“I don't know whar, 'n' I don't keer whar--but I'm goin'.”
She turned her eyes toward the great wall of forest-covered mountain,
lifting its height before the open door, and the blood showed its deep
glow upon her cheek.
“Some o' these days,” she added; “as shore as I'm a woman.”
When they talked the matter over afterward, Miss Thorne's remarks were
at once decided and severe.
“Shall I tell you what my opinion is, Rebecca?” she said. “It is my
opinion that there is evil enough in the creature to be the ruin of the
whole community. She is bad at the core.”
“I would rather believe,” said Rebecca, musingly, “that she was only
inordinately vain.” Almost instantaneously her musing was broken by a
light laugh. “She has dressed her hair as I dress mine,” she said, “only
it was done better. I could not have arranged it so well. She saw it
last night and was quick enough to take in the style at a glance.”
At the beginning of the next week there occurred an event which changed
materially the ordinary routine of life in the cabin. Heretofore the two
sojourners among the mountain fastnesses had walked and climbed under
the escort of a small tow-headed Harney. But one evening as she sat
sketching on her favorite flat seat of rock, Miss Noble somewhat alarmed
this youth by dropping her paper and starting to her feet.
“Orlander” Harney sat and stared at her with black eyes and opened
mouth. The red came and went under her fair skin, and she breathed
quickly.
“Oh,” she cried softly, “how _could_ I be mistaken!”
That she was not mistaken became evident immediately. At the very moment
she spoke, the advancing horseman, whose appearance had so roused her,
glanced upward along the path and caught sight of her figure. He lifted
his hat in gay greeting and struck his horse lightly with his whip.
Rebecca bent down and picked up her portfolio.
“You may go home,” she said quietly to the boy. “I shall be there soon;
and you may tell Miss Thorne that Mr. Lennox has come.” She was at the
base of the rock when the stranger drew rein. “How is this?” she asked
with bright uplifted eyes. “We did not think”--
It occurred to Lennox that he had never recognized her peculiar charm
so fully as he did at this moment. Rebecca Noble, though not a
beauty, possessed a subtle grace of look and air which was not easily
resisted,--and just now, as she held out her hand, the clear sweetness
of her face shadowed by her piquantly plain hat of rough straw, he felt
the influence of this element more strongly than ever before.
“There was no reason why I should not come,” he said, “since you did not
forbid me.”
At sunset they returned to the cabin. Lennox led his rather
sorry-looking animal by the bridle, and trusting to its meekness of
aspect, devoted his attention wholly to his companion.
“Thet's Nath Dunbar's critter,” commented “Mis'” Harney, standing at the
door. “They've powerful poor 'commodations fur boardin', but I reckon
Nath must 'a' tuk him in.”
“Then,” said Rebecca, learning that this was the case, “then you have
seen Lodusky.”
But he had not seen Lodusky, it seemed. She had not been at home when
he arrived, and he had only remained in the house long enough to make
necessary arrangements before leaving it to go in search of his friends.
The bare, rough-walled room was very cheery that night. Lennox brought
with him the gossip of the great world, to which he gave an air of
freshness and spice that rendered it very acceptable to the temporary
hermits. Outside, the moon shone with a light as clear as day, though
softer, and the tender night breezes stirred the pine-tops and nestled
among the laurels; inside, by the beautiful barbarous light of the
flaring pine-knots on the hearth, two talkers, at least, found the hours
fly swiftly.
When these two bade each other good-night it was only natural that they
should reach the point toward which they had been veering for twelve
months.
Miss Thorne remained in the room, drawing nearer the fire with an
amiable little shiver, well excused by the mountain coolness, but
Rebecca was beguiled into stepping out into the moonlight The brightness
of the moon and the blackness of the shadows cast by trees and rocks and
undergrowth, seemed somehow to heighten the effect of the intense and
utter stillness reigning around them,--even the occasional distant cry
of some wandering wild creature marked, rather than broke in upon, the
silence. Rebecca's glance about her was half nervous.
“It is very beautiful,” she said, “and it moves one strongly; but I
am not sure that it is not, in some of one's moods, just a little
oppressive.”
