DIANA ROYALL turned her horse’s head from the highroad and began to
descend the Trail of the Cedar-bird. It was late afternoon, and the
glory of the west was suddenly obscured with a bank of purple clouds;
the distant rumble of thunder jarred the stillness, and a moisture,
the promise of heavy rain, filled the air. Long streamers of angry
clouds drifted across the upper sky, and far off the tall pines stirred
restlessly.
Regardless of these threatenings of Nature, Diana rode on, under the
interlacing boughs, swaying forward sometimes in her saddle to avoid
a sweeping branch, while her horse picked his way in the narrow path,
often sending a loose stone rolling ahead of them or crackling a
fallen limb. Through long aisles of young green she caught glimpses of
the river; now and then a frightened rabbit scurried across the path
or a squirrel chattered overhead. She loved the voices of the wild
things, the fragrant stillness of the pinewoods, the perfume of young
blossomings. She brought her horse to a walk, passing slowly along the
trail; even the soft young leaves that brushed against her shoulder
were full of friendships. She loved the red tips of the maples, and the
new buds of the hemlocks; she knew where she ought to hear the sweet
call--“Bob White!”--and once, before the clouds threatened so darkly,
she caught the note of a song-sparrow. Life was sweet; there was a joy
merely in living, and she tried to crowd out of her mind that little
angry prick of mortification that had stung her ever since she met the
eyes of Caleb Trench across her receipt. He had known that she mocked
him, had scorned to notice it, and had showed that he was stronger
mentally than she was. In that single instant Diana had felt herself
small, malicious, discourteous, and the thought of it was like the
taste of wormwood. She resented it, and resenting it, blamed herself
less than she blamed Trench. Why had he come on such a silly errand?
Why had he tempted her to rudeness? The question had fretted her for
weeks; for weeks she had avoided passing the little old house at the
Cross-Roads where Caleb had lived now for three years. Yet, when she
came to the opening in the cedars, she drew near unconsciously and
looked down at the old worn gable of his roof. It faced northeast, and
there was moss on its shingles; she saw a little thin trail of smoke
clinging close to the lip of the chimney, for the atmosphere was heavy.
Then she turned impatiently in the saddle, breaking her vagrant
thoughts away from the solitary man, secretly angry that she had
thought of him at all. Her glance fell on a mass of blossoming wild
honeysuckle, and the loveliness of its rose tintings drew her; she
slipped to the ground and patting her horse, left the bridle loose on
his neck. She had to gather up her skirts and thread her way through
a bracken of ferns before she reached the tempting flowers and began
to gather them. She broke off a few sprays and clustered them in her
hands, pausing to look out across the newly plowed fields to her right;
they had been sown to oats, and it seemed to her that she saw the first
faint drift of green on the crests of the furrows. The next moment a
crash of thunder shook the air, the trees overhead cracked and bent low
before the onrush of the sudden gust. Her horse, a restive creature,
shied violently and stood shivering with fear. Diana, grasping her
flowers, started through the ferns, calling to him, but a blinding
flash followed by more thunder forestalled her; the horse rose on his
haunches and stood an instant, quivering, a beautiful untamed creature,
his mane flying in the wind, and then plunged forward and galloped down
the trail.
Diana called to him again helplessly and foolishly, for her voice was
lost in the crackling of boughs and the boom of thunder; she was alone
in the lonely spot, with the wind whistling in her ears. It ripped
the leaves from the trees overhead and she stood in a hail of green
buds. The fury of the gale increased, the black clouds advanced across
the heavens with long streamers flying ahead of them, the light in
the upper sky went out, darkness increased; suddenly the woods were
twilight and she heard no sound but the mighty rush of the wind.
As yet no rain fell, only leaves, broken twigs, and, at last, great
branches crashed. The lightning tore the clouds apart in fearful rents.
It was a long way home, seven and a half miles, and already big drops
spattered through the trees. Strangely enough, a thought of Caleb’s
walk with the six cents flashed in upon her and she resented it. Yet
the nearest shelter was the little shop at the Cross-Roads. It made
no difference, she would face the storm; and she started boldly down
the trail though the bushes whipped against her skirt and the boughs
threatened her. Once a rolling stone nearly threw her down, but she
kept resolutely on. If the horse went home riderless, what would they
think? She could only dimly conjecture Colonel Royall’s distress, but
she would not go to the little shop to telephone; she would walk home!
