Still the boy sat silent, with his chin in his hand, as sits the
self-torturing figure of Rodin's bronze "Penseur"--the attitude of
thought which kills peace. Boone understood that unless Happy found a
man who shared with her that idea of keeping the torch lit in the midst
of darkness, her life might benefit others, but for herself it would be
a distressing failure.
Happy had fancied him, that he realized, but he had thought of it as a
phase through which she would pass with only such a scar as ephemeral
affairs leave--one of quick healing.
Now the fuller significance was clear. He knew that she faced a life
which her very efforts at betterment would make unspeakably bleak,
unless she found companionship. He saw that to him she looked for
release from that wretched alternative--and he had come to tell her
that, beyond a deep and sincere friendship, he had nothing to offer her.
Such an announcement, though truthfulness requires it, is harder for
being deferred.
Words seemed elusive and unmanageable as he made his beginning. "I'm
right glad that we are neighbours again, Happy," he told her. "I'm not
much to brag on--but I set a value on the same things you do--and I
reckon that means a good deal to--" He paused a moment, and added
clumsily, "to friendships."
Perhaps it was the word itself, or perhaps, and that is likelier, it was
the light and unconscious stress with which Boone spoke it that told her
without fuller explanation what he had come to confess. Two syllables
brought her face to face with revelation, and all else he might say
would be only redundancy. Already she had feared it at times when she
lay wakeful in her bed.
From that day when he had called her "Rebekkah at the Well," she had
been in love with him. She had not awakened to any hot ambition until
she had been fired with the incentive of paralleling his own educational
course. Now if he were not to be in her life she had only developed
herself out of her natural setting into a doom of miserable discontent.
It had always seemed as rational an assumption that their futures should
merge as that the only pair of falcons in a forest full of jack-daws
should mate.
Now he spoke of friendships!
Yet the girl, though stunned with bitter disappointment, was not wholly
astonished.
Topics of gossip are rare enough to be made much of in the hills, and
the neighbours had not failed to intimate in her hearing that when she
was away her "beau" had been sitting devotedly at other feet; but Happy
had smiled tranquilly upon her informants. "Boone would be right apt to
be charitable to a stranger," she had said, giving them none of the
satisfaction of seeing the thorn rankle, which is not to say that she
did not feel the sting. She had found false security in the thought that
Boone, even if he felt Anne's allurement, would be too sensible to raise
his eyes to her as a possibility since their worlds were not only
different but veritable antipodes of circumstance. What she had failed
to consider was that the Romeos and Juliets of the world have never
taken thought of what the houses of Montague and Capulet might say.
For a while now she sat very silent, her hands in her lap tightly
clasped and unmoving, but when she spoke her voice was even and soft.
"Thank you, Boone," she said; then after a moment, "Boone, is there
anything you'd like to tell me?"
The young man looked suddenly up at her, and his reply was a question,
too--an awkward and startled one: "What about, Happy--what do you mean?"
"The best thing friends can do--is to listen to what interests--each
other. Sometimes there are things we keep right silent about--in
general, I mean--and yet we get lonesome--for somebody to talk to--about
those things."
There was a pause, and then as Happy explained, the seeming serenity of
her manner was a supreme test of self-effacement which deserved an
accolade for bravery.
"I'd heard it hinted--that you thought a heap of a girl--down below--I
thought maybe you'd like to tell me about her."
How should he know that words so simply spoken in the timbre of calm
naturalness came from a heart that was agonized?
How could he guess that the quiet figure sitting in the low chair was
suffering inexpressible pain, or that the eyes that looked out through
half-closed lids seemed to see a world of rocking hills, black under
clouds of an unrelieved hopelessness?
One who has come braced for an ordeal and finds that he has reared for
himself a fictitious trouble, can realize in the moment of reaction only
the vast elation of relief.
Had her acting been less perfect, he might have caught a shadowing forth
of the truth--but, as it was, he only felt that shackles had been
knocked from him, and that he stood a free man.
So he made a clean breast of how Anne had become his ideal; how he had
fought that discovery as an absurdly impossible love, and how for that
reason he had never before spoken of his feelings. But he did not, of
course, intimate that it had been Anne herself who had finally given him
a right to hope.
Happy listened in sympathetic silence, and when he was through she said,
still softly:
"Boone, I reckon you've got a right hopeful life-span stretching out
ahead of you--but are you sure you aren't fixing to break your heart,
boy? Don't those folks down there--hold themselves mighty high? Don't
they--sort of--look down on us mountain people?"
It was a fair question, yet one which he could not answer without
betraying Anne's stout assertion of reciprocated feeling. He could only
nod his head and declare, "A feller must take his chances, I reckon."
From the dark forests the whippoorwills called in those plaintive notes
that reach the heart. Down by the creek the frogs boomed out, and
platinum mists lay dreamily between their soft emphases of shadow. Boone
was thinking of the girl whose star hung there in the sky. His heart was
singing in elation, "She loves me and, thank God, Happy understands,
too. My way lies clear!" He was not reflecting just then that princesses
have often spoken as boldly as Anne had done, at sixteen, and have been
forced to submit to other destinies at twenty. The girl was
thinking--but that was her secret, and if she was bravely masking a
tortured heart it should be left inviolate in its secrecy.
The young man in his abstraction did not mark how long the silence held,
and when at last Happy rose he came out of his revery with a start.