It is possible Lennox did not hear her. He was looking down at her with
eager eyes. Suddenly he had caught her hand to his lips and kissed it.
“You know why I am here, Rebecca,” he said. “Surely, all my hoping is
not vain?”
She looked pale and a little startled; but she lifted her face and did
not draw herself away.
“Is it?” he asked again. “Have I come on a hopeless errand?”
“No,” she answered. “You have not.”
His words came freely enough then and with fire. When Rebecca reentered
the cabin her large eyes shone in her small, sweet face, and her lips
wore a charming curve.
Miss Thorne turned in her chair to look at her and was betrayed into a
smile.
“Mr. Lennox has gone, of course,” she said.
“Yes.”
Then, after a brief silence, in which Rebecca pushed the pine-knots with
her foot, the elder lady spoke again.
“Don't you think you may as well tell me about it, Beck, my child?” she
said.
Beck looked down and shook her head with very charming gravity.
“Why should I?” she asked. “When--when you know.”
Lennox rode his mildly disposed but violently gaited steed homeward
in that reposeful state of bliss known only to accepted lovers. He had
plucked his flower at last; he was no longer one of the many; he was
ecstatically content. Uncertainty had no charm for him, and he was by no
means the first discoverer of the subtle fineness her admirers found so
difficult to describe in Miss Noble. Granted that she was not a beauty,
judged rigidly, still he had found in her soft, clear eye, in her color,
her charming voice, even in her little gestures, something which reached
him as an artist and touched him as a man.
“One cannot exactly account for other women's paling before her,” he
said to himself; “but they do--and lose significance.” And then he
laughed tenderly. At this moment, it was true, every other thing on
earth paled and lost significance.
That the family of his host had retired made itself evident to him when
he dismounted at the house. To the silence of the night was added the
silence of slumber. No one was to be seen; a small cow, rendered lean
by active climbing in search of sustenance, breathed peacefully near
the tumble-down fence; the ubiquitous, long-legged, yellow dog, rendered
trustful by long seclusion, aroused himself from his nap to greet the
arrival with a series of heavy raps upon the rickety porch-floor with
a solid but languid tail. Lennox stepped over him in reaching for the
gourd hanging upon the post, and he did not consider it incumbent upon
himself to rise.
In a little hollow at the road-side was the spring from which the
household supplies of water were obtained. Finding none in the wooden
bucket, Lennox took the gourd with the intention of going down to the
hollow to quench his thirst.
“We've powerful good water,” his host had said in the afternoon, “'n'
it's nigh the house, too. I built the house yer a-purpose,--on 'count of
its be-in' nigh.”
He was unconsciously dwelling upon this statement as he walked, and
trying to recall correctly the mountain drawl and twang.
“She,” he said (there was only one “she” for him to-night)--“she will
be sure to catch it and reproduce it in all its shades to the life.”
He was only a few feet from the spring itself and he stopped with a
sharp exclamation of the most uncontrollable amazement,--stopped and
stared straight before him. It was a pretty, dell-like place, darkly
shadowed on one side but bathed in the flooding moonlight on the other,
and it was something he saw in this flood of moonlight which almost
caused him to doubt for the moment the evidence of his senses.
How it was possible for him to believe that there really could stand in
such a spot a girl attired in black velvet of stagy cut and trimmings,
he could not comprehend; but a few feet from him there certainly stood
such a girl, who bent her lithe, round shape over the spring, gazing
into its depths with all the eagerness of an insatiable vanity.
“I can't see nothing” he heard her say impatiently. “I can't see nothin'
nohow.”
Despite the beauty, his first glance could not help showing him she was
a figure so incongruous and inconsistent as to be almost _bizarre_. When
she stood upright revealing fully her tall figure in its shabby finery,
he felt something like resentment. He made a restive movement which she
heard. The bit of broken looking-glass she held in her hand fell into
the water, she uttered a shamefaced angry cry.
“What d'ye want?” she exclaimed. “What are ye a-doin'? I didn't know as
no one was a-lookin'. I”--
Her head was flung backward, her full throat looked like a pillar of
marble against the black edge of her dress, her air was fierce. He would
not have been an artist if he had not been powerfully struck with a
sense of her picturesqueness.