Anne Masters looked out of the car windows with shadowed and preoccupied
eyes on that journey from the mountains back to Louisville. The old
conductor who always stopped and chatted with her, after a glance at her
expression, punched her ticket and passed on. Something was not well
with her, he reflected.
To this girl, the joyous sense of freedom had been the essence of life,
and now she was going home with the feeling of one who has passed under
a yoke. It was as if henceforth she were to know the sea which she had
adventurously sailed in liberty only from the chained oar bench of the
galley slave. She felt humiliated and utterly miserable, and perhaps,
worst of all, she was oppressed by an unrelieved realization of her own
futility. Beside the competence of the young woman who took dictation at
Morgan's desk, her own social accomplishments appeared for the first
time summoned for comparison, and the parallel left her branded in her
own mind as an economic parasite. Marriage was the one way in which a
woman of her sort could finance her life, and the only marriage which
for her would be a fulfilment and not a travesty--itself requiring
financing--lay remote.
Anne repressed the first indignant impulse to write to Boone of the
unjustifiable charge against him to which she had been forced to listen.
There at the capital he was adjusting himself to new duties and settling
his shoulders into an unaccustomed harness. She knew that he took these
things seriously since he meant to use their opportunities as
stepping-stones to broader achievement, and a letter on such a subject
would seem hysterical and wanting in faith, when perhaps he was most
depending on that faith. Now she told herself that except for having
unalterably committed herself to that course with foolish emphasis, she
would not even speak incidentally to Boone of the matter. She assured
herself that already she knew the answer and needed no further
evidence--but a pledge was a pledge, and she must have the reply to take
from his lips to her father.
Yet in the weeks which intervened before that opportunity arrived, the
repudiated matter rankled like a poison, which abates none of its
malignity because its victim has pasted an innocuous label on the
bottle.
So one day, while Anne was being tortured in spirit and was telling
herself that she was serenely untroubled, Boone was at the school where
Happy Spradling had for some years been a member of the teaching staff.
His eyes were glowing with appreciation as he went about the place,
recognizing the magic that had grown there. It had woven its spell out
of the dauntless resolution of a little coterie of women who, like
unostentatious vestals, had kindled and fed here, where it meant
everything, the fire of education and wholesomeness. Surrounded by a
hinterland where sloven illiteracy fostered lawlessness, that fire
burned in houses that stood up as monuments both of practical utility
and surprising beauty. Its light was reflected in keen young faces
hungry for education and smiling young eyes in which Boone read the
presage of a new future for his people.
Women had done this thing: women for the most part from the Bluegrass
who had surrendered ease and chosen effort: women who, out of a
volunteer greatness of spirit, elected to "wait in heavy harness on
fluttered folk and wild."
Boone drew a long breath of silent tribute and homage. It pleased him to
think, too, that not all of the magic-makers came from beyond the hills.
Happy was one of them. In these years she had developed until one might
not have guessed that she, too, had not come from the source of a
gentler rearing. She had met the representative of her district as an
old friend, but in no glance or inflection was there a hint that between
them lay any buried memory.
"They sent for you to come here," the girl told him, as she showed him
over the redeemed grounds, "because we want your help. They didn't know
that we were old friends, and I didn't mention it. You see what we are
trying to do here, but we need roads. A country without highways is a
house without windows. That is where you can help us. We're very poor,
you know."
"You're making the country very rich," he answered gravely, and he
returned to Frankfort with the affairs of that school near his heart.
That week-end he went to Louisville, and as he sat at Anne's right at a
dinner party a mood of romanticism laid its glamour upon his thoughts.
Tonight he could seem to step back across the years and stand looking
into the hungry, discontented eyes of a boy in hodden-gray perched on
the topmost rail of a rotting fence. It seemed incredible that that boy
had been himself. To that boy, all life except the hard realities of a
pioneer people had been an untried thing of formless dream tissue.
And tonight he sat here! In many respects it was just such a table and
just such a company as everywhere reflected the niceties of civilized
society, yet in the little intimate things it was distinctive.
In the voices, the colloquialisms--the very colour of thought--spoke the
spirit of the South--not the Old South, perhaps, yet the offspring of a
mother who had passed on much of herself.
From the log cabin to this dinner seemed to him the measure of his
progress thus far. It was as though with seven-league boots he had
crossed the centuries!
Behind him lay a boyhood that belonged to the little sectionalism of the
backwoods settlement. Here was the widening circle of the life evolved
out of it, yet still a circle of sectionalism. What lay beyond?
In his imagination the young Kentuckian saw the dome of the capitol at
Washington, the nerve centre of the nation, where functioned the broad
affairs of statecraft. Above the dome an afterglow hung in the sky, and
in it shone a single star--the evening star. That, of course, was a long
way off, yet from Louisville to Washington seemed a shorter and smoother
road than from the laurel thickets to Louisville. Youth was his, and a
resolution forged and tempered. Ambition was his, and the incentive of a
beacon whose light he renewed whenever he looked into the violet eyes
that were not far from his own.
