to the rain quarter. An ominous murmur arose louder and louder, coming
nearer and nearer; the branches of the old elm suddenly swept the mossy
old roof, and about midnight the tempest broke in its utmost fury. At
the same instant two little nightcaps with wide ruffles lifted
themselves from the pillows, unseen and unheard by each other in the
darkness of the night and the crash of the storm. Both the little
sisters were terrified. They were always very much afraid of a storm,
and this one was terrifying indeed. But love gives courage to the most
timid. And they were very, very tender of one another, these two gentle,
little old sisters. Miss Judy thought of Miss Sophia's rheumatism, with
the wind furiously beating the rain clear across the room, almost to the
very bed. Miss Sophia thought of Miss Judy's heart trouble, which she
had had a touch of that very night, and she dreaded, for her sister's
sake, lest the lightning begin to flash, as the thunder boomed nearer
and louder. But the loving are the daring, and each forgot her own
terror in fear for the other. At precisely the same moment the two
little old sisters began to get up and to leave their opposite sides of
the high bed. Miss Judy, usually much quicker of movement than Miss
Sophia, now moved so slowly in order not to disturb her, that she was
longer than ever before in reaching the floor by way of the chair. Miss
Sophia, on the other hand, hurried down the dwarf staircase backward,
like a fleeing crab, fairly driven by alarm and her loving concern for
Miss Judy. So that--still utterly unaware of one another's being awake,
much less astir, such was the uproar of the blast and the downpour of
the rain--they crept tremblingly round the opposite corners at the foot
of the bed, in the blackness of the room, with tightly shut eyes, with
outstretched arms guarding their faces, and thus ran into violent
collision.
Neither Miss Judy nor Miss Sophia could ever recall very clearly what
happened after that. The neighbors remembered only hearing, above the
tumult of the tempest, blood-curdling screams and shrieks of fire, and
murder, and theft, in tones which none of them recognized. The Oldfield
people, men, women, and children, alarmed and panic-stricken, sprang
from their beds, and rushed to the rescue through the storm and darkness
in their nightclothes. The doctor alone was dressed, as he had not gone
to bed, having just got home from the country. It was he--thus already
afoot--who led all the rest, catching up his lantern, which was still
lighted, and clubbing his umbrella for a weapon as he ran, as much
alarmed as any one of all those who were rushing to the rescue. A single
kick from his great boot shattered the wooden bar and burst open the
front door. The outcry continuing, led him and those who followed close
upon his heels to the bedchamber. When he held up the lantern, there
stood the little sisters, locked together in a death-grip and quite out
of their senses with fright. Their gentle little hands, which had never
touched one another nor any living creature save with kindness, were
fiercely clutched in each other's gray hair, hooked like bird-claws
through the shreds of their tattered nightcaps; their mild eyes, which
had seen only love in all their tranquil lives, were still closed
against the first horrors which they had ever encountered; their soft
voices, which had never before been harsher than the cooing of doves,
now shrilled by wordless terror, still pierced the roar of the tempest
with ceaseless shrieking. Thus it was that all the horrified neighbors
found them. The doctor never knew whether he was laughing or crying when
he picked them both up--one on each arm--and put them to bed as though
they had been his own babies.
Dear little Miss Judy! Poor little Miss Sophia! That night comes back to
most of us with a smile that is tenderly close to tears.
XVII
LOVE'S AWAKENING
But there never was any open smiling over the events of that memorable
night. Miss Judy herself regarded what had happened far too gravely to
allow of its seeming trivial or amusing to any one else. Indeed, she so
plainly shrank from all mention of it that it was rarely spoken of at
all. Everybody saw how pale she turned whenever it was mentioned, and
how she pressed her little hand to her heart. So that, as no one ever
knowingly gave the little lady pain, the memory soon dropped into kind
oblivion.
The only reminder of it was the more frequent pressure of Miss Judy's
hand to her heart, which had always been a weak, soft, fluttering little
thing, and a new paleness of her sweet face which merely made its
delicate blushes more lovely. The shock had been very great, there could
be no doubt of that, and there was not much likelihood of her forgetting
it; but it was ever Miss Judy's way to put painful things behind her as
quickly as possible, and to turn her face toward sweetness and peace as
naturally as a flower turns toward the sunlight.
