Moved by tenderness and thoughts of self-sacrifice, which had occupied
his mind to the momentary exclusion of all else, Tryon had scarcely
noticed, as he approached the house behind the cedars, a strain of
lively music, to which was added, as he drew still nearer, the
accompaniment of other festive sounds. He suddenly awoke, however, to
the fact that these signs of merriment came from the house at which he
had intended to stop;--he had not meant that Rena should pass another
sleepless night of sorrow, or that he should himself endure another
needless hour of suspense.
He drew rein at the corner. Shocked surprise, a nascent anger, a vague
alarm, an insistent curiosity, urged him nearer. Turning the mare into
the side street and keeping close to the fence, he drove ahead in the
shadow of the cedars until he reached a gap through which he could see
into the open door and windows of the brightly lighted hall.
There was evidently a ball in progress. The fiddle was squeaking
merrily so a tune that he remembered well,--it was associated with one
of the most delightful evenings of his life, that of the tournament
ball. A mellow negro voice was calling with a rhyming accompaniment
the figures of a quadrille. Tryon, with parted lips and slowly
hardening heart, leaned forward from the buggy-seat, gripping the rein
so tightly that his nails cut into the opposing palm. Above the
clatter of noisy conversation rose the fiddler's voice:--
"Swing yo' pa'dners; doan be shy,
Look yo' lady in de eye!
Th'ow yo' ahm aroun' huh wais';
Take yo' time--dey ain' no has'e!"
To the middle of the floor, in full view through an open window,
advanced the woman who all day long had been the burden of his
thoughts--not pale with grief and hollow-eyed with weeping, but flushed
with pleasure, around her waist the arm of a burly, grinning mulatto,
whose face was offensively familiar to Tryon.
With a muttered curse of concentrated bitterness, Tryon struck the mare
a sharp blow with the whip. The sensitive creature, spirited even in
her great weariness, resented the lash and started off with the bit in
her teeth. Perceiving that it would be difficult to turn in the narrow
roadway without running into the ditch at the left, Tryon gave the mare
rein and dashed down the street, scarcely missing, as the buggy crossed
the bridge, a man standing abstractedly by the old canal, who sprang
aside barely in time to avoid being run over.
Meantime Rena was passing through a trying ordeal. After the first few
bars, the fiddler plunged into a well-known air, in which Rena, keenly
susceptible to musical impressions, recognized the tune to which, as
Queen of Love and Beauty, she had opened the dance at her entrance into
the world of life and love, for it was there she had met George Tryon.
The combination of music and movement brought up the scene with great
distinctness. Tryon, peering angrily through the cedars, had not been
more conscious than she of the external contrast between her partners
on this and the former occasion. She perceived, too, as Tryon from the
outside had not, the difference between Wain's wordy flattery (only
saved by his cousin's warning from pointed and fulsome adulation), and
the tenderly graceful compliment, couched in the romantic terms of
chivalry, with which the knight of the handkerchief had charmed her
ear. It was only by an immense effort that she was able to keep her
emotions under control until the end of the dance, when she fled to her
chamber and burst into tears. It was not the cruel Tryon who had
blasted her love with his deadly look that she mourned, but the gallant
young knight who had worn her favor on his lance and crowned her Queen
of Love and Beauty.
Tryon's stay in Patesville was very brief. He drove to the hotel and
put up for the night. During many sleepless hours his mind was in a
turmoil with a very different set of thoughts from those which had
occupied it on the way to town. Not the least of them was a profound
self-contempt for his own lack of discernment. How had he been so
blind as not to have read long ago the character of this wretched girl
who had bewitched him? To-night his eyes had been opened--he had seen
her with the mask thrown off, a true daughter of a race in which the
sensuous enjoyment of the moment took precedence of taste or sentiment
or any of the higher emotions. Her few months of boarding-school, her
brief association with white people, had evidently been a mere veneer
over the underlying negro, and their effects had slipped away as soon
as the intercourse had ceased. With the monkey-like imitativeness of
the negro she had copied the manners of white people while she lived
among them, and had dropped them with equal facility when they ceased
to serve a purpose. Who but a negro could have recovered so soon from
what had seemed a terrible bereavement?--she herself must have felt it
at the time, for otherwise she would not have swooned. A woman of
sensibility, as this one had seemed to be, should naturally feel more
keenly, and for a longer time than a man, an injury to the affections;
but he, a son of the ruling race, had been miserable for six weeks
about a girl who had so far forgotten him as already to plunge headlong
into the childish amusements of her own ignorant and degraded people.