The race would not, of course, be easy. There would be the heart-testing
smother of effort before the prize was won, but the future lay open, and
he coveted no victory of unwrung withers and unwearied lungs.
Thank God, the one thing without which he must fail was surely his: the
loyalty of the woman he loved.
Anne had been unusually quiet and grave this evening, but he had arrived
on a late train and had as yet had no opportunity for talk with her
alone. That would come later.
When he had driven home with her, he followed her into the old parlour,
with its ripe portraits from the brush of Jouett, and the cheery blaze
of its open fire. With her opera cloak thrown across his arm, he watched
her go over and stand on the hearth, while the firelight played on the
ivory whiteness and the satin softness of her neck and shoulders, and
made a nimbus about her bright hair.
"You're not wearing your string of pearls tonight," he smiled; and she
smiled, too, but not happily.
"No," she said. "I thought I wouldn't."
She did not add that she had not worn them because they were the gift of
Colonel Wallifarro and seemed to her an emblem of bondage.
All that she would tell him in a few minutes, but first she had an
awkward question to ask which had hung over her all evening as the
threat of bedtime punishment hangs over a child. Now she meant to
dispose of that quickly and categorically and have it done with. She
felt shamed, as his frank eyes met hers, to broach an inquiry that
seemed so nearly an insult to his allegiance. But she stood pledged and
she had planned the matter in just one fashion. There would be the
question and the negative reply, then the ghost would be laid.
That there could be any other answer than "No," however modified or
justified by circumstance, had not entered into her premises of thought
as conceivable. The general who, no matter how flawless his
plan-in-chief, has arranged no alternative strategy, is a commander
doomed. Anne had admitted in advance no substitute for absolute denial.
Now she turned and spoke gently:
"Before we talk of anything else, dear, there's a question I must ask
you, and you must answer it in one word--yes, or no. You'll want to say
more, and afterwards you may--but not at first." She paused, and a note
of apology crept into the voice that went on again: "I feel disloyal
even to ask it, but it's a thing I'm pledged to do, and I'll explain the
reason afterwards."
Boone smiled with the confidence of a man for whom the witness stand
holds no terror.
"Ask it, dearest."
"Did you ... ever"--she faltered a moment, then went hurriedly on, as if
racing against a failure of resolve--"ask ... any other girl ... to
marry you?"
The smile was struck from his face in an instant, leaving his eyes
pained and his lips straight and tight, and her gaze, fixed on his, read
the swift change of expression and responded with a sudden terror in her
own pupils.
"I was never ... in love with any one...!"
"One word!" Her interruption came in a tone he had never heard her use
before. It was so quiet that it carried with it a chill like that of
death. "Yes or no."
Boone felt a cold moisture on his hands and temples. A matter easy to
explain had, of a sudden, become inexplicable. Looking back over lapsed
years, all the quixotic urging of a false sense of justice had gone out
of conduct which had then seemed so mandatory. The inescapable
obligation to which he had responded seemed empty and twisted now. He
could see only that he had insulted Happy with a half offer and been
false to his avowed love of Anne and to his duty to himself.
That, at the time, he had been groping toward a callow and half-baked
conception of honour failed now to extenuate his blunder, and if he
himself could no longer understand it, how could he hope to make her do
so?
His voice came in a dull monotone.
"Yes," he said, "I did. May I explain?"
In the credo of this girl's life fairness and generosity were twin
cornerstones, and condemnation without hearing was an abhorrent and mean
injustice. But the unadmitted poison of an accusation fought in secret
had been insidiously undermining her sanity on the one central theme of
her life, and Boone's affirmative had seemed to sever with a shock of
complete surprise the anchor cable of her faith.
"No," she said, and for once it might have been the acid-marred voice of
her mother, "that's all I need to know."
"But, Anne"--Boone took an impulsive step toward her and sought to speak
sanely, while he held off the sense of chaos under which his brain
staggered--"but, Anne, after all these years, you can't throw overboard
your faith in me without giving me a chance to be heard."
She laughed bitterly, and of course that was hysteria, but to the man it
seemed only derision.
"Until three minutes ago," she said, "I would have staked my life on my
faith in you ... I did just about do it.... Now, I'm afraid ... there
isn't any left ... to throw away."
"If you ever had any," he declared--and he, too, spoke under a stress
that gave an unaccustomed hardness to his voice, "there should be some
still. The answer you held me to answers nothing. It gives no
reason--no explanation."
"The reasons ... don't count for much. Yes means yes. It means years of
deceit and lies to me.... Good-bye."