And she really was very happy during those first days following the
fright. Her happiness always came at second hand, as perhaps the purest
happiness always comes. She was happy because Doris was happy--young,
beautiful, joyous, sparkling with health and spirits. Seeing this, Miss
Judy found nothing lacking in her own life. And then she was so
delightfully busy in building air-castles. She was, to be sure, nearly
always busy in doing this, but she seemed now to have a firmer
foundation to build upon than usually came within her reach. Doris and
Lynn met at her house on these bright summer days, almost every day, and
sometimes twice a day. Doris came at first oftener than she had ever
come before, and stayed longer, on account of her own and her mother's
anxiety about the effect of the shock upon Miss Judy's health. They knew
how frail was the small tenement housing Miss Judy's quenchless spirit.
They almost held their breath for days after that unmentionable night.
The entire community, indeed, was alarmed; even old lady Gordon thought
it worth while to send her grandson to see how Miss Judy was, and to
warn him against saying why he came lest he frighten her. Finding Doris
with Miss Judy, the young man naturally went again on the next day--and
the next and the next--without being sent. Thus gradually it came about
in the natural order of events that Doris and Lynn met daily in Miss
Judy's house; that she saw them constantly together, and that her
greatest, loveliest air-castle thus grew apace. Every day added to its
height and its beauty, till its crystal minarets, towering through
rainbow clouds, touched at last the sapphire key-stone of the arching
heavens.
Doris and Lynn knew nothing of all this. They were merely drifting--as
youth usually drifts--with the sweet summertide. In those glowing,
fragrant days the season was at its greenest and sweetest. The
crystalline freshness of spring still lingered in the dustless air,
which was just beginning to gather the full fervor of the summer
sunshine. Nature now was at her busiest, her kindest, and her
cruelest--glad, blossoming, bewildering, alluring--wreathing her single
relentless purpose with gayest flowers and most intoxicating perfume.
The vivid beauty of the full leafage, gold-flecked by the glorious flood
of sunlight, was not yet dimmed to the browning of a leaf's tip; every
emerald blade of grass held its brimming measure of sap; the rank grass
under foot, the thick foliage overhead, the earth and the air alike,
teemed with life and pulsated with wings. And every living thing, seen
or unseen, high or low, was being swept onward by the same resistless
power toward the common altar. The lacelike white of the flowering elder
covered the whole earth with a delicate bridal veil. Here, there,
everywhere, floated the snowy foam of myriad blossoms--the crest of
creation's tidal wave.
And the young man and the young maid also went the way of all innocent
healthy young creatures in ripening summer, thinking little more of the
titanic forces moving the world, than the birds and the bees and the
butterflies. Lynn was wiser and older than Doris; yet he too was still
young, and still far from any real maturity of wisdom. His knowledge of
life was such as may be gained by a student who goes through a great
university with a definite ambition steadily before him; and who comes
from it into the world with a clear, clean, and upright conception of
what a man who earnestly means to hold a high place in it should be and
should do. But he was only a boy grown tall after all, and he had never
seen so beautiful a girl as Doris was, or any one of such indefinable
charm or of such ineffable grace.
He looked down at her as she walked by his side one day, going up the
big road. They took daily walks together now without objection from any
source. Only dear little Miss Judy, with her funny notions of
chaperonage--which nobody understood any more than many other of the
little lady's dainty whims, and which everybody indulged and quietly
smiled at, as at many another of her odd, sweet ways--would ever have
thought of objecting. It was, indeed, an old, well-established, and
highly respected custom of the country for young men and young maids to
walk alone together. Seeing them do this, the Oldfield people merely
smiled kindly, as kind people do at young lovers anywhere--and sometimes
nodded at one another, thus silently saying that all was well, that this
was just as it should be. The very fact of these daily walks alone
together made everything perfectly open and clear. Even Miss Judy's
rigid scruples on the score of propriety gradually relaxed, as Doris and
Lynn went so openly and frankly from her side to stroll toward the
graveyard, day after day.
