MR. KEITH'S IDEALS
After this it was astonishing how many excuses Gordon could find for
visiting the village. He was always wanting to consult a book in the
Doctor's library, or get something, which, indeed, meant that he wanted
to get a glimpse of a young girl with violet eyes and pink cheeks,
stretched out in a lounging-chair, picturesquely reclining amid clouds
of white pillows. Nearly always he carried with him a bunch of flowers
from Mrs. Rawson's garden, which were to make patches of pink or red or
yellow among Miss Alice's pillows, and bring a fresh light into her
eyes. And sometimes he took a basket of cherries or strawberries for
Mrs. Yorke. His friends, the Doctor and the Rawsons, began to rally him
on his new interest in the Springs.
"I see you are takin' a few nubbins for the old cow," said Squire
Rawson, one afternoon as Gordon started off, at which Gordon blushed as
red as the cherries he was carrying. It was just what he had been doing.
"Well, that is the way to ketch the calf," said the old farmer,
jovially; "but I 'low the mammy is used to pretty high feedin'." He had
seen Mrs. Yorke driving along in much richer attire than usually dazzled
the eyes of the Ridge neighborhood, and had gauged her with a
shrewd eye.
Miss Alice Yorke's sprain turned out to be less serious than had been
expected. She herself had proved a much less refractory patient than her
mother had ever known her.
It does not take two young people of opposite sexes long to overcome the
formalities which convention has fixed among their seniors, especially
when one of them has brought the other down a mountain-side in his arms.
Often, in a sheltered corner of the long verandah, Keith read to Alice
on balmy afternoons, or in the moonlit evenings sauntered with her
through the fields of their limited experience, and quoted snatches from
his chosen favorites, poems that lived in his heart, and fancied her the
"maid of the downward look and sidelong glance."
Thus, by the time Alice Yorke was able to move about again, she and
Keith had already reached a footing where they had told each other a
good deal of their past, and were finding the present very pleasant, and
one of them, at least, was beginning, when he turned his eyes to the
future, to catch the glimmer of a very rosy light.
It showed in his appearance, in his face, where a new expression of a
more definite ambition and a higher resolution was beginning to take
its place.
Dr. Balsam noted it, and when he met Gordon he began to have a quizzical
light in his deep-gray eyes. He had, too, a tender tone in his voice
when he addressed the girl. Perhaps, a vision came to him at times of
another country lad, well-born like this one, and, like this one, poor,
wandering on the New England hills with another young girl, primmer,
perhaps, and less sophisticated than this little maiden, who had come
from the westward to spend a brief holiday on the banks of the
Piscataqua, and had come into his life never to depart--of his dreams
and his hopes; of his struggles to achieve the education which would
make him worthy of her; and then of the overthrow of all: of darkness
and exile and wanderings.
When the Doctor sat on his porch of an evening, with his pipe, looking
out over the sloping hills, sometimes his face grew almost melancholy.
Had he not been intended for other things than this exile? Abigail
Brooke had never married, he knew. What might have happened had he gone
back? And when he next saw Alice Yorke there would be a softer tone in
his voice, and he would talk a deeper and higher philosophy to her than
she had ever heard, belittling the gaudy rewards of life, and instilling
in her mind ideas of something loftier and better and finer than they.
He even told her once something of the story of his life, and of the
suffering and sorrow that had been visited upon the victims of a foolish
pride and a selfish ambition. Though he did not confide to her that it
was of himself he spoke, the girl's instinct instantly told her that it
was his own experience that he related, and her interest was
deeply excited.
"Did she ever marry, Doctor?" she asked eagerly. "Oh, I hope she did
not. I might forgive her if she did not; but if she married I would
never forgive her!"
The Doctor's eyes, as they rested on her eager face, had a kindly
expression in them, and a look of amusement lurked there also.
"No; she never married," he said. "Nor did he."
"Oh, I am glad of that," she exclaimed; and then more softly added, "I
know he did not."
Dr. Balsam gazed at her calmly. He did not pursue the subject further.
He thought he had told his story in such a way as to convey the moral
without disclosing that he spoke of himself. Yet she had discovered it
instantly. He wondered if she had seen also the moral he intended
to convey.
Alice Yorke was able to walk now, and many an afternoon Gordon Keith
invited her to stroll with him on the mountain-side or up the Ridge,
drawing her farther and farther as her strength returned.
The Spring is a dangerous season for a young man and a pretty girl to be
thrown closely together for the first time, and the budding woods are a
perilous pasture for their browsing thoughts. It was not without some
insight that the ancient poets pictured dryads as inhabitants of the
woods, and made the tinkling springs and rippling streams the
abiding-places of their nymphs.
