Those who have pursued the coy goddess of happiness through the mazes of
the labyrinth of life, know well how she invites her victim on from
point to point, only to evade capture at the end. Mr. Opp rose with each
summer dawn, radiant, confident, and expectant, and each night he sat in
his window with his knees hunched, and his brows drawn, and wrestled
with that old white-faced fear.
Two marauders were harassing the editor these days, dogging his
footsteps, and snapping at him from ambush. One was the wolf that howls
at the door, and the other was the monster whose eyes are green.
Since the halcyon days that had wafted Miss Guinevere Gusty back to the
shore of the Cove, Mr. Opp had not passed a serene hour out of her
presence. His disposition, though impervious to the repeated shafts of
unkind fortune, was not proof against the corrosive effect of jealousy.
If he could have regarded Willard Hinton in the light of a hated rival,
and met him in fair and open fight, the situation would have been
simplified. But Hinton was the friend of his bosom, the man who, he had
declared to the town, "possessed the grandest intelligence he had ever
encountered in a human mind." He admired him, he respected him, and, in
direct contradiction to the emotion that was consuming him, he trusted
him.
Concerning Miss Guinevere Gusty's state of mind, Mr. Opp permitted
himself only one opinion. He fiercely denied that she was absent-minded
and listless when alone with him; he refused to believe his own eyes
when he saw a light in her face when she looked at Hinton that was
never there for him. He preferred to exaggerate to himself her
sweetness, her gentleness, her loyalty, demanding nothing, and
continuing to give all.
His entire future happiness, he assured himself, hung upon the one
question of little Miss Kippy. For four months the problem had been a
matter for daily, prayerful consideration, but he was still in the dark.
When he was with Guinevere the solution seemed easy. In explaining away
the difficulties to her, he explained them away to himself, also. It was
only a matter of time, he declared, before the oil-well would yield rich
profit. When that time arrived, he would maintain two establishments,
the old one for Miss Kippy, and a new and elegant one for themselves.
Mr. Opp used the hole in the ground as a telescope through which he
viewed the stars of the future.
But when he was alone with Kippy, struggling with her whims, while he
tried to puzzle out the oldest and most universal of conundrums,--that
of making ends meet,--the future seemed entirely blotted out by the
great blank wall of the present.
The matter was in a way complicated by the change that had come over
Miss Kippy herself. Two ideas alternately depressed and elated her. The
first was a fixed antipathy to the photograph of Miss Guinevere Gusty
which Mr. Opp had incased in a large hand-painted frame and installed
upon his dresser. At first she sat before it and cried, and later she
hid it and refused for days to tell where it was. The sight of it made
her so unhappy that Mr. Opp was obliged to keep it under lock and key.
The other idea produced a different effect. It had to do with Hinton.
Ever since his visit she had talked of little else. She pretended that
he came to see her every day, and she spread her doll dishes, and
repeated scraps of his conversation, and acted over the events of the
dinner at which he had been present. The short gingham dresses no longer
pleased her; she wanted long ones, with flowing sleeves like the blue
merino. She tied her hair up in all manner of fantastic shapes, and
stood before the glass smiling and talking to herself for hours. But
there were times when her mind paused for a moment at the normal, and
then she would ask frightened, bewildered questions, and only Mr. Opp
could soothe and reassure her.
"D.," she said one night suddenly, "how old am I?"
Mr. Opp, whose entire mental and physical powers were concentrated upon
an effort to put a new band on his old hat, was taken off his guard.
"Twenty-six," he answered absently.
A little cry brought him to her side.
"No," she whispered, shivering away from him, yet clinging to his
sleeve, "that's a lady that's grown up! Ladies don't play with dolls.
But I want to be grown up, too. D., why am I different? I want to be a
lady; show me how to be a lady!"
Mr. Opp gathered her into his arms, along with his hat, a pair of
scissors, and a spool of thread.
"Don't, Kippy!" he begged. "Now, don't cry like that! You are getting on
elegant. Hasn't brother D. learned you to read a lot of pieces in your
first reader? And ain't we going to begin on handwriting next? Wouldn't
you like to have a slate, and a sponge to rub out with?"
In an instant her mood veered.
"And a basket?" she cried eagerly. "The children carry a basket, too. I
see them when I peep through the shutters. Can I have a basket, too?"
The network of complexities that was closing in upon Mr. Opp apparently
affected his body more than his spirits. He seemed to shrivel and
dwindle as the pressure increased; but the fire in his eyes shone
brighter than before.