She kept steadily on. Twice the force of the wind almost drove her
back; twice she had to stop and steady herself against a tree trunk.
The thought came to her that she had been foolish to stay out so long,
but she scarcely heeded it now, for the wind had torn her hat off and
loosened her hair, and it was whipping her clothes about and tearing
at her like a malicious spirit. She reached the end of the path and
came into the turnpike just as the rain came in a blinding sheet, white
as sea-spray, and closed down around her with a rush of water like a
cloudburst. She kept on with difficulty now, scarcely seeing her way,
and another rolling stone caught her foot. She stumbled and nearly
fell, straightening herself with an agony darting through her ankle;
she had given it a sharp twist and it no longer bore her weight without
anguish. She reeled against a fence at the wayside and held to it,
trying to be sure that she was in the road. Then another flash showed
her the shop at the Cross-Roads, not twenty feet away. An hour before
she could not have imagined her joy at seeing it, now she had only the
hope that she could reach it. The pain in her ankle increased, and
her drenched clothes clung to her; she pulled herself forward slowly,
clinging to the fence. The roar of the wind filled the world, and the
rain drove in her face.
She did not see the man in the door of the shop; she did not know
that, looking at the storm, he saw a figure clinging to the fence, but
she suddenly felt herself lifted from the ground and borne forward in
strong arms. Then something seemed to snap in her brain, she swam in
darkness for a moment, with the throb of pain reaching up to her heart,
before she lost even the consciousness of that.
Afterwards, when light began to filter back, she was being carried
still, and almost instantly full comprehension returned. She was aware
that it was Caleb Trench who carried her, and that he did it easily,
though she was no light burden. He was taking her from the shop into
his office beyond when she recovered, and she roused herself with an
effort and tried to slip to the floor.
“Be careful,” he said quickly, with an authority in his tone which,
even at that moment, reached her; “you may have sprained or broken your
ankle, I do not know which.” And he carried her to a plain old leather
lounge in the corner and put her gently down. “Are you in pain?” he
asked, turning up the lamp which he had already lighted.
The light fell on his face as well as upon hers, and as she looked
up, Diana was impressed with the vivid force, the directness, the
self-absorption of the man’s look. If her presence there meant anything
to him, if he had felt her beauty and her charm as she lay helpless in
his arms, he gave no sign. It was a look of power, of reserve, of iron
will; she was suddenly conscious of an impulse to answer him as simply
as a child.
“It is nothing,” she said; “I don’t believe I’m even hurt much. Where
did you find me?”
“Almost at my door,” he replied, moving quietly to a kind of cupboard
at the other side of the room and pouring some brandy into a glass.
“You must drink this; your clothing is soaked through and I have
nothing dry to offer you, but if you can, come to the fire.”
Diana took the liquor and drank it obediently, unconsciously yielding
to the calm authority of his manner. Then she tried to rise, but once
on her feet, staggered, and would have fallen but for his arm. He
caught her and held her erect a moment, then gathered her up without a
word, and carried her to a seat by the little open stove into which
he had already thrown some wood. Diana sank into his old armchair
with crimson cheeks. She was half angry, half amused; he was treating
her like an injured child, and with as little heed of her grand-dame
manners as if she had been six years old.
“I have telephoned to Dr. Cheyney,” he said simply, “but, of course,
this storm will delay him.”
“I am not ill,” Diana protested. “I am not even badly hurt; my horse
ran away, and I--I think I sprained my ankle.”
“You were clinging to the fence,” Trench said, without apparent
emotion, “and you fainted when I lifted you.”
She sickened at the memory, yet was woman enough to resent the man’s
indifference. “I’m sorry you ’phoned for poor old Dr. Cheyney,” she
said stiffly; “please ’phone to my people to send for me.”
“I tried,” he replied, undisturbed by her hauteur, “but the storm must
have interfered. I can’t get them, and now I can’t get Dr. Cheyney.”
“How long was I unconscious?” she asked quickly, trying to piece
together her recovery and all that he had done.
