“Yo Espero! Yo Espero!” Asleep, awake, the words haunted him, night and
day they rang in his ears, “Yo Espero, Yo Espero.” The brooks sang it;
in the hot mid-day the cadence of the meadow creatures took it up; the
orioles repeated it across the fields, the thrushes’ hymn was for her
alone: “Yo Espero, Yo Espero.”
Days dawned and vanished, brief as the flash of a fire-fly wing. The
locust-trees powdered the greensward with white blossoms, the laurel,
dainty and conventional, spread its flowered cambric out to dry, and the
dogwood leaves drifted through the forest like snowflakes.
O’Hara, the triumphant affianced of Claire, provoked the wrath of all
unaffianced gods and men. He simply mooned. Guests arrived and guests
left the Diamond Spring Hotel, but the Beezeleys stayed on for ever.
There were captains and colonels and generals from the South; the names
of Fairfax and Marmaduke and Carter and Stuart were heard in corridor and
card-room. There were Rittenhouses and Appletons, and Van Burens, too,
and the flat bleat of Philadelphia echoed the colourless jargon of Boston
and the semi-civilized accent of New York.
It was the middle of May. The catbirds had ceased their music and now
haunted the garden, mewing from every thicket. A crested blue jay,
ominous prophet of distant autumn, screamed viciously at the great belted
kingfishers, but wisely avoided these dagger-billed birds, and also the
occasional cock-of-the-woods that flew into the oak-grove, and tapped all
day on the loose bark.
Edgeworth loved all these creatures. A few weeks previous he hadn’t cared
tuppence for them. But now it was different; he felt at home with all
the world; he smiled knowingly at the thrushes, he nodded gaily to the
great blue heron, and laughed when that dignified but snobbish biped cut
him dead. Flowers too he was on good terms with; he haunted the woods,
now all ablaze with azaleas, he sat among blue and violet larkspurs
and felt that he was among friends. The little wood-violets peeped up
at him fearlessly; they knew he would never pick them; the big orange
lady-slippers arranged themselves neatly, two by two, as he passed, but
he laughingly disregarded their offers. True, the girl at his side,—for
he never rambled alone,—was worthy of such self-sacrifice on the part of
any lady-slipper, orange or maroon.
“Io,” he said, as they lay in the forest on the heights above Diamond
Springs, “can you realise it all? I scarcely can. Was it yesterday, was
it last week,—was it years ago that I said good morning to you there on
our bridge?”
“Jim, I don’t know.”
Her hair had fallen down and she flung it like a glistening veil from her
face. She lay full length across the soft pine needles, her scarlet lips
parted, tearing bits of flame-colored azalia blossoms from a cluster at
her belt.
“See the lizards,” said Edgeworth sitting up beside her, “see them race
over the dry leaves! There! They’ve run up a tree! Look, Io.”
“I see,” she said. But she was looking up at him.
He bent over her and kissed her, both hands clasped in hers.
“You didn’t look at all,” he said.
“Didn’t I?” whispered Yo Espero.
It was true that she had not looked. When her eyes were not fastened upon
his face, they were closed.
So he sat smiling down at her with her slim fingers twisted in his; and
that shadow of wistfulness that ever hovers close to happiness, fell over
his eyes. And he said: “Do you ever regret—anything—Io?”
She smiled faintly.
“No—nothing, dear.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Then you are happy.”
“Yes.”
What had she to regret? She loved him. To him she came, sick at heart
for the companionship which she had never known. He had delivered her
from her loneliness. First she listened to him with the fierce happiness
of the lonely; then she idolized him; then she loved him. Love was all
she had to give; and she gave it, even before he asked,—gave it without
thought or regret.
“Do you know,” he said, “that you have the prettiest hands in the world?”
“Have I?”
“Don’t you know that your whole figure is exquisite?”
She raised one hand indolently and placed the fingers across his lips.
“What do I care,—if you love me?” she said.
“But I care,” he said; “to think that you,—all, all of you,—with your
beautiful eyes and your neck and your lips and these two little hands,
are mine—all mine!—”
“And that brown hair above me—is mine,—isn’t it?” murmured the girl; “I
never asked you before, but don’t—don’t I own some of you too? I have
given you all of myself.”
It was little to ask;—the question was a new one though, and he suddenly
began to wonder how much of him she did own. He looked at her half
curiously as she lay there, her innocent face upturned, her young figure
flung across the pine-needle matting of the forest. Her eyes told him she
loved him; every line and curve of her sweet body solemnized the vow.
“Io,” he said, “all of me that is worth owning you own.”
“This hand?” she asked, locking her fingers in his.
“Both,” he said.
“Everything? All—all?”
“All, Yo Espero.”
“You never said so—before.”
“I say it now; all! all! all!”
* * * * *
“We will go to Silver Mine Creek,” said Yo Espero, “and we will fish
there for a little fish. There are bass in the French Broad, and you
shall catch them from the rifts below Deepwater Bridge. We will gallop
on horseback to Sunset Sands and we will go to Bubbling Spring. All this
will take time, you know, but you are never going away, are you? Hush!