Boone Wellver turned and walked to the door. His eyes, fixed ahead, saw
nothing. As he went, he collided with a table and paused, looking at it
with a dazed sense of injury. On the threshold he halted to speak in a
voice which was queer and uncommanded.
"You are sending me away," he said, "without a chance. I still have
faith in you ... unless it's a false faith, you'll send for me to come
back ... and give me that chance.... Until you do, I won't ask it ... or
try to see you."
The girl stood looking past him in a sort of trance. "Good-bye," she
repeated, and he took up his coat and hat and went out.
For a little while after he had gone Anne Masters remained staring with
a stunned and transfixed immobility at the empty frame of the door
through which he had gone; a frame it seemed to her out of which had
suddenly been torn the picture of her life, leaving a tattered canvas.
She shivered violently; then she, too, started toward the door, swayed
unsteadily, and fell insensible.
* * * * *
A measure before the lower house of the General Assembly had split it so
evenly that when the roll call came on the vote, a deadlock was
predicted and one absentee might bring defeat to his cause. After each
adjournment noses were jealously counted, and the falling gavel, calling
each session to order, found Boone in his seat with a face that sought
to mask its misery behind a stony expressionlessness. It was a deadly
sober face with eyes that wandered often into abstraction, so that men
who had seen it heretofore ready of smile commented on the change, yet
hesitated to question one so palpably aloof.
In these days it was hard for Boone to see, with his single purpose
shattered, the reason or value of any purpose, yet habit held him to his
routine duties with an overserious and humourless inflexibility.
After the first dull wretchedness of the night when he and Anne had
parted, he had laid hold upon a hope which had not endured. He had told
himself with the persistence of a refrain that the girl who had that
night condemned him out of hand was a girl temporarily bereft of
reasoning balance by a tide of heartache and a tempest of anger. The
mail would soon bring him a note announcing the restoration of the woman
he loved to her own gracious fairness and serene self-recovery. He could
not, without losing his whole grip on life, bring himself to the
admission that the passion of a wild, ungenerous moment would endure.
Indeed, the thought of what she must have suffered--what she must still
be suffering--so to carry her and hold her outside her whole orbit of
being, tortured him as much as his own personal loss and grief.
But no word had come. That wild, hurried interview had moved with such
torrential haste and violence to its culmination of breached
understanding that there had been no time for stemming it with
moderation or explained circumstances.
She had not had the chance to tell him of the disclosures her father had
made, or of the sense of bondage that had weighed upon her until the
colour of her thought had lost its clarity and become bewilderingly
turgid. She had not been able to let the light into the festering
brooding that had subconsciously poisoned her mind. A single idea had
carried all else with it as a flood carries wreckage. For years she had
stood out for Boone. A time had come when he had been charged with
absolute duplicity toward her, and she had scornfully wagered her life
on his fealty and submitted the whole vital matter to one question. His
answer had been a confession.
There had been no years of intermittent association when he could
logically or decently have entertained another love affair. From the
first day of his avowed allegiance until now there had been no break in
his protestations. Therefore, the word "yes" or "no" contained all the
answer there could be to the question of his loyalty, and the word which
shattered the whole dream came from his own lips.
One day, as Boone was leaving his hotel room for the state house, two
letters were handed him, and his heart leaped into drum-beat. One was
addressed in her hand, and that one he thrust into his pocket, as one
saves the best to read last.
The other was an invitation from Colonel Wallifarro: an engraved blank
filled in with a name and date. In a secluded corner of the hard-frozen,
state house grounds he sat on a bench to read the note from Anne, but
when he had torn the envelope and glanced at the sheet the light went
out of his eyes and his bronzed cheeks became suddenly drawn.
"I thought you might like to know," she said. "The invitation from Uncle
Tom looks innocent enough, but I don't think you'd enjoy the party. It's
given to announce my engagement to Morgan."
Boone sat there dazed, while in the icy air his breath floated cloudlike
before his lips.
Eventually he awoke to some realization of the passage of time, and
looked at his watch. It was past the hour for the roll-call on the bill
which his absence might deliver into the hands of the enemy, the cause
for which he and his colleagues had been fighting.
He came with an effort to his feet and went heavily through the corridor
and into the chamber. At the door, where he leaned against the casing,
he heard the clerk of the house calling the roll, and the staccato
"Ayes" and "Noes" of the responses. Already the alphabetical sequence
had progressed to the U's, and soon his own name would follow. Then it
came, and at first his stiff tongue could not answer. He was licking his
lips and his throat worked with some spasmodic reflex. Finally he heard
a strained and unnatural voice, which he could hardly recognize as his
own, answering "No."
Heads turned toward him at the queer sound, and from somewhere rose a
twittering of laughter. That was perhaps natural enough, for to the
casual and uncomprehending eye he made a spectacle both sorry and
ludicrous--this usually self-contained young man who now stood
stammering and disordered of guise, like a fellow not wholly recovered
from a night-long debauch.