“Ten minutes,” he answered. “I saw the horse going by riderless and
went out to look. It seemed a long time before I saw you coming and
carried you into the shop. I thought you were not coming to, and you
were so soaked with water that I had lifted you to bring you to the
fire when you recovered.”
“I hope Jerry got home,” she said thoughtfully. “It was my folly; I saw
how black the clouds were, and I ought to have gone home.”
Trench stooped for more wood and fed the fire, the glow lighting up his
face again. “Where were you?” he asked simply, and then “I beg your
pardon--”
“I was up the trail,” she said quietly. “I stayed too long. It was
beautiful; all the young things are budding. I dismounted to gather
some wild honeysuckle--and it is gone!”
For the first time his eyes met hers with a glow of understanding. “Did
you notice the turn above the river?” he asked, still feeding the fire.
She smiled reluctantly. “How white the cucumber is,” she answered, “and
did you see the red tips of the maples? How glossy the new green leaves
look!”
“There is a place there, where the old hickory fell, where you can see
the orchard and that low meadow by the lane--” His face was almost
boyish, eager for sympathy, awakened, changed.
“It is beautiful,” Diana replied, nodding, “and one hears the Bob White
there.”
“Ah!” he breathed softly, “you noticed?”
Diana leaned her elbow on the worn arm of his chair and nestled her
chin in her hand, watching him. After all, what manner of man was he?
The storm, still raging in all its fury, shook the house to its
foundation; a deafening crash of thunder seemed to demolish all other
sounds. She glanced covertly about the little room, seeking some
explanation there. A village shopkeeper who was by nature a poet and
a mystic, and of whom men spoke as a politician--there was a paradox.
Something like amusement touched the edge of her thought, but she tried
for the first time to understand. The room was small and lined on two
sides with rough bookshelves made of unstained pine, yet there was a
picturesqueness in the medley of old books, grouped carelessly about
them. There were a few old worn leather chairs and the lounge, a faded
rug, a table littered with papers and pens around the shaded lamp,
beside which lay his pipe. His dog, Shot, a yellow nondescript, lay
across the threshold, nose between paws, watching her suspiciously. The
place was homely yet severe, clean but disorderly, and the strangest
touch of all was the big loose bunch of apple-blossoms in an old
earthen jar in the corner, the pink and white of the fragile blooms
contrasting charmingly with the dull tintings of the earthenware, and
bringing the fragrance of spring into the little room. Their grouping,
and the corner in which he had placed them, where the light just caught
the beauty of the delicate petals, arrested Diana’s thought.
“You are an artist,” she remarked approvingly; “or else--was it an
accident?”
He followed her glance and smiled, and she noticed that, in spite
of the rugged strength and homeliness of his face, his rare smile
had almost the sweetness of a woman’s. “Not altogether accident,” he
said, “but the falling of the light which seems to lift them out of
the shadows behind them. Isn’t it fair that I should have something
beautiful in this shabby place?”
Diana colored; had he noticed her survey and again thought her
discourteous? She could say nothing to refute its shabbiness and,
for the moment, her usual tact deserted her. She sat looking at the
apple-blossoms in silence while he rose from his place as fire-feeder,
and, going to the kitchen, came back with a cup of hot tea.
“You had better drink this,” he advised quietly; “I’m afraid you’ll
take cold. I hope the tea will be right; you see I am ‘the cook and the
captain too.’”
She took the cup, obediently again, and feeling like a naughty child.
“It is excellent,” she said, tasting it; “I didn’t know a mere man
could make such good tea.”
He laughed. “Once or twice, you know, men have led a forlorn hope. I
sometimes feel like that when I attack the domestic mysteries.”
“Courage has its own rewards--even in tea, then!” she retorted,
wondering if all the men who lived thus alone knew how to do so many
things for themselves? In her experience it had been the other way.
Colonel Royall was as helpless as a baby and needed almost as much
care, and Jacob Eaton had a scornful disregard of domestic details,
only demanding his own comforts, and expecting that his adoring mother
would provide them without annoying him with even the ways and means.
It occurred to Diana that, perhaps, it was the wide difference in
social position, that gentlemen might be helpless in matters where the
humbler denizens of the earth had to be accomplished; that, in short,
Caleb Trench must make his own tea or go without, while Jacob Eaton
could pay for the making of an indefinite succession of cups of tea.
