On the porch of Miss Pendleton's house that night, guitars were
tinkling. From inside came the glow of shaded lamps softly amber--and
outside along the hillsides where the whippoorwills called plaintively,
slept a silver wash of moonlight.
The stars were large and low-hanging and a pale mist tempered the
slopes that rose in a nocturne of majesty and peace.
Bear Cat Stacy sat there immersed in reverie. He was seeing such a
school grow up on the spot where he had hoped to build a house for
Blossom and himself--then that vision faded and his face grew set
because the other and more personal picture had intervened--the picture
of the dwelling-house to which he had looked forward.
He did not notice that the guitars and the singing voices had come to
silence, and that the white patches of the women's dresses had vanished
from the shaded porch--he was looking out into the summer mists--and
thinking his own thoughts.
Then he heard Miss Pendleton's voice, and came out of his abstraction
with a start, looking about to realize for the first time that the two
of them stood alone out there.
"Now you must talk business," smiled the lady. "I haven't introduced
you yet to the person who is best of all fitted to discuss the details.
She knows just what we seek to do here and how we do it. She knows the
needs of mountain children, too--because she is a mountain girl
herself. She came here really as a pupil--but she's much more than that
now. She teaches the younger children while she studies herself--and
she has developed a positive genius for this work."
Miss Pendleton paused and then added: "I'm going to let the two of you
talk together first--and then I'll join you."
Bear Cat rose and stood courteously acquiescent, then his hostess left
him and he saw another figure appear to stand framed in the door. His
heart rose out of his breast into the throat and choked him, for he
believed that his dreaming had unsettled his mind.
There stood Blossom with the amber light kindling her soft hair into a
nimbus of radiance, and in her cheeks was the old color like the heart
of the laurel's flower.
She stood slim and straight, no longer pallid or thin, and in her eyes
danced a light of welcome.
"Blossom," he stammered--and she left her frame and its amber
background to come forward--with her hands extended.
"Turney," was all she said.
"How came you here?" he demanded, forgetting to release her slim hands.
"How did this come to pass?"
She looked out over the blue and silver leagues of the June night, and
said simply. "There's lots to tell you--let's go out there and talk."
They were standing on a great bowlder where the moss and ferns grew,
and about them twinkled myriads of fireflies. They had been silent for
a long time and Turner's voice had a strained note as he said slowly.
"I promised ye ... thet I wouldn't ever pester ye again with ...
love-making ... but to-night it's right hard ter keep thet pledge."
The breeze was stirring her hair and her own eyes were deep as she
gazed away, but suddenly she turned and her long lashes were raised as
she met his gaze.
"I don't want ... that you should keep it," she whispered. "I give you
back your pledge."
As in those old days the hills seemed to rock about him and the arms
that came forward and paused were unsteady.
"Ye means ... thet...."
"I means thet I loved ye first, Turney." The words came tremulously,
almost whispered, and in them was something of self-accusation. "Maybe
I ought to be ashamed--but somehow I can't. All of what happened seems
to me like a dream that doesn't really belong in my life. It seems to
me that I was dazzled and couldn't tell the true from the seeming....
It seems as I look back that a little piece of my life was torn loose
from the rest--but that the real me has always been yours."
She laid her hands on his shoulders, and as he caught her in his arms,
the light breath of the night breeze brought the fragrance of
honeysuckle to them both. She rested for a moment in his embrace with
the serene feeling that she was at home.
Between them fell a silence but in the bath of silvery light through
the fragrant stillness of dove gray night-tones and cobalt shadows the
girl's eyes were brightly eloquent. Yet after a moment a shade of
troubling thought came into them and the lips moved into the
tremulousness of a self-searching and somewhat self-accusing whisper.
"Turney," she said, "there's one thing that I've got to say--and I
guess it had better be now."
"If it's any fault you're finding with yourself--don't say it," he
protested as his hands closed over her slender fingers. "There ain't
anything that I need to have explained. I reckon I understand what
happiness means and that's enough."
But Blossom shook her head.
"If I'd been straight loyal--like you've been, Turney, I reckon I
couldn't ever have made any mistake. There wouldn't ever have been room
for anybody but you." She paused and then went falteringly ahead. "From
now on there won't ever be. You've known me always and yet even you
can't realize how young and foolish and _plumb_ ignorant I was a year
ago. If I'd been just a _little_ more experienced, it couldn't have
happened. If things hadn't come with such a rush after they began, that
I was just swept along like a log in a spring-tide--it couldn't have
happened." It seemed difficult for her to force the words, but she
obeyed the mandate of her conscience with the candor of the
confessional. "I never had the chance to think--until I came over here
and began looking back. A person like I was doesn't think very clear in
the midst of cyclones and confusions, and I didn't see that the real
bigness was in you--more than in--him. I didn't see it until later. I'd
grown up with you, and I took you too much for granted, I reckon, and
everything he said or did seemed like a scrap out of a fairy story to
my foolish mind."
There was one thing she did not tell him, even now; that she had
learned at last through the lawyers what her husband's connection with
the railroad plans had been. Back of all his fascination there had been
a tarnished honesty, but that secret she still kept to herself.
But she lifted eyes to Turner that were wide open for his reading, and
gravely she said: "I lost my way once--but I've found it again and if
you can forget what a little fool I was at sixteen, you won't ever have
need to doubt me any more."
"All thet's happened was worth goin' through--if it led to this," he
declared in a husky whisper, and as she raised her lips to his her eyes
were sparkling, and her words fell whimsically into dialect.
"Thet piece of bottom land down thar, Turney--I reckon we kin raise a
dwellin'-house on hit now--a dwellin'-house an' a school-house, too."
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry, by Charles Neville Buck