From time immemorial the graveyard had been the favorite trysting-place
of Oldfield lovers. Perhaps the graveyard of every far-off old village
always is the lovers' chosen resort. It is certainly nearly always the
most beautiful and the most retired spot, yet it is also usually close
by, for in death, as in life, humanity holds closer together in the
country than in town, and the dead are not laid so far from the living.
And then, to the young everywhere, death itself always seems so distant
that its earthly habitations have no real terrors. No sadness ever comes
to happy youth from the mere nearness to the Eternal Silence; nothing of
the Great Mystery, vast as the universe and inscrutable as life, ever
sounds for the happy young with the sighing of the wind over the long,
long, green, green grass growing only over country graves, the saddening
sound which older and less happy ears always hear. None of that
unutterable feeling of the pain of living, and the peace of dying, ever
wrings the hearts of happy lovers at the moan of the gentlest breeze
through the graveyard cedars, where it seems to those who are older and
sadder to moan as it never does elsewhere.
Certainly, neither of the two young people, sitting that day on the
rustic benches under the tallest cedar, either heard or thought of any
of these sad things. Lynn heard mainly the music of the mating birds,
and thought mostly of the exquisite curve of the fair cheek almost
touching his arm. It was so satiny in its smoothness, so velvety in its
softness, and so delicately tinted with the faint, yet warm, glow of
rich, rare red, which gleams out of the deep heart of a golden tea-rose.
And the glory of her wonderful hair! He felt, as he looked down upon her
radiant head, so close to his shoulder, that he had never realized how
wonderful its dazzling crown was, until he saw it now with the wondrous
light of the sunset re-gilding its fine gold, and with the south wind
ruffling its loveliness into more bewitching disorder. As he gazed, a
sudden gust leaped over the far green hilltops and lifted the wide brim
of her white hat, thus revealing the full beauty of her face.
Lynn saw it, with a sharp indrawing of his breath. A yearning so keen,
so deep and tender, as to cross the narrow border between pleasure and
pain, rushed into the young man's heart. It has been said what an ardent
lover of beauty he was. The feeling which swept over him now was the
yearning that every true lover of the beautiful feels at the sight of
great beauty: the hopeless desire to hold it forever unchanged--be it
the delicate flush on an exquisite cheek, which must go as quickly as it
comes, the freshness of a perfect flower which must fade with the rising
of the sun, or the miracle of the dawn which must soon vanish before the
noontide glare. Doris seemed to him Beauty's very self, to be worshipped
with all his beauty-worshipping soul, not merely a beautiful girl to be
loved with all his human young heart.
She wore that day a dress of faded pink muslin, very thin, very soft,
very scant, so that it clung close to her slender, supple form--a poor
old dress, so old that no one could remember whose it had been first.
The bodice opened daintily at the throat in the pretty old fashion known
as "surplice" to the Oldfield people; and on the glimpse of snow which
drifted between the modest edges of the opening--where the lily of her
fairness lay under the rose of the muslin ruffles, just where the sweet
curve of her throat melted into the lovely roundness of her bosom--there
nestled a little cross of jet held by a narrow band of black velvet,
tied around her neck and whitening its whiteness as jet whitens pearl.
Such a poor little ornament! Such a poor old dress! And yet the picture
that they made when Doris wore them!
Looking at her, Lynn knew well enough that he had but to loose his firm
hold upon himself ever so little, to love her as he might never be able
to love another woman. He never had seen, and never expected to see,
such beauty as this of Doris's, for the true lover of beauty knows its
rarity. And nothing else in the world so appealed to him; no charm of
mind, or heart, or spirit, could ever quite make up for the lack of it,
notwithstanding that he valued these qualities also, and held them
higher than thoughtless youth often holds them. And yet, despite his
frank recognition of the truth, he still had no thought of allowing
himself to love Doris Wendall. Perhaps, all unsuspected even by himself,
the instinct of the Brahmin was in him too; of a certainty, what is bred
in the bone is apt to come out in the flesh. But if this were true, if
he were influenced by any feeling of caste, he certainly did not suspect
it. He was not vain, with the common, harmless vanity of most young men;
nor was there in him any unbecoming pride of birth or position. He
thought that he was held back solely by his determination to let nothing
turn him from his life plans. He was wholly sincere in believing that he
was strong enough to stand firm, to keep himself from loving Doris, as
he knew he could love her. The thought that she might love him had never
crossed his mind. The thought of being able to win her was as far from
him as the thought of reaching out his arms to gather a star--so high
above all earthly things had his beauty-worship enshrined her.