Yet, was this man entirely out of her class? Diana tasted the tea, with
a critical appreciation of its admirable qualities, and quietly viewed
the tea-maker. He was seated again now in the old armchair by the
table, and she observed the strong lines of his long-fingered muscular
hands, the pose and firmness of the unquestionably intellectual head.
There was nothing commonplace, nothing unrefined in his aspect, yet
all her training went to place between them an immeasurable social
chasm. She regarded him curiously, as one might regard the habitant of
another and an inferior hemisphere, and he was poignantly aware of her
mental attitude. Neither spoke for a while, and nothing was audible in
the room but the crash and uproar of the storm without. In contrast,
the light and shelter of the little place seemed like a flower-scented
refuge from pandemonium. Diana looked over her teacup at the silent
man, who seemed less ill at ease than she was.
“I think you are a stranger here, Mr. Trench,” she said, in her soft
voice; “at least, we who have been here twenty years call every one
else a stranger and a sojourner in the land.”
“I have been here only three years,” he replied, “but I do not feel
myself altogether a stranger--to backwoodsmen,” he added ironically.
She glanced up quickly, recalling the talk between her father and Jacob
Eaton. “Is it you who are organizing them?” she asked lightly.
Her question took him by surprise, and he showed it; it seemed like an
echo of old Judge Hollis. “I’m no organizer, Miss Royall,” he replied
simply, stooping to caress the dog, who had come to lay his rough head
against his knee.
She smiled; something in his manner, an indefinable distinction and
fineness, began to make her feel at ease with him. “Is that mere
modesty?” she asked. “I wish you would tell me--I love politics and,”
she laughed gently, “I’m profoundly ignorant.”
His rare smile lighted the repose of his strong face again. “I am not a
desirable teacher for you, Miss Royall,” he replied; “I’m that abnormal
thing, that black sheep in the neighborhood, a Republican.”
She leaned over and set her empty cup on the table. “I am immensely
interested,” she said. “A Republican is almost as curious as the famed
‘Jabberwock.’ It isn’t possible that you are making Republicans up in
the timberlands?”
“Some one must have told you so,” he retorted quietly, a flicker of
humor in his grave eyes; “they look upon me here as they would on a fox
in a chicken-yard.”
She colored; she did not want to speak of her father or her cousin.
“You see what a busy thing rumor is,” she said.
“You divine how harmless I am,” he went on, stooping again to throw
another stick into the blaze; “a single Republican in a wilderness of
Democrats. I’m no better than one old woodchuck in a cornfield.”
“A little leaven will leaven the whole lump,” she laughed.
Her new tone, which was easy now and almost friendly, touched him and
melted his reserve; he looked up smiling and caught her beauty and
warmth, the lovely contour of her face. Her hat had been lost, and
the fire was drying her moist hair, which was loosened in soft curls
about her forehead. Her presence there began to reach the man’s inner
consciousness, from which he had been trying to shut her out. He was
fighting to bar his thought against her, and her lovely presence in his
room seemed to diffuse a warmth and color and happiness that made his
pulses throb more quickly. Even the dog felt her benign influence and
looked up at her approvingly. Trench steadied his mind to answer her
banter in her own tone.
“The lump will reject the leaven first, I fear,” he said lightly; “I
never dreamed of such vivid convictions with so little knowledge,” he
added. “I come from a race of calm reasoners; my people were Quakers.”
“Oh!” She blushed as the exclamation escaped her, for she had suddenly
remembered the six cents and understood the absurdity of his seven-mile
walk; it was the Quaker in him. “I know nothing in the world about
Quakers beyond their--their--”
“Hats?” he laughed; “like cardinals, they have that distinction.”
“Do you think me very ignorant?” she asked, unconscious that she was
bridging the social chasm again and again, that she had, indeed,
forgotten it in her interest in the man. His dog had come over now and
laid his head in Diana’s lap, and she caressed it unconsciously; the
dumb overture of friendship always touched her.
Trench turned. The firelight was on both their faces, and he met her
eyes with that luminous glance which seemed to compel hers. “It would
be very difficult for me to tell you what I think of you,” he said
deliberately, but with a humorous kindness in his voice.
