From that instant Hewson renounced his purpose, and he remained true to
this renunciation in spite of the behavior of St. John, which might well
have tempted him to a revenge in kind. No one seemed to have slept late
that morning; several of the ladies complained that they had not slept a
wink the whole night, and two or three of the men owned to having waked
early and not been able to hit it off again in a morning nap, though it
appeared that they were adepts in that sort of thing. The hour of their
vigils corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson’s apparition that he
wondered if a mystical influence from it had not penetrated the whole
house. The adventitious facts were of such a nature that he controlled
with the greater difficulty the wish to explode upon an audience so aptly
prepared for it the prodigious incident which he was keeping in reserve;
but he did not yield even when St. John carefully led up to the point
through the sensation of his guests, by recounting the evidences of the
supposed visit of a burglar, and then made his effect by suddenly turning
upon Hewson, and saying with his broad guffaw: “And here you have the
burglar in person. He has owned his crime to me, and I’ve let him off the
penalty on condition that he tells you all about it.” The humor was not
too rank for the horsey people whom St. John had mainly about him, but
some of the women said, “Poor Mr. Hewson!” when the host, failing
Hewson’s confession, went on to betray that he had risen at that
unearthly hour to go down to the St. Johnswort Inn for a cup of its
famous coffee. The coffee turned out to be the greatest kind of joke; one
of the men asked Hewson if he could say on his honor that it was really
any better than St. John’s coffee there before them, and another
professed to be in a secret more recondite than had yet been divined: it
was that long grim girl, who served it; she had lured Hewson from his
rest at five o’clock in the morning; and this humorist proposed a Welsh
rarebit some night at the inn, where they could all see for themselves
why Hewson broke out of the house and smashed a trellis before sunrise.
Hewson sat silent, not even attempting a defensive sally. In fact it was
only his surface mind which was employed with what was going on; as
before, his deeper thought was again absorbed with his great experience.
He could not, if his conscience had otherwise suffered him, have spoken
of it in that company, and the laughter died away from his silence as if
it had been his offence. He was not offended, but he was ashamed, and
not ashamed so much for St. John as for himself, that he could have ever
imagined acquiring merit in such company by exploiting an experience
which should have been sacred to him. How could he have been so shabby?
He was justly punished in the humiliating contrast between being the butt
of these poor wits, and the hero of an incident which, whatever its real
quality was, had an august character of mystery. He had recognized this
from the first instant; he had perceived that the occurrence was for him,
and for him alone, until he had reasoned some probable meaning into it or
from it; and yet he had been willing, he saw it, he owned it! to win the
applause of that crowd as a man who had just seen a ghost.
He thought of them as that crowd, but after all, they were good-natured
people, and when they fancied that he was somehow vexed with the turn the
talk had taken, they began to speak of other things; St. John himself led
the way, and when he got Hewson alone after breakfast, he made him a sort
of amend. “I didn’t mean to annoy you, old fellow,” he said, “with my
story about the burglary.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Hewson brisked up in response, as he took the
cigar St. John offered him. “I’m afraid I must have seemed rather stupid.
I had got to thinking about something else, and I couldn’t pull myself
away from it. I wasn’t annoyed at all.”
Whether St. John thought this sufficient gratitude for his reparation did
not appear. As Hewson did not offer to break the silence in which they
went on smoking, his host made a pretext, toward the end of their cigars,
after bearing the burden of the conversation apparently as long as he
could, of being reminded of something by the group of women descending
into the garden from the terraced walk beyond it and then slowly, with
little pauses, trailing their summer draperies among the flower-beds and
bushes toward the house.
“Oh, by-the-way,” he said, “I should like to introduce you to Miss
Hernshaw; she came last night with Mrs. Rock: that tall girl, there,
lagging behind a little. She’s an original.”
“I noticed her at breakfast,” Hewson answered, now first aware of having
been struck with the strange beauty and strange behavior of the slim
girl, who drooped in her chair, with her little head fallen forward, and
played with her bread, ignoring her food otherwise, while she listened
with a bored air to the talk which made Hewson its prey. She had an
effect of being both shy and indifferent, in this retrospect; and when
St. John put up the window, and led the way out to the women in the
garden, and presented Hewson, she had still this effect. She did not
smile or speak in acknowledgement of Hewson’s bow; she merely looked at
him with a sort of swift intensity, and then, when one of the women said,
“We were coming to view the scene of your burglarious exploit, Mr.