"I wonder what you are thinking about," he said suddenly, that day, with
his eyes still on the curve of her cheek. "Of late I have begun to
believe that you don't any longer think Miss Judy's thoughts
exclusively," he went on, banteringly, in the freedom which now existed
between them. "More than once I have seen unmistakable signs of thoughts
of your own, thoughts which, moreover, were not in the least like Miss
Judy's."
Doris turned with a dimpling smile, and lifted her wide-open, frank
brown eyes to his darker ones. "You must not laugh at dear Miss Judy. I
never allow anybody to do that. I can only wish my thoughts were always
as good and sweet as hers."
"I haven't made any comparison. I've merely mentioned a difference,"
Lynn said, laughing teasingly, in the hope that the rare tinge of color
might linger longer on her fair cheek.
And yet, in a way, he had been quite in earnest in what he had said. It
was a fact that he had marked a great change in Doris, that he had come
gradually to see that a simple, sound strength of mind, a sort of
wholesome common sense, lay under her gentle purity as solid white rock
lies under a limpid brook.
"Well, it is quite true, I suppose, that Miss Judy never thought, in all
her life, of what I was thinking of just then, and what I have been
thinking of a great deal lately," Doris said, slowly, shyly, as if
approaching a difficult subject.
"And what is that? What were you thinking or dreaming of, when I
awakened you just now," the young man asked.
"I wasn't dreaming at all. I was wide awake. I was wondering how--" with
an effort, after a momentary hesitation, and in a tone so low that he
barely heard, "how a girl might earn a living for several persons--for a
whole family." And then, after a longer pause, a quick breath, and a
sudden deepening of the rare red of her cheek, "So that her mother need
not work so hard."
It was the first time that she had spoken to him of this secret wish, so
long cherished. She had, indeed, seldom mentioned her mother to him in
any manner whatever. The reserve was not in the least because she was
ashamed of her--such a feeling was unknown to Doris. She respected her
mother and loved her, knowing, as no one else could know, how good a
mother she was, how utterly unselfish, how absolutely upright, before
the perpetual necessity which drove her to earn the family's bread in
the only way that she knew. With her whole heart Doris loved and honored
her mother. But, alas! their tastes were so unlike, their thoughts were
so different, their whole lives were so far apart. And neither love nor
honor nor any other of all the tenderest, noblest feelings of the truest
heart, can ever bring together those whom cruel nature has set forever
apart. For it is one of the mysteries of the sorrow of living that the
deep rivers of many earnest lives are thus set to run side by side, and
yet forbidden ever to mingle from the beginning to the end; from the
unknown fountain of life to the unsounded sea of death.
Lynn had noticed more than once that a shadow fell over Doris's gentle
spirits whenever, on their strolls together, they caught a glimpse of
Sidney. It was usually in the distance that they saw her, going up or
down the big road, with her long, free, fearless step, her bonnet on the
back of her head, and her knitting-needles flying as she walked. For,
notwithstanding that Lynn had gone to her house almost daily now for
weeks past, she had managed, by hook or by crook,--as she would have
expressed it,--to hold to her original intention of keeping out of the
way, of giving him a fair field and no favor, as she said to herself.
Yet the young man had gathered, nevertheless, although he scarcely knew
how, a tolerably correct impression of the compelling personality of
Doris's mother. Little by little he had begun, consequently, to perceive
the unusual and contending influences which had made this beautiful girl
what she was; and the knowledge caused him to wonder what she would
become, now that she was beginning to be herself, now that the strong
forces of her own character were already in revolt.