Diana drew back; she was not sure that she was annoyed. It was new, it
was almost delightful to meet a primitive person like this. She could
not be sure of social banalities here; he might say something new,
something that stirred her pulses at any moment. It was an alarming but
distinctly pleasurable sensation, this excursion into another sphere;
it was almost as exciting as stealing pears. She looked at him with
sparkling eyes.
“Couldn’t you try?” she asked daringly, and felt a tremulous hope that
he would, though she could not believe it possible that he would
calmly cross the social Rubicon again, and make her feel that all men
were and are “of necessity free and equal.”
“You do not really wish me to try,” he retorted; “to you this is
an adventure, and I”--he smiled, but a deeper emotion darkened his
eyes--“I am the dancing bear.”
Her cheeks reddened yet more deeply, and her breath came quickly. What
had she done? Opened the way for a dilemma? This man would not be
led; he was a new and alarming problem. She was trying to collect her
thoughts to answer him, to put back the old tone of trivial banter, to
restore the lost equilibrium, but happily she was spared the task. The
tempest had lulled unnoticed, while they talked, and they were suddenly
aware that the shop-door had opened and closed again, and some one
was coming toward them. The next moment Dr. Cheyney appeared at the
threshold, and Diana sank back into the shelter of the old chair with a
feeling of infinite relief.
V
HALF an hour later Caleb Trench was helping his two guests into the
doctor’s old-fashioned, high-topped buggy.
“That’ll do, Caleb; I’ve got her safely tucked in,” Dr. Cheyney said,
as he gathered the reins up and disentangled them from old Henk’s
tail. “I reckon Henk and I can carry her all right; she isn’t any more
delicate than a basket of eggs.”
Diana smiled in her corner of the carriage. “Thank you again, Mr.
Trench,” she said gently; “it’s nice to have some one considerate. Dr.
Cheyney has always scolded me, and I suppose he always will.”
“Think likely,” the doctor twinkled; “you mostly deserve it, Miss
Royall.”
“He’s worse when he calls me names,” Diana lamented, and bowed her head
again to Caleb as old Henk started deliberately upon his way.
The hood of the vehicle shut off her view, and she did not know that
Trench stood bareheaded in the rain to watch the receding carriage,
until the drenched green boughs locking over the road closed his
last glimpse of it in a mist-wreathed perspective, beautiful with
wind-beaten showers of dogwood bloom.
The two inside the buggy were rather silent for a while. Diana was
watching the light rainfall. The sun was breaking through the clouds,
and the atmosphere became wonderfully translucent. Great branches were
strewn by the way, and a tall pine, cleft from tip to root, showed the
course of a thunderbolt. The stream was so swollen that old Henk forded
with cautious feet, and the water lapped above the carriage step.
“Drowned out most of the young crops,” Dr. Cheyney remarked laconically.
“What sort of a man is Caleb Trench?” Diana asked irrelevantly.
Dr. Cheyney looked around at her with quizzical eyes. “A shopkeeper,”
he replied. “I reckon that’s about as far as you got before to-day,
wasn’t it?”
She colored. “I suppose it was,” she admitted, and then added, “Not
quite, doctor; I saw that he was odd.”
The old man smiled. “Di,” he said, “when you were no higher than my
knee you’d have been more truthful. You know, as well as I do, that the
man is above the average; he’s keeping shop and reading law down at
Judge Hollis’ office, and he’s trying to teach the backwoodsmen honest
politics. Taken out a pretty large contract, eh?”
Diana looked down at her fine strong hands lying crossed in her lap;
her face was deeply thoughtful. “I suppose he’s bent on rising in
politics,” she said, with a touch of scorn in her voice; “the typical
self-made man.”
“You didn’t happen to know that he was a gentleman,” Dr. Cheyney
remarked dryly.
She met his eye and smiled unwillingly. “I did,” she said; “I saw
it--to-night.”
“Oh, you did, did you?” The old man slapped Henk with the reins. “Well,
what else did you see?”
“Very little, I imagine,” she replied. “I suppose I thought he had ‘a
story’; that’s the common thing, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” admitted the doctor, “but it isn’t so, as far as I know.