"None of his folks live long over forty," said Mrs. Fallows,
lugubriously; "they sorter burn themselves out."
Hinton, meanwhile, utterly unaware of being the partial cause of the
seismic disturbance in the editorial bosom, pursued the monotonous
routine of his days. It had taken him only a short time to adapt himself
to the changes that the return of the daughter of the house had brought
about. He had anticipated her arrival with the dread a nervous invalid
always feels toward anything that may jolt him out of his habitual rut.
He held a shuddering remembrance of her musical accomplishments, and
foresaw with dread the noisy crowd of young people she might bring about
the house.
But Guinevere had slipped into her place, an absent-minded, dreamy,
detached damsel, asserting nothing, claiming nothing, bending like a
flower in the high winds of her mother's wrath.
Hinton watched the dominating influence nip every bud of individuality
that the girl ventured to put forth, and he determined to interfere.
During the long months he had spent with Mrs. Gusty he had discovered a
way to manage her. The weak spot in her armor was pride of intellect;
she acknowledged no man her superior. By the use of figurative
language, and references to esoteric matters, he was always able to
baffle and silence her. His joy in handling her in one of her tempers
was similar to that of controlling a cat-boat in squally weather. Both
experiences redounded to his masculine supremacy.
One hot August day, he and Mrs. Gusty had just had an unusually sharp
round, but he had succeeded, by alternate compliment and sarcasm, in
reducing her to a very frustrated and baffled condition.
It was Sunday, the day the Cove elected for a spiritual wash-day. In the
morning the morals of the community were scrubbed and rinsed in the
meeting-house, and in the afternoon they were hung out on the line to
dry. The heads of the families sat in their front yards and dutifully
tended the children, while their wives flitted from house to house,
visiting the sick and the afflicted, and administering warnings to the
delinquent. It was a day in which Mrs. Gusty's soul reveled, and she
demanded that Guinevere's soul should revel likewise.
It was with the determination that Guinevere should occasionally be
allowed the privilege of following her own inclinations that Hinton
hurled himself into the breach.
"I'll go, Mother," said Guinevere; "but it's so hot. We went to see
everybody last Sunday. I thought I'd rather stay home and read, if you
didn't mind."
Mrs. Gusty tossed her head in disgust, and turned to Hinton.
"Now, ain't that a Gusty for you! I never saw one that didn't want to
set down to the job of living. Always moping around with their nose in a
book. I never was a reader, never remember wasting a' hour on a book in
my life, and yet I never saw the time that I wasn't able to hold my own
with any Gusty living."
"In short," said Hinton, sympathetically, "to quote a noted novelist,
you have never considered it necessary to add the incident of learning
to the accident of brains."
Mrs. Gusty tied her bonnet-strings in a firmer knot as she looked at him
uncertainly, then, not deigning to cast another glance in the direction
of her daughter, who was disappearing up the stairs, swept out of the
house.
Hinton looked at his watch; it was not yet two o'clock. The afternoon
threatened to be a foretaste of eternity. He went out on the porch and
lay in the hammock, with his hands clasped across his eyes. He could no
longer see to read or to write. The doctor said the darkness might close
in now at any time, after that the experiment of an operation would be
made, and there was one chance in a hundred for the partial restoration
of the sight.
Having beaten and bruised himself against the bars of Fate, he now lay
exhausted and passive in the power of his jailer. He had tried to run
his own life in his own way, and the matter had been taken out of his
hands. He must lie still now and wait for orders from headquarters. The
words of Mr. Opp, spoken in the low-ceiled, weird old dining-room, came
vividly back to him: "What the fight is concerning, or in what manner
the general is a-aiming to bring it all correct in the end, ain't,
according to my conclusion, a particle of our business."
And Hinton, after a year of rebellion and struggle and despair, had at
last acknowledged a superior officer and declared himself ready to take
whatever orders came.
As he lay in the hammock he turned his head at every noise within the
house, and listened. He had become amazingly dependent upon a soft,
drawling voice which day after day read to him for hours at a time. At
first he had met Guinevere's offers of help with moody irritability.
"Pray, don't bother about me," he had said. "I am quite able to look
after myself; besides, I like to be alone."
But her unobtrusive sympathy and childish frankness soon conquered his
pride. She read to him from books she did not understand, played games
with him, and showed him new walks in the woods. And incidentally, she
revealed to him her struggling, starving, wistful soul that no one else
had ever discovered.