"Boone, I'm mighty glad you felt that you could talk to me this way,"
she said. "I want to be a _real_ friend. But I've been working hard
today--and if it won't hurt your feelings, I wish you'd go home now. I'm
dog-tired, and I'd like to go to bed."
He had started away, but the evening had brought such surprises--and
such a lifting of heavy anxiety--that he wanted to mull matters over out
there in the soothing moonlight and the clean sweetness of the air.
So he sat down on a boulder where the shadow blotted him into the night,
and when he had been there for a while he looked up in a fresh
astonishment. Happy had not gone to bed. She was coming now across the
stile, with movements like those of a sleep-walker. Outside on the road
she stood for a while, pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight, looking
in the direction she supposed he had taken, while her fingers plucked at
her dress with distressed little gestures. Then with unsteady steps she
went on to the edge of the highway and leaned against the boll of a tall
poplar. He could see that her eyes were wide and her lips moving. Then
she wheeled and threw her hands, with outspread fingers, against the
cool bark above her head, leaning there as a child might lean on a
mother's bosom, and the sobs that shook her slender body came to him
across the short interval of distance.
Boone went over to her with hurried strides, and when she felt his hands
on her shoulders she wheeled. Then only did her brave disguise fail her,
and she demanded almost angrily, forgetting her school-taught diction,
"Why didn't ye go home like I told ye? Why does ye hev ter dog me this
fashion, atter I'd done sent ye away?"
"What's the matter, Happy?" he demanded; but he knew now, well enough,
and he was too honest to dissimulate. "I didn't know, Happy," he
pleaded. "I thought you meant it all."
"I did mean hit all--I means thet I wants thet ye should be
happy--only--" Her voice broke there as she added, "--only I've done
always thought of myself as yore gal."
She broke away from him with those words and fled back into the house,
and most of that night Boone tramped the woods.
On the morning after Happy had fled from him, under the spurring of her
discovered secret, she had not been able with all her bravery of effort
to hide from the family about the daybreak breakfast table the traces of
a sleepless and tearful night. To Happy, this morning the murky room
which was both kitchen and dining hall seemed the epitome of sordidness,
with its newspaper-plastered walls and creaking puncheon floor.
Yesterday each depressing detail had been alleviated by the thought that
the future held a promise of release. Contemplating delivery, one can
laugh gaily in a cell, but now the dungeon doors seemed to have been
permanently closed and the key thrown away.
"Happy's done been cryin'," shrilled one of the youngest of the brother
and sister brood--for that was a typical mountain family to which, for
years, each spring had brought its fresh item of humanity. As Cyrus
pithily expressed it, "Thar hain't but only fo'teen of us settin' down
ter eat when everybody's home."
Old Cyrus put a stern quietus on the chorus of questioning elicited by
the proclaiming of his daughter's grief.
"Ef she's been cryin', thet's her own business," he announced. "I reckon
she don't need ter name what hit's erbout every time she laughs or
weeps."
And, such is the value of the patriarchal edict, the tumult was promptly
stilled.
Yet the head of the house, himself, could not so readily dismiss a
realization of the unwonted pallor on cheeks normally soft and rosily
colourful. The eyes were undeniably wretched and deeply ringed. To
himself Cyrus said, "They've jest only done had a lovers' quarrel. Young
folks is bound ter foller fallin' out as well as fallin' in, I reckon."
Neither that day nor the next, however, did the girl "live right up to
her name," and on the following night Boone did not come over to sue for
peace, as a lover should, under such April conditions of sun and storm.
"What does ye reckon's done come over 'em, Maw?" the father eventually
inquired, and the mother shook her perplexed head.
The two of them were alone on the porch just then, save for one of the
youngest children, who was deeply absorbed with the feeding of a small
and crippled lamb from a nursing bottle improvised out of a whiskey
flask.
Slowly the old man's face clouded, until it wore so forebodingly sombre
a look as the wife had not seen upon it since years before when life had
run black. Then, despite all his efforts to "consort peaceful with
mankind," he had been drawn into an enmity with a fatal termination.
Cyrus had on that occasion been warned that he was to be "lay-wayed"
and, as he had taken down his rifle from the wall, his eyes had held
just the same hard and obdurate glint that lingered in them now. The
woman, remembering that time long gone, when her husband had refused to
turn a step aside from his contemplated journey, shuddered a little. She
could not forget how he had been shot out of his saddle and how he had,
while lying wounded in the creek-bed road, punished his assailant with
death. He was wounded now, though not with a bullet this time, and his
scowl said that he would hit back.
"What air hit, Paw?" she demanded, and his reply came in slow but
implacable evenness:
"I've done set a heap of store by Boone Wellver. I've done thought of
him like a son of my own--but ef he's broke my gal's heart--an's she's
got ther look of hit in her eyes--him an' me kain't both go on dwellin'
along ther same creek." He paused a moment there, and in his final words
sounded an even more inflexible ring: "We kain't both go on livin'
hyar--an' I don't aim ter move."
"Paw"--the plea came solicitously from a fear-burdened heart--"we've
just got ter wait an' see."
"I don't aim ter be over-hasty," he reassured her, with a rude sort of
gentleness, "but nuther does I aim ter endure hit--ef so be hit's true."
But that evening at twilight when Boone crossed the stile, if the nod
which greeted him was less cordial than custom had led him to expect, at
least Cyrus spoke no hostile word. The old man was "biding his time,"
and as he rose and knocked the nub of ash out of his pipe-bowl, he
announced curtly, "I'll tell Happy ye're hyar."