own, it being the conduct and sentiment
which graced them and which they owed to persons of their condition, he
had no wish to be rude, even though it might seem that he owed a man in
_his_ position nothing.
“Oh, I’ll help you,” he said hastily, “though we shall have to rig up
some sort of properties. But I don’t need much.”
The talk fell upon these immediately, and he forthwith perceived that
he was in for it. And why not? he asked himself. How did it endanger
him, or why should he shun it? All the Cove and the countryside for
twenty miles around knew of his feats of sleight of hand; and since
accident had revealed his knack to this little coterie of well-bred
and well-placed young men, why should he grudge the exhibition to the
few scores of ladies and children at New Helvetia, to aid the little
diversion of the evening? His scruples could have no force now, for
this would bring him--the social pariah!--no nearer to them than when
he sat by the tenpin-alley and humbly watched his betters play. The
episode of the jugglery, once past, would be an old story and bereft of
interest. He would have had his little day, basking in the sun of the
applause of his superiors, and would sink back to his humble obscurity
at the side of the bowling-alley. Should he show any disposition to
presume upon the situation, he realized that they well understood the
art of repressing a forward inferior. The entertainment contemplated
no subsequent social festivities. The programme, made out with many
an interlineation, had been calculated to occupy all the time until
eleven o’clock; and Royce, looking at it with the accustomed eye of a
manager of private theatricals, felt himself no prophet to discern that
midnight would find the exhausted audience still seated, enjoying that
royal good measure of amusement always meted out by bounteous amateurs.
Throughout the evening he would be immured with the other young men in
the close little pens which served for dressing and green rooms,--for
all the actors in the farce were to be men,--save for the fraction of
time when his jugglery would necessitate his presence on the stage.
True, Miss Fordyce, should she patronize the entertainment, might then
have to look at him somewhat more discerningly than she would look
at the wall, perhaps! It could surely do her no harm. She had seen
worse men, he protested, with eager self-assertion. She owed him that
much,--one glance, one moment’s cognition of his existence. It was
not much to ask. He had made a great sacrifice for her sake, and all
unknown to her. He had had regard to her estimate of her dignity and
held it dear. He had done her reverence from the depths of his heart,
regardless that it cost him his last hope.
The powers of the air were gradually changing at New Helvetia Springs.
The light of the days had grown dull and gray. Masses of white vapor
gathered in the valley, rising, and rising, and filling all its depths
and slopes, as if it were the channel of some great river, till only
the long level line of the summit of the opposite range showed above
the impalpable tides in the similitude of the further banks of a
great stream. It was a suggestive resemblance to Lucien Royce, and
he winced as he looked upon it. He was not sorry when it had gone,
for the gathering mists soon pervaded the forests, and hid cliffs and
abysses and even the familiar path, save for the step before the eye,
and in this still whiteness all the world was lost; at last one could
only hear--for it too shared the invisibilities--the rain falling
steadily, drearily, all the day and all the long, long hours of the
black night. The bowling-alley was deserted; lawn-tennis had succumbed
to the weather; the horses stood in the stalls. One might never know
that the hotel at New Helvetia Springs existed except that now and
again, in convolutions of mist as it rolled, a gable high up might
reveal itself for a moment, or a peaked turret; unless indeed one
were a ghost, to find some spectral satisfaction in slipping viewless
through the white enveloping nullity, and gazing in at the window of
the great parlor, where a log fire was ruddily aflare and the elders
perused their newspapers or worked their tidies, and the youth swung
in rocking-chairs and exchanged valuable ideas, and played cards, and
read a novel aloud, and hung in groups about the tortured piano. So
close stood a poor ghost to the window one day, risking observation,
that he might have read, over the charming outline of sloping shoulders
clad faultlessly in soft gray cloth, the page of the novel which Miss
Fordyce had brought there to catch the light; so close that he might
have heard every syllable of the conversation which ensued when the
man in whom he discovered her destiny--the cold, inexpressive-looking,
personified conventionality--came and sat beside her on the sofa. But
the poor ghost had more scruples than reality of existence, and, still
true to the sanctions that control gentlemen in a world in which he had
no more part, he turned hastily away that no syllable might reach him.
And as he turned he ran almost into the arms of a man who had been
tramping heavily up and down the veranda in the white obscurities, all
unaware of his propinquity. It might have been better if he had!