The Spring came with a burst of pink and green. The mountains took on
delicate shades, and the trees blossomed into vast flowers, feathery and
fine as lace.
An excursion in the budding woods has been dangerous ever since the day
when Eve found a sinuous stranger lurking there in gay disguise, and was
beguiled into tasting the tempting fruit he offered her. It might be an
interesting inquiry to collect even the most notable instances of those
who, wandering all innocent and joyous amid the bowers, have found the
honey of poisonous flowers where they meant only innocence. But the
reader will, perhaps, recall enough instances in a private and
unrecorded history to fill the need of illustration. It suffices, then,
to say that, each afternoon that Gordon Keith wandered with Alice Yorke
through the leafy woods, he was straying farther in that perilous path
where the sunlight always sifts down just ahead, but the end is veiled
in mist, and where sometimes darkness falls.
These strolls had all the charm for him of discovery, for he was always
finding in her some new trait, and every one was, he thought, an added
charm, even to her unexpected alternations of ignorance and knowledge,
her little feminine outbreaks of caprice. One afternoon they had
strolled farther than usual, as far even as the high pines beyond which
was the great rock looking to the northeastward. There she had asked him
to help her up to the top of the rock, but he had refused. He told her
that she had walked already too far, and he would not permit her
to climb it.
"Not permit me! Well, I like that!" she said, with a flash of her blue
eyes; and springing from her seat on the brown carpet, before he could
interpose, she was climbing up the high rock as nimbly as if she were
a boy.
He called to her to stop, but she took no heed. He began to entreat her,
but she made no answer. He was in terror lest she might fall, and
sprang after her to catch her; but up, up she climbed, with as steady a
foot and as sure an eye as he could have shown himself, until she
reached the top, when, looking down on him with dancing eyes, she kissed
her hand in triumph and then turned away, her cheeks aglow. When he
reached the top, she was standing on the very edge of the precipice,
looking far over the long reach of sloping country to the blue line of
the horizon. Keith almost gasped at her temerity. He pleaded with her
not to be so venturesome.
"Please stand farther back, I beg you," he said as he reached her side.
"Now, that is better," she said, with a little nod to him, her blue eyes
full of triumph, and she seated herself quietly on the rock.
Keith began to scold her, but she laughed at him.
He had done it often, she said, and what he could do she could do.
The beauty of the wide landscape sank into both their minds, and after a
little they both took a graver tone.
"Tell me where your old home is," she said presently, after a long pause
in which her face had grown thoughtful. "You told me once that you could
see it from this rock."
Keith pointed to a spot on the far horizon. He did not know that it was
to see this even more than to brave him that she had climbed to the top
of the rock.
"Now tell me about it," she said. "Tell me all over what you have told
me before." And Keith related all he could remember. Touched with her
sympathy, he told it with more feeling than he had ever shown before.
When he spoke of the loss of his home, of his mortification, and of his
father's quiet dignity, she turned her face away to keep him from seeing
the tears that were in her eyes.
"I can understand your feeling a little," she said presently; "but I did
not know that any one could have so much feeling for a plantation. I
suppose it is because it is in the country, with its trees and flowers
and little streams. We have had three houses since I can remember. The
one that we have now on Fifth Avenue is four times as large--yes, six
times as large--and a hundred times as fine as the one I can first
remember, and yet, somehow, I always think, when I am sad or lonely, of
the little white house with the tiny rooms in it, with their low
ceilings and small windows, where I used to go when I was a very little
girl to see my father's mother. Mamma does not care for it; she was
brought up in the city; but I think my father loves it just as I do. He
always says he is going to buy it back, and I am going to make him
do it."
"I am going to buy back mine some day," said Keith, very slowly.
She glanced at him. His eyes were fastened on the far-off horizon, and
there was that in his face which she had never seen there before, and
which made her admire him more than she had ever done.
"I hope you will," she said. She almost hated Ferdy Wickersham for
having spoken of the place as Keith told her he had spoken.
When Keith reached home that evening he had a wholly new feeling for the
girl with whom accident had so curiously thrown him. He was really in
love with her. Hitherto he had allowed himself merely to drift with the
pleasant tide that had been setting in throughout these last weeks. But
the phases that she had shown that afternoon, her spirit, her courage,
her capricious rebelliousness, and, above all, that glimpse into her
heart which he had obtained as she sat on the rock overlooking the wide
sweep where he had had his home, and where the civilization to which it
belonged had had its home, had shown him a new creature, and he plunged
into love. Life appeared suddenly to open wide her gates and flood him
with her rosy light.