I could not live until sunrise. Then, in the fall, we will go across
to the little Hurricane where there are deer. You shall shoot a great
wild-turkey also! Dear me! What more can a man ask for? And then there
are teal and mallard on the French Broad before the ice has bridged the
Little Red Horse. You will love the South.”
“Yes, dear,” he answered, soberly; but his eyes were turned to the North.
“I know lots of springs in the forest,” she said, watching his face.
“And blockade stills?” he smiled.
She laughed outright and sat up, gathering her heavy hair into a twist.
“There is one within a few steps of where we sit; you could never find
it,” she said, tauntingly.
“Oho!” he exclaimed, “whose?”
“Zeke’s,” said the girl, “I could go to it in two minutes,—hark!—was that
a gunshot from the valley?”
“I think it was,” he said, “it came from that way,” and he pointed to the
west.
“From Painted Mountain! Did it sound like a rifle, Jim?”
Her eyes were very bright. Two red spots glowed on either cheek.
“I don’t know, dear,” he said, “why?”
As he spoke he rose and stepped back two paces. And as he took the second
step there came a whirr, a girl’s scream, and a rattlesnake struck him
twice above the ankle.
For one second the forest swam before his eyes; then a cold sweat started
from the roots of his hair and he bent and picked up a stick, shaking in
every limb. It was over in a moment; the snake lay dead, shuddering and
twisting among the rocks, but it was Yo Espero who had crushed it, and
now she turned to him a face as bloodless as his own.
“Wait!” she panted, “there’s whisky at Zeke’s!” and she sprang across the
mountain-side and vanished among the thickets.
He bent over and tore down his stocking; then his head whirled and he
sank trembling upon the ground.
As he lay there great throbs of pain swept through him in waves,
succeeded by momentary numbness, but through the mist of faintness and
the delirium of pain he heard the dead snake thumping among the leaves.
Then all was one great thrill of agony, but, as his senses reeled again,
a touch fell upon his arm and he heard her voice:
“Drink,—quickly—all—all you can!”
And he did, blindly, guided by her arm. She held the demijohn until his
head fell back.
Then she knelt, ripped her own sleeve from wrist to shoulder and stared
at her round white arm. Two blue marks, close together, capped the
summit of a terrible swelling, and she cried out once for help. With all
the strength that remained, she dragged the demijohn to her mouth and
stretched out on the ground, the crystal clear liquor running between
her teeth. She tried hard to swallow. Once she murmured, “I knew there
was not enough for both,—I guess there isn’t much left; I guess—it’s—too
late—”
After a minute or two she wandered in her delirium, but still she
swallowed desperately until the demijohn rolled away from her nerveless
grasp, and she seemed to lose consciousness. With the last spark of
understanding left in her numbed brain, she turned over and stretched
out, her lips crushed against his face.
Zeke found them. Whether it was the smell of blockade whisky, coupled
with the absence of his demijohn, or whether it was Providence, cannot be
successfully argued here. But he found them, and he carried them into his
ramshackle cabin and laid them side by side across his mattress.
After he had looked at them for half an hour’s absolute silence, he spat
the remains of a hard-chewed quid into a corner, picked up his gun, and
wended his way down the mountain-side to the Diamond Springs Hotel.
Here he was promptly arrested by two pale-faced Revenue Officers, and
here, for the first time, he learned that Clyde, the tenant of Yo Espero
on Painted Mountain, had been shot dead, two hours before, for resisting
arrest at the hands of United States officers.
The hotel was in commotion, but when Zeke drawled out his story, panic
reigned supreme, and the Beezeleys started in a body for Zeke’s hut. How
they got lost on the mountain and were frightened by snakes, and how Dr.
Samuel Meeke headed a rescue party in their behalf, has no place in this
story,—nor, I imagine, in any story. O’Hara went on Zeke’s bond, and
Zeke, followed by O’Hara and the proprietor of the Diamond Springs Hotel,
started for the blockader’s burrow. The proprietor’s name was Eph Doom,
but, unlike his namesake, nothing about him was sealed, not even his
lips, and he chattered continually until Zeke drawled out: “O shet up,
yew mewl o’ misery!”
Once O’Hara spoke:
“You left them both lying across your bed, Zeke?”
“’Bout a foot apart,” drawled Zeke.
But when O’Hara burst into the cabin, he cried: “Thank God!” For they
were in each other’s arms.
* * * * *
And that is all there is to say.
Eph Doom recounts a great deal more; he tells how those two striplings,
dazed by alcohol and numbed with poison, clung together blindly; he tells
how he, personally, drove a shoal of Beezeleys and Meekes and Dills from
the door of the cabin, and he relates with fire how young Edgeworth sat
up, pale, trembling, and demanded that he, Ephraim Doom, should, as a
Justice of the Peace, then and there instantly unite in holy wedlock
James Edgeworth and Yo Espero Clyde: which he did not do, because O’Hara
whispered: “Wait till he’s sober.”
How Zeke escaped the clutches of the law needs a story by itself.
How Dr. Samuel Meeke and Mrs. Dill—but that is scandal.
How Yo Espero and Edgeworth loved is all that concerns this story.