Caleb Trench comes of good old stock in Pennsylvania. His father lost
a fortune just before Caleb left college; the old man’s dead, and his
wife, too. Trench has had to work and work hard. He couldn’t take his
law course, and he’s never complained. He got together a little money
and had to pay it all out for his sister; she was dying of some spinal
trouble, and had to be nursed through a long illness and buried. Trench
gave every cent; now he’s making a new start. Hollis likes him, so does
Miss Sarah.”
Diana smiled. “It’s something to please Miss Sarah.”
“I never did,” said William Cheyney calmly; “she declares I tried to
poison her last time she was laid up with sciatica. She’s taking patent
medicines now, and when she’s at the last gasp she’ll send for me and
lay the blame on my shoulders.”
“It’s hard to be a doctor after all, isn’t it?” laughed Diana; then she
leaned forward and caught the blossoming end of a vagrant dogwood and
broke off the flowers as they passed. “Dr. Cheyney,” she went on, after
a long moment, “I’ve wanted you to see father again; I don’t believe
he’s well.”
“Why not?” asked the doctor, his eyes on the mist of rain that seemed
to move before them like the pillar of cloud before the Israelites.
“He’s moody,” she said, “he’s almost sad at times and--and he spent an
hour in the Shut Room--” She paused and looked questioningly at the old
man beside her, but he made no comment.
In the pause they heard the slush of Henk’s hoofs in the muddy road.
“I wish he wouldn’t,” Diana continued; “it’s beautiful--his devotion to
my mother’s memory, but I--I’m jealous of that Shut Room, it makes him
so unhappy. Couldn’t I break it up by taking him away?”
The doctor shook his head. “Better not, Diana,” he cautioned her,
“better not. You can’t uproot an old tree. Let him fight his battle out
alone.”
“I can’t bear that he should be alone,” she protested tenderly. “I
can’t bear to be shut out even from his griefs. Pa and I are all in all
to each other. Why does he never speak of mother? Is it his sorrow?”
Dr. Cheyney nodded, pursing his lips. Henk jogged on.
“It’s a long time,” said Diana, “I was only three years old.”
“Let it be, my girl,” the old man counseled; “we can’t enter the
upper chamber of the soul, you know. David’s got to fight it out.
Sometimes”--the doctor let the reins go so slack that old Henk
walked--“sometimes grief is like a raw cut, Diana, and we can’t put in
a few stitches either; got to leave that to Providence.”
“He isn’t well,” Diana insisted.
“He’d be no better for my meddling,” Dr. Cheyney retorted, unmoved.
“I wanted him to go East with me,” she continued, “to go to New York.”
Dr. Cheyney glanced up quickly. “And he wouldn’t?”
Diana shook her head.
“Don’t you ask it,” cautioned the old man. “It’s the time of year when
your father’s full of notions; let him be.”
“The time of year”--Diana met the doctor’s kindly eyes--“when mother
died?”
William Cheyney turned red. The girl, looking at him, saw the dull red
stealing up to the old man’s white hair and wondered.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do I look like her?” Diana asked, after a moment of perplexed thought.
“No!” said Dr. Cheyney shortly.
Old Henk had climbed the last hill,--the one that always seems to meet
the sky until you have climbed it,--and there, below it, unfolded the
wide valley with the brown of new-plowed fields and the long strips of
lovely foliage. The mist of the rain was molten gold now, and a rainbow
spanned the sky.
“I wish I did!” Diana sighed regretfully.
“You’re the handsomest woman in the State,” the old doctor retorted
tartly. “What more do you want?”
“The kingdoms of earth,” replied Diana, and laughed softly.
Dr. Cheyney disentangled the rein again from old Henk’s tail, and they
turned the corner.
“Diana,” he said abruptly, “did you happen to ask Caleb Trench to call?”
“I?” Diana flushed crimson. “No,” she said reluctantly, “I didn’t.”
Dr. Cheyney shook with silent laughter. “That’s the way you treat the
good Samaritan,” he said. “I’d rather be the Levite, Di.”
She leaned back in her corner of the carriage, blushing but resentful,
a line between her brows. “It wouldn’t be any use,” she said. “I--I
couldn’t make him feel welcome there.”