What more, indeed, he asked himself savagely,--what more could be
expected of the base-born child of the plaything of a gentleman's idle
hour, who to this ignoble origin added the blood of a servile race?
And he, George Tryon, had honored her with his love; he had very nearly
linked his fate and joined his blood to hers by the solemn sanctions of
church and state. Tryon was not a devout man, but he thanked God with
religious fervor that he had been saved a second time from a mistake
which would have wrecked his whole future. If he had yielded to the
momentary weakness of the past night,--the outcome of a sickly
sentimentality to which he recognized now, in the light of reflection,
that he was entirely too prone,--he would have regretted it soon
enough. The black streak would have been sure to come out in some
form, sooner or later, if not in the wife, then in her children. He
saw clearly enough, in this hour of revulsion, that with his
temperament and training such a union could never have been happy. If
all the world had been ignorant of the dark secret, it would always
have been in his own thoughts, or at least never far away. Each fault
of hers that the close daily association of husband and wife might
reveal,--the most flawless of sweethearts do not pass scathless through
the long test of matrimony,--every wayward impulse of his children,
every defect of mind, morals, temper, or health, would have been
ascribed to the dark ancestral strain. Happiness under such conditions
would have been impossible.
When Tryon lay awake in the early morning, after a few brief hours of
sleep, the business which had brought him to Patesville seemed, in the
cold light of reason, so ridiculously inadequate that he felt almost
ashamed to have set up such a pretext for his journey. The prospect,
too, of meeting Dr. Green and his family, of having to explain his
former sudden departure, and of running a gauntlet of inquiry
concerning his marriage to the aristocratic Miss Warwick of South
Carolina; the fear that some one at Patesville might have suspected a
connection between Rena's swoon and his own flight,--these
considerations so moved this impressionable and impulsive young man
that he called a bell-boy, demanded an early breakfast, ordered his
horse, paid his reckoning, and started upon his homeward journey
forthwith. A certain distrust of his own sensibility, which he felt to
be curiously inconsistent with his most positive convictions, led him
to seek the river bridge by a roundabout route which did not take him
past the house where, a few hours before, he had seen the last fragment
of his idol shattered beyond the hope of repair.
The party broke up at an early hour, since most of the guests were
working-people, and the travelers were to make an early start next day.
About nine in the morning, Wain drove round to Mis' Molly's. Rena's
trunk was strapped behind the buggy, and she set out, in the company of
Wain, for her new field of labor. The school term was only two months
in length, and she did not expect to return until its expiration. Just
before taking her seat in the buggy, Rena felt a sudden sinking of the
heart.
"Oh, mother," she whispered, as they stood wrapped in a close embrace,
"I'm afraid to leave you. I left you once, and it turned out so
miserably."
"It'll turn out better this time, honey," replied her mother
soothingly. "Good-by, child. Take care of yo'self an' yo'r money, and
write to yo'r mammy."
One kiss all round, and Rena was lifted into the buggy. Wain seized
the reins, and under his skillful touch the pretty mare began to prance
and curvet with restrained impatience. Wain could not resist the
opportunity to show off before the party, which included Mary B.'s
entire family and several other neighbors, who had gathered to see the
travelers off.
"Good-by ter Patesville! Good-by, folkses all!" he cried, with a wave
of his disengaged hand.
"Good-by, mother! Good-by, all!" cried Rena, as with tears in her
heart and a brave smile on her face she left her home behind her for
the second time.
When they had crossed the river bridge, the travelers came to a long
stretch of rising ground, from the summit of which they could look back
over the white sandy road for nearly a mile. Neither Rena nor her
companion saw Frank Fowler behind the chinquapin bush at the foot of
the hill, nor the gaze of mute love and longing with which he watched
the buggy mount the long incline. He had not been able to trust
himself to bid her farewell. He had seen her go away once before with
every prospect of happiness, and come back, a dove with a wounded wing,
to the old nest behind the cedars. She was going away again, with a
man whom he disliked and distrusted. If she had met misfortune before,
what were her prospects for happiness now?
The buggy paused at the top of the hill, and Frank, shading his eyes
with his hand, thought he could see her turn and look behind. Look
back, dear child, towards your home and those who love you! For who
knows more than this faithful worshiper what threads of the past Fate
is weaving into your future, or whether happiness or misery lies before
you?