He had also divined something of Doris's dislike of her mother's means
of earning a living; but he was still far from knowing how strong the
feeling was, or that it had grown with her growth, gradually and
steadily, until it had taken a great sudden leap--thus coming as close
to bitterness as her gentle nature could ever come--soon after she had
met himself. Nor had he observed that day, as they climbed the hillside
to the graveyard, that Doris had seen her mother far off and that a
shadow had fallen at once over the brightness of her innocent talk,
through which a soft gayety often shone as color gleams out of the
whiteness of the pearl.
"Do you know any girls who work? That is what I was thinking about," she
went on timidly, turning her eyes away and looking toward the hills
enfolding the valley; the near green hills beyond which she had never
been, the far empurpled hills rimming all that she knew of the world.
"_Do_ you know any working girls?" she repeated. "White girls, I mean,
of course. I was wondering--I thought that if so--perhaps you might know
what kind of work they do. The kind of work that might be done by a
young gentlewoman of good breeding."
It was quaintly charming to hear the last thing that Miss Judy would
have thought of, or dreamed of saying, so staidly uttered, in that
little lady's own prim manner and in that little lady's own
old-fashioned words. Lynn could not help smiling, although there was no
doubting Doris's earnestness, and notwithstanding that there was
something in her look and tone which touched him.
"I'll have to think," he said, half in jest and half in earnest. "No, on
the spur of the moment, I am almost sure that I don't know any working
girl who might be described in just those terms. There are doubtless
many working girls who are ladies, but they would scarcely be likely to
call themselves by such an antiquated name. They wouldn't even know
themselves by so antiquated a description."
She did not smile; silently, gravely, she turned her dark eyes on his
face; her own face was lovelier than ever in its wistfulness, and her
dark eyes softer than ever in their unconscious appeal.
"But I am in earnest," she persisted. "Have you ever known any--any
girl--like me--who worked?"
His eyes were grave too, now, and they were looking straight down into
hers. "I have known very few girls of any kind," he said gently. "And I
have never known one--in the least like you."
A rosy light, bright as the reflection of the sunset's glow, flashed
over her face and beamed from her eyes. She did not know why she
suddenly felt so happy. She bent down in sweet confusion and gathered a
handful of the long, green grass, and began braiding the emerald blades
with trembling fingers. Lynn watched her hands in the false security of
his own strength, heedless of the spell which they were innocently
weaving. He followed every movement of the little white fingers, so
delicately tapering and so exquisitely tipped with rose and pearl; and
he saw--as he saw all beauty--the rosy velvet of the soft little palms,
and then his greedy gaze roved further and fed upon the perfection of
the small feet which neither the poor little slippers nor the long grass
could hide. The intensity of his gaze unconsciously brought a sort of
nervous flutter into the little hands; the girl felt it, although she
was not thinking of it, and her hands dropped suddenly on her lap. Her
gaze, uplifted, met his again, helplessly entreating, almost with the
look of a frightened child groping its way through the dark.
"But there must be girls who work. I must find out what they do. I must
learn how to do it too--whatever it is. Won't you help me?"
Her lips were quivering and her eyes were full of tears.
"My dear child! Dear, dear Doris! How can I help you? You to enter the
arena to struggle with brutal gladiators for the spoils which belong to
the strongest and the fiercest? Help _you_ to do this--you soft, lovely,
tender little thing!"
He did not know that love thrilled in every tone of his voice, that
passion barbed his words, winging them straight home to the girl's
awakened heart. He did not know that--for her--love all at once shone
out of his eyes, dazzlingly, blindingly, as a great wide door opens
suddenly upon a chilly twilight, revealing all the alluring warmth, all
the glowing flame of the home firelight within.
"Dear little one," he went on, blindly, with infinite tenderness, "the
only work appointed for one like you is to make a paradise out of a
home. A woman like you was created to be carried over life's rough
places in a good man's strong arms. There is only one place in the world
for you. Only one--only the warm, sweet corner of the household fire,
safe behind the heads of children."