She never talked to him of her love affair, but she dwelt vaguely on the
virtues of duty and loyalty and self-sacrifice. The facts in the case
were supplied by Mrs. Gusty.
Hinton looked at his watch again, and groaned when he found it was only
a quarter past two. Feeling his way cautiously along the porch and down
the steps, he moved idly about the yard. He could not distinguish
Menelaus from Paris now, and Helen of Troy was no longer to be
recognized.
At long intervals a vehicle rattled past, leaving a cloud of dust
behind. The air shimmered with the heat, and the low, insistent buzzing
of bees beat on his ears mercilessly. He wondered impatiently why
Guinevere did not come down, then checked himself as he remembered the
constant demands he made upon her time.
At three o'clock he could stand it no longer. He felt a queer, dull
sensation about his head, and he constantly drew his hand across his
eyes to dispel the impression of a mist before them.
"Oh, Miss Guinevere!" he called up to her window. "Would you mind coming
down just for a little while!"
Guinevere's head appeared so promptly that it was evident it had been
lying on the window-sill.
"Is it time for your medicine?" she asked guiltily. "Mother said it
didn't come till four."
"Oh, no," said Hinton, with forced cheerfulness; "it isn't that. You
remember the old song, don't you, 'When a man's afraid, a beautiful maid
is a cheering sight to see'?"
She disappeared from the window, and in a moment joined him behind the
screen of honeysuckles on the porch. The hammock hung, inviting ease,
but neither of them took it. She sat primly on the straight-backed,
green settee, and he sat on the step at her feet with his hat pulled
over his eyes.
"What an infernal nuisance I have been to you!" he said ruefully; "but
no more than I have been to myself. The only difference was that I had
to stand it, and you stood it out of the goodness of that kind little
heart of yours. Well, it's nearly over now; I'm expecting to go to the
city any day. I guess you'll not be sorry to get rid of me, will you,
Miss Guinevere?"
Instead of answering, she drew a quick breath and turned her head away.
When she did speak, it was after a long pause.
"I like the way you say my name. Nobody says it like that down here."
"Guinevere?" he repeated.
She nodded. "When you say it like that, I feel like I was another
person. It makes me think of flowers, and poetry, and the wind in the
trees, and all those things I've been reading you out of your books.
Guin-never and Guinevere _don't_ seem the same at all, do they?"
"They aren't the same," he said, "and you aren't the same girl I met on
the boat last March. I guess we've both grown a bit since then. You know
I was rather keen on dying about that time,--'in love with easeful
death,'--well, now I am not keen about anything, but I am willing to
play the game out."
They sat in silence for a while, then he said slowly, without raising
his eyes: "I am not much good at telling what I feel, but before I go
away I want you to know how much you've helped me. You have been the one
light that was left to show me the way down into the darkness."
A soft touch on his shoulder made him lift his head. Guinevere was
bending toward him, all restraint banished from her face by the
compassion and love that suffused it.
[Illustration: "'Oh, my God, it has come'"]
Instinctively he swayed toward her, all the need of her crying out
suddenly within him, then he pulled himself sharply together, and,
resolutely thrusting his hands in his pockets, rose and took a turn up
and down the porch.
"Do you mind reading to me a little?" he asked at length. "There are
forty devils in my head to-day, all hammering on the back of my
eyeballs. I'll get my Tennyson; you like him better than you do the
others. Wait; I'm going."
But she was up the steps before him, eager to serve, and determined to
spare him every effort.
Through the long afternoon Guinevere read, stumbling over the strange
words and faltering through the difficult passages, but vibrant to the
beauty and the pathos of it all. On and on she read, and the sun went
down, and the fragrance of dying locust bloom came faintly from the
hill, and overhead in the tree-tops the evening breeze murmured its
world-old plaint of loneliness and longing.
Suddenly Guinevere's voice faltered, then steadied, then faltered again,
then without warning she flung her arms across the back of the bench,
and, dropping her head upon them, burst into passionate sobs.
Hinton, who had been sitting for a long time with his hands pressed over
his eyes, sprang up to go to her.
"Guinevere," he said, "what's the matter? Don't cry, dear!" Then, as he
stumbled, a look of terror crossed his face and he caught at the railing
for support. "Where are you?" he asked sharply. "Speak to me! Give me
your hand! I can't see--I can't--oh, my God, it has come!"