This last hour in Elsie's company was a mingled pain and pleasure to
Curtis, for she was most charming. She laid aside all hauteur, all
perversity, and gave herself unreservedly to her good friends. They were
all at high tension, and the talk leaped from jest to protest, and back
to laughter again, agile and inconsequent. The time and the place, the
past and the future, counted for little to these four, for they were
young and they were lovers.
At last Jennie rose. "If you people are to rise at dawn you must go to
sleep now. Good-night! Come, Elsie Bee Bee."
Maynard followed Jennie into the hall with some jest, and Curtis seized
the opportunity to delay Elsie. He offered his hand, and she laid hers
therein with a motion of half-surrender.
"Good-night, Captain. I appreciate your kindness more than I can say."
"Don't try. I feel now that I have done nothing--nothing of what I
should have done; but I didn't think you were to leave so soon. If I had
known--"
"You have done more than you realize. Once more, good-night!"
"Good-night!" he said, in an unsteady voice; "and remember, you promised
to write!"
"I will keep my promise." She turned at the door. "Don't try to write
around your red people. I believe I'd like to hear how you get on with
them."
"Defend me from mine enemies within the gates, and I'll work out my
problem."
"I'll do my best. Good-bye!"
"No, not good-bye--just good-night!"
For a moment he stood meditating a further word, then stepped into the
hall. Elsie, midway on the stairs, had turned and was looking down at
him with a face wherein the eyes were wistful and brows perplexed. She
guiltily lowered her lashes and turned away, but that momentary
pause--that subtle interplay of doubt and dream--had given the soldier a
pleasure deeper than words.
* * * * *
Jennie was waiting at the door of the tiny room in which Elsie was to
sleep, her face glowing with admiration and love. "Oh, you queenly
girl!" she cried, with a convulsive clasp of her strong arms. "I can't
get over the wonder of your being here in our little house. You ought to
live always in a castle."
Elsie smiled, but with tears in her eyes. "You're a dear, good girl. I
never had a truer friend."
"I wish you were poor!" said Jennie, as they entered the plain little
room; "then you could come here as a missionary or something, and we
could have you with us all the time. I hate to think of your going away
to-morrow."
"You must come and see me in Washington."
"Oh no! That wouldn't do!" said Jennie, half alarmed. "It might spoil me
for life out here. You must visit us again."
There was a note of honest, almost boyish suffering in Jennie's
entreaties which moved the daughter of wealth very deeply, and she went
to her bed with a feeling of loss, as though she were taking leave of
something very sweet and elementally comforting.
She thought of her first lover, and her cheeks burned with disgust of
her folly. She thought of two or three good, manly suitors whose
protestations of love had left her cold and humorously critical. On
Lawson's suit she lingered, for he was still a possibility should
she decide to put her soldier-lover away. "But I _have_ done
so--definitely," she said to some pleading within herself. "I can't
marry him; our lives are ordered on divergent lines. I can't come here
to live."
"Happiness is not dependent on material things," argued her newly
awakened self. "He loves you--he is handsome and true and good."
"But I don't love him."
"Yes, you do. When you returned Osborne Lawson's ring you quite plainly
said so."
She burned with a new flame with this confession; but she protested,
"Let us be sensible! Let us argue!"
"You cannot argue with love."
"I am not a child to be carried away by a momentary gust of emotion. See
how impossible it is for me to share his work--his austere life."
And here entered the far-reaching question of the life and death of a
race. In a most disturbing measure this obscure young soldier
represented a view of life--of civilization antagonistic to her faith,
and in stern opposition to the teachings of her father. In a subtle
fashion he had warped the word _duty_ from its martial significance to a
place in a lofty philosophy whose tenets were only just beginning to
unfold their inner meaning to her.
Was it not true that she was less sympathetic with the poor brown
peoples of the earth than with the animals? "How can you be contemptuous
of God's children, whom the physical universe has colored brown or black
or yellow--you, who are indignant when a beast is overburdened? If we
repudiate and condemn to death those who do not please us, who will
live?"
She felt in herself some singular commotion. Conceptions, hitherto mere
shells of thought, became infilled with passion; and pity, hitherto a
feeble sentiment with her, expanded into an emotion which shook her,
filled her throat with sobs, discrediting her old self with her new self
till the thought of her mean and selfish art brought shame. How small it
all was, how trivial, beside the consciousness of duty well done,
measured against a life of self-sacrifice, such as that suggested by
this man, whose eyes sought her in worship!
Could there be any greater happiness than to stand by his side, helping
to render a dying, captive race happier--healthier? Could her great
wealth be put to better use than this of teaching two hundred thousand
red people how to meet and adjust themselves to the white man's way of
life? Their rags, their squalor, their ignorance were more deeply
depressing to her lover than the poverty of the slums, for the Tetongs
had been free and joyous hunters. Their condition was a tragic
debasement. She began to feel the arguments of the Indian helpers. Their
words were no longer dead things; they had become electric nodes; they
moved her, set her blood aflame, and she clinched her hands and said: "I
will help him do this great work!"