All the way back to New York Langbourne was oppressed by a sense of loss
such as his old disappointment in love now seemed to him never to have
inflicted. He found that his whole being had set toward the unseen owner
of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and
tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He
was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The
voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the
noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it
was a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must
have listened for it in the night, how every tone of it must have
pervaded him and possessed him. He was in love with it, he was as
entirely fascinated by it as if it were the girl's whole presence, her
looks, her qualities. The remnant of the summer passed in the fret of
business, which was doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in
being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound
of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The
image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout
the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening,
late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded
to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced
his purpose of returning in person the circular addressed to her as a
means of her acquaintance. He wrote to her, and in terms as dignified as
he could contrive, and as free from any ulterior import, he told her he
had found it in the hotel hallway and had meant to send it to her at
once, thinking it might be of some slight use to her. He had failed to
do this, and now, having come upon it among some other papers, he sent
it with an explanation which he hoped she would excuse him for troubling
her with.
This was not true, but he did not see how he could begin with her by
saying that he had found the circular in her room, and had kept it by
him ever since, looking at it every day, and leaving it where he could
see it the last thing before he slept at night and the first thing after
he woke in the morning. As to her reception of his story, he had to
trust to his knowledge that she was, like himself, of country birth and
breeding, and to his belief that she would not take alarm at his
overture. He did not go much into the world and was little acquainted
with its usages, yet he knew enough to suspect that a woman of the world
would either ignore his letter, or would return a cold and snubbing
expression of Miss Simpson's thanks for Mr. Stephen M. Langbourne's
kindness.
He had not only signed his name and given his address carefully in hopes
of a reply, but he had enclosed the business card of his firm as a token
of his responsibility. The partner in a wholesale stationery house ought
to be an impressive figure in the imagination of a village girl; but it
was some weeks before any answer came to Langbourne's letter. The reply
began with an apology for the delay, and Langbourne perceived that he
had gained rather than lost by the writer's hesitation; clearly she
believed that she had put herself in the wrong, and that she owed him a
certain reparation. For the rest, her letter was discreetly confined to
an acknowledgment of the trouble he had taken.
But this spare return was richly enough for Langbourne; it would have
sufficed, if there had been nothing in the letter, that the handwriting
proved Miss Simpson to have been the one who had made the entry of her
name and her friend's in the hotel register. This was most important as
one step in corroboration of the fact that he had rightly divined her;
that the rest should come true was almost a logical necessity. Still, he
was puzzled to contrive a pretext for writing again, and he remained
without one for a fortnight. Then, in passing a seedsman's store which
he used to pass every day without thinking, he one day suddenly
perceived his opportunity. He went in and got a number of the catalogues
and other advertisements, and addressed them then and there, in a
wrapper the seedsman gave him, to Miss Barbara F. Simpson, Upper Ashton
Falls, N. H.
Now the response came with a promptness which at least testified of the
lingering compunction of Miss Simpson. She asked if she were right in
supposing the seedsman's catalogues and folders had come to her from
Langbourne, and begged to know from him whether the seedsman in question
was reliable: it was so difficult to get garden seeds that one could
trust.
The correspondence now established itself, and with one excuse or
another it prospered throughout the winter. Langbourne was not only
willing, he was most eager, to give her proof of his reliability; he
spoke of stationers in Springfield and Greenfield to whom he was
personally known; and he secretly hoped she would satisfy herself
through friends in those places that he was an upright and trustworthy
person.
Miss Simpson wrote delightful letters, with that whimsical quality which
had enchanted him in her voice. The coaxing and caressing was not there,
and could not be expected to impart itself, unless in those refuges of
deep feeling supposed to lurk between the lines. But he hoped to provoke
it from these in time, and his own letters grew the more earnest the
more ironical hers became. He wrote to her about a book he was reading,
and when she said she had not seen it, he sent it her; in one of her
letters she casually betrayed that she sang contralto in the choir, and
then he sent her some new songs, which he had heard in the theatre, and
which he had informed himself from a friend were contralto. He was
always tending to an expression of the feeling which swayed him; but on
her part there was no sentiment. Only in the fact that she was willing
to continue this exchange of letters with a man personally unknown to
her did she betray that romantic tradition which underlies all our young
life, and in those unused to the world tempts to things blameless in
themselves, but of the sort shunned by the worldlier wise. There was no
great wisdom of any kind in Miss Simpson's letters; but Langbourne did
not miss it; he was content with her mere words, as they related the
little events of her simple daily life. These repeated themselves from
the page in the tones of her voice and filled him with a passionate
intoxication.
Towards spring he had his photograph taken, for no reason that he could
have given; but since it was done he sent one to his mother in Vermont,
and then he wrote his name on another, and sent it to Miss Simpson in
New Hampshire. He hoped, of course, that she would return a photograph
of herself; but she merely acknowledged his with some dry playfulness.
Then, after disappointing him so long that he ceased to expect anything,
she enclosed a picture. The face was so far averted that Langbourne
could get nothing but the curve of a longish cheek, the point of a nose,
the segment of a crescent eyebrow. The girl said that as they should
probably never meet, it was not necessary he should know her when he saw
her; she explained that she was looking away because she had been
attracted by something on the other side of the photograph gallery just
at the moment the artist took the cap off the tube of his camera, and
she could not turn back without breaking the plate.
Langbourne replied that he was going up to Springfield on business the
first week in May, and that he thought he might push on as far north as
Upper Ashton Falls. To this there came no rejoinder whatever, but he did
not lose courage. It was now the end of April, and he could bear to wait
for a further verification of his ideal; the photograph had confirmed
him in its evasive fashion at every point of his conjecture concerning
her. It was the face he had imagined her having, or so he now imagined,
and it was just such a long oval face as would go with the figure he
attributed to her. She must have the healthy palor of skin which
associates itself with masses of dark, mahogany-colored hair.