Randolph Anderson had a large contempt for money used otherwise than
for its material ends. A dollar never meant anything to him except
its equivalent in the filling of a need. Generosity and the impulse
of giving were in his blood, yet it had gone hard several times with
people who had tried to overreach him even to a trifling extent. But
now he submitted without a word to losing ten dollars through cashing
Arthur Carroll's worthless check. He himself was rather bewildered at
his tame submission. One thing was certain, although it seemed
paradoxical; if he had not had suspicions as to Arthur Carroll's
perfect trustworthiness, he would at once have gone to him with the
check.
"I dare say he overdrew his account without knowing it, as many an
honest man does," he reasoned, when trying to apologize to himself
for his unbusiness-like conduct, but always he knew subconsciously
that if he had been perfectly sure of that view of it he would not
have hesitated to put it to the proof. For some reason, probably
unconfessed rather than actually hidden from himself, he shrank from
a possible discovery to Arthur Carroll's discredit. When a man of
Randolph Anderson's kind replies to a question concerning the beauty
of a young girl that he does not know, the assumption is warranted
that he has given the matter consideration. A man usually leaps to a
decision of that kind, and if he has no ulterior motive for
concealment, he would as lief proclaim it to the house-tops.
Usually Randolph Anderson would no more have hesitated about giving
his opinion as to a girl's looks than he would have hesitated about
giving his candid opinion of the weather. For the most part a woman's
face had about as much effect upon his emotional nature as the face
of a day. He saw that it was rosy or gray, smiling and sunny, or
frowning or rainy, then he looked unmovedly at the retreating backs
of both. It was all the same thing. Anderson was a man who dealt
mostly with actualities where his emotions were concerned. With some,
love-dreams grow and develop with their growth and development; with
some not. The latter had been true with Randolph Anderson. Then, too,
he was scarcely self-centred and egotistical enough for genuine
air-castles of any kind. To build an air-castle, one's own
personality must be the central prop and pillar, for even anything as
unsubstantial as an air-castle has its building law. One must rear
around something, or the structure can never rise above the horizon
of the future.
Anderson had stored his mind with the poetic facts of the world
rather than projected his poetic fancies into the facts of the world.
He saw things largely as they were, with no inflorescence of rainbows
where there was none; but there are actual rainbows, and even
auroras, so that the man who does not dream has compensations and a
less chance of disillusion. Of course Anderson had thought of
marriage; he could scarcely have done otherwise; but he had thought
of it as an abstract condition pertaining to himself only in a
general way as it pertains to all mankind. He had never seen himself
plainly enough in his fancy as a lover and husband to have a pang of
regret or longing. He had been really contented as he was. He had a
powerful mind, and the exercising of that held in restraint the
purely physical which might have precipitated matters. Some men
advance, the soul pushing the body with more or less effort; some
with the soul first, trailing the body; some in unison, and these are
they who make the best progress as to the real advancement. Anderson
moved, on the whole, in the last way. He was a very healthy man, mind
and body, and with rather unusual advantages in point of looks. This
last he realized in one way but not in another. He knew it on general
principles; he recognized the fact as he recognized the fact of his
hands and feet; but what he actually saw in the looking-glass was not
so much the physical fact of himself as the spiritual problem with
its two known quantities of need and circumstance, and its great
unknown third which took hold of eternity. Anderson, although not in
a sense religious, had a religious trend of thought. He went every
Sunday with his mother to the Presbyterian church where his
grandfather had preached to an earlier generation.
On the Sunday after his encounter with Arthur Carroll with reference
to the bill, he went to church as usual with his mother.
Mrs. Anderson was a picture of a Sunday, in a rich lavender silk and
a magnificent though old-fashioned lace shawl which floated from her
shoulder in a fairy net-work of black roses. She would never wear
plain black like most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed
women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her
son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies
on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A
deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of her
gown.
"Mother, you are just such a mixture of color as that lilac-bush,"
said her son, irrelevantly, looking from her to a great lilac-bush in
the corner of the yard they were passing. It was tipped with rose on
the delicate ends of its blooming racemes, which shaded to blue at
the bases.
"Did you see those new people in church to-day?" said she.
"Yes, I think I did," replied Randolph. "They sat just in front of
the Egglestons, didn't they?"
"Yes," said his mother, "they did sit there. There is quite a large
family. The ladies are all very nice-looking, too, and they all look
alike. If they are going to church, such a family as that, and so
well off, they will be quite an acquisition to Banbridge."
"Yes," said Randolph. He spoke absently, and he looked absently at a
great wistaria which draped with pendulous purple blooms the veranda
of a house which they were just passing. It arrested his eyes as with
a loud chord of color, but his mind did not grasp it at all.
Afterwards he could not have said he had seen it. As is often the
case, while his eyes actually saw one thing, his consciousness saw
another. Great, purple, pendulous flowers filled his bodily vision,
and the head and shoulders of a young girl above a church pew his
mental outlook. Had he seen the Carrolls in church--had he, indeed?
Had he seen anything besides them, or rather besides one of them? Had
he not, the moment she came up the aisle and entered the pew, seen
her with a very clutch of vision? He could not have described one
article of her dress, and yet it was complete in his thought. She had
worn a soft silk of a dull-red shade, with a frill of cream lace
about the shoulders, and there were pink roses under the brim of her
dull-red hat, and under the roses was her face, shaded softly with a
great puff of her dark hair. And her dark eyes under the dark hair
had in them the very light of morning dew, which sparkled back both
this world and heaven itself into the eyes of the looker, all
reflected in tiny crystal spheres. Suddenly the man gazing across the
church had seen in this girl's face all there was of earth and the
overhang of heaven; he had seen the present and the future. It is
through the face of another human being that one gets the furthest
reach of human vision, and that furthest reach had now come for the
first time to Randolph Anderson. All at once a quiver ran through his
entire consciousness from this elongated vision, and he realized
sight to its uttermost. Yet it did not dawn on him that he was in
love with this girl. He would have laughed at the idea. He had seen
her only twice; he had spoken to her only once. He knew nothing of
her except that she had given him a worthless check to cash. Love
could not come to him in this wise, and it had not, in fact. He had
only attained to the comprehension of love. He had gotten faith, he
had seen the present world and the world to come in the light of it,
but not as yet his own soul. Yet always he saw the girl's head under
the pink roses under the brim of the dark-red hat. It was evidently a
favorite headgear of hers. She had worn it with a white dress when
she had come to the store to get the check cashed. But he had not
seen her so fully then. His little doubt and bewilderment over the
check had clouded his vision. Now, since he had seen her in the
church-pew, his last thrifty scruple as to ignoring the matter of the
check left him. He felt that he could not put his doubt of her father
to the proof. Suppose that the account had not been carelessly
overdrawn-- Suppose-- He never for one instant suspected the girl. As
soon suspect a rosebud of foregoing its own sweet personality, and of
being in reality something else, say a stinging nettle. The girl
carried her patent royal of youth and innocence on her face. He made
up his mind to say nothing about the check, to lose the ten dollars,
and, since dollars were so far from plenty with him, to sacrifice
some luxury for the luxury of the loss. He made up his mind that he
could very well do without the book with colored plates of South
American butterflies which he had thought of purchasing. Much better
live without that than rub the bloom off a better than butterfly's
wing. Better anything than disturb that look of innocent ignorance on
that girl's little face.