“You mean that Cousin Jacob would insult him,” Dr. Cheyney said bluntly.
She stiffened. “I should protect my own guests,” she retorted hotly.
“Could you?” asked the doctor dryly.
Diana met his eyes indignantly; then a throb of pain in her ankle made
her wince.
“I reckon it does hurt, Di.” The old man smiled compassionately. “I’ll
bandage it when we get you home. Don’t be capering off your horse again
in thunder-storms.”
“I’d be sure to break my neck next time, I suppose,” she said ruefully.
“Let it be a leg, Di,” advised the doctor, “that would give me a job;
the other would all go to the undertaker. He told me once,” he added,
with a twinkle, “that we worked so much together we ought to have a
common interest. I believe he wanted to found a trust--‘doctors’ and
undertakers’ amalgamated protected’--or something of that sort. I
begged off on the ground of injury to my profession. I told him it
wouldn’t do for a poor man like me to go into a trust with a rich
planter.”
“Dr. Cheyney,” Diana interrupted, “I don’t want you to think that Jacob
Eaton rules our house; he has more influence with father than I wish he
had, but he can’t rule father.”
“I suppose you’ll marry him in the end,” William Cheyney remarked
reflectively.
Diana, leaning back in her corner, looked thoughtful. “No,” she said
slowly, “I don’t believe I will.”
The doctor slapped Henk again with his loose rein. “Why not?” he asked
dispassionately.
She thought a moment, a gleam of mischief deepening in her glance. “For
one thing, his eyes are too near together,” she said at last.
“There’s no telling but what you could get them spaced better,”
he replied, twinkling; “science is advancing, and so is wireless
telegraphy.”
Diana laughed. “Some one will like them as they are,” she said, “and
Jacob thinks them handsome.”
“Sleek young cub!” said the doctor, turning in at the gate that led to
the old white house with its two wings and its belvedere. “I’d like you
to marry a real man, Di.”
Diana leaned her head back in the corner and closed her eyes, as
the throbbing pain held her breathless again. Then she smiled. “Dr.
Cheyney,” she said, “do you remember the time I cried because you
wouldn’t give me the pink capsules?”
“You were seven,” replied the doctor placidly. “I remember. They would
have killed you, but you screamed for them; you raised Cain about them.”
“I wanted my own way,” said Diana, “and I want it still. I think I’d
better be an old maid.”
Old Henk was jogging up the path, and before the doctor could reply a
negro stableman came running breathless, and stopped at the sight of
Diana.
“Fo’ de Lawd, Miss Di!” he said, “I’se glad ter see you. Jerry done
come home drenched, an’ we ’se been out searchin’--scared ter tell de
col’nel.”
“You old rogue!” said the doctor, “he was the first one to tell. Miss
Diana has sprained her ankle.”
“He was right,” said Diana promptly; “father would have been out in the
storm and never found me. Texas, go on up and tell the colonel that
I’ve hurt my ankle; I won’t have him worried, and I can’t walk well
enough to deceive him.”
The doctor looked at her quizzically. “That’s right, Di,” he said,
driving on; “you’ve spoilt him, but I reckon he can stand it if I can.”
“He began it,” she laughed softly; “he spoilt me first.”
Dr. Cheyney laughed too. “Perhaps he did,” he admitted
gently,--“perhaps he did, but I’m not sure; you’ve got to have your
trial, Diana.”
They were at the door now, and she laid her hand suddenly over the old
man’s. “Dr. Cheyney,” she said, “won’t you thank Caleb Trench and tell
him I’d be glad to have him come up here? I want to thank him again
properly.”
“No,” said Dr. Cheyney promptly, “I won’t.”
Diana’s eyes opened. “Why?” she demanded, flushing hotly, half
indignant.
The doctor looked over the top of his spectacles. “He wouldn’t come,
Diana,” he said; “you wouldn’t either, in his place.”
She did not answer, but turned away abruptly and reached out both hands
to Texas, who helped her down. “Good-bye, doctor,” she said coolly,
standing with one hand on the negro’s shoulder.
The doctor climbed out. “Go to!” he said, smiling grimly; “I’m coming
in to bandage your ankle. Don’t cry for the pink capsules again, Di.”
And Diana turned crimson with anger.