Hewson. Was that the very window?” the girl looked impatiently away.
“The very window,” Hewson owned. “You wouldn’t know it. St. John has had
the trellis put up and the spot fresh turfed,” and he detached the
interlocutory widow in the direction of their bachelor host, as she
perhaps intended he should, and dropped back to the side of Miss
Hernshaw.
She was almost spiritually slender. In common with all of us, he had
heard that shape of girl called willowy, but he made up his mind that
sweetbriery would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face a virginal
youth suggested the tender innocence and surprise of the flower, while
the droop of her figure, at once delicate and self-reliant, arrested the
fancy with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She looked not above
sixteen in age, but as she was obviously out, in the society sense of the
word, this must have been a moral effect; and Hewson was casting about in
his mind for some appropriate form of thought and language to make talk
in when she abruptly addressed him.
“I don’t see,” she said, with her face still away, “why people make fun
of those poor girls who have to work in that sort of public way.”
Hewson silently picked his steps back through the intervening events to
the drolling at breakfast, and with some misgiving took his stand in the
declaration, “You mean the waitress at the inn?”
“Yes!” cried the girl, with a gentle indignation, which was so dear to
the young man that he would have given anything to believe that it veiled
a measure of sympathy for himself as well as for the waitress. “We went
in there last night when we arrived, for some pins--Mrs. Rock had had her
dress stepped on, getting out of the car--and that girl brought them. I
never saw such a sad face. And she was very nice; she had no more manners
than a cow.”
Miss Hernshaw added the last sentence as if it followed, and in his poor
masculine pride of sequence Hewson wanted to ask if that were why she was
so nice; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, “Yes, there’s a whole
tragedy in it. I wonder if it’s potential or actual.” He somehow felt
safe in being so metaphysical.
“Does it make any difference?” Miss Hernshaw demanded, whirling her face
round, and fixing him with eyes of beautiful fierceness. “Tragedy is
tragedy, whether you have lived it or not, isn’t it? And sometimes it’s
all the more tragical if you have it still to live: you’ve got it before
you! I don’t see how any one can look at that girl’s face and laugh at
her. I should never forgive any one who did.”
“Then I’m glad I didn’t do any of the laughing,” said Hewson, willing to
relieve himself from the strain of this high mood, and yet anxious not to
fall too far below it. “Perhaps I should, though, if I hadn’t been the
victim of it in some degree.”
“It was the vulgarest thing I ever heard!” said the girl.
Hewson looked at her, but she had averted her face again. He had a
longing to tell her of his apparition which quelled every other interest
in him, and, as it were, blurred his whole consciousness. She would
understand, with her childlike truth, and with her unconventionality she
would not find it strange that he should speak to her of such a thing for
no apparent reason or no immediate cause. He walked silent at her side,
revolving his longing in his thought, and hating the circumstance which
forbade him to speak at once. He did not know how long he was lost in
this, when he was suddenly recalled to fearful question of the fact by
her saying, with another flash of her face toward him, “You _have_ lost
sleep Mr. Hewson!” and she whipped forward, and joined the other women,
who were following the lead of St. John and the widow.
Mrs. Rock, to whom Hewson had been presented at the same time as to Miss
Hernshaw, looked vaguely back at him over her shoulder, but made no
attempt to include him in her group, and he thought, for no reason, that
she was kept from doing so on account of Miss Hernshaw. He thought he
could be no more mistaken in this than in the resentment of Miss
Hernshaw, which he was aware of meriting, however unintentionally. Later,
after lunch, he made sure of this fact when Mrs. Rock got him into a
corner, and cozily began, “I always feel like explaining Rosalie a
little,” and then her vague, friendly eye wandered toward Miss Hernshaw
across the room, and stopped, as if waiting for the girl to look away.
But Miss Hernshaw did not look away, and that afternoon, Hewson’s week
being up, he left St. Johnswort before dinner.