The other's jaw fell and his brow corrugated with self-reproach.
"Well, if that don't show what a thick-head I am! I thought ye was all
right er I'd gone on with ye. Nobody c'd 'a' walked straighter ner
talked straighter. Said ye was goin' to leave Canaan fer good and
didn't want nobody to know it. Said ye was goin' to take the
'leven-o'clock through train fer the West, and told me I couldn't come
to the deepo with ye. Said ye'd had enough o' Canaan, and of
everything! I follered ye part way to the deepo, but ye turned and
made a motion fer me to go back, and I done it, because ye seemed to be
kind of in trouble, and I thought ye'd ruther be by yerself. Well,
sir, it's one on me!"
"Not at all," said Joe. "I was all right."
"Was ye?" returned the other. "DO remember, do ye?"
"Almost," Joe smiled, faintly.
"ALMOST," echoed Happy, shaking his head seriously. "I tell ye, Joe, ef
I was YOU--" he began slowly, then paused and shook his head again. He
seemed on the point of delivering some advice, but evidently perceiving
the snobbishness of such a proceeding, or else convinced by his own
experience of the futility of it, he swerved to cheerfulness:
"I hear the boys is all goin' to work hard fer the primaries. Mike
says ye got some chances ye don't know about; HE swears ye'll be the
next Mayor of Canaan."
"Nonsense! Folly and nonsense, Happy! That's the kind of thing I used
to think when I was a boy. But now--pshaw!" Joe broke off with a tired
laugh. "Tell them not to waste their time. Are you going out to the
Beach this afternoon?"
The little man lowered his eyes moodily. "I'll be near there," he
said, scraping his patched shoe up and down the curbstone. "That
feller's in town agin."
"What fellow?"
"'Nashville' they call him; Ed's the name he give the hospital:
Cory--him that I soaked the night you come back to Canaan. He's after
Claudine to git his evens with me. He's made a raise somewheres, and
plays the spender. And her--well, I reckon she's tired waitin' table
at the National House; tired o' me, too. I got a hint that they're
goin' out to the Beach together this afternoon."
Joe passed his hand wearily over his aching forehead. "I understand,"
he said, "and you'd better try to. Cory's laying for you, of course.
You say he's after your wife? He must have set about it pretty openly
if they're going to the Beach to-day, for there is always a crowd there
on Sundays. Is it hard for you to see why he's doing it? It's because
he wants to make you jealous. What for? So that you'll tackle him
again. And why does he want that? Because he's ready for you!"
The other's eyes suddenly became bloodshot, his nostrils expanding
incredibly. "READY, is he? He BETTER be ready. I--"
"That's enough!" Joe interrupted, swiftly. "We'll have no talk like
that. I'll settle this for you, myself. You send word to Claudine
that I want to see her at my office to-morrow morning, and you--you
stay away from the Beach to-day. Give me your word."
Mr. Fear's expression softened. "All right, Joe," he said. "I'll do
whatever you tell me to. Any of us 'll do that; we sure know who's our
friend."
"Keep out of trouble, Happy." Joe turned to go and they shook hands.
"Good day, and--keep out of trouble!"
When he had gone, Mr. Fear's countenance again gloomed ominously, and,
shaking his head, he ruminatively entered an adjacent bar through the
alley door.
The Main Street bridge was an old-fashioned, wooden, covered one,
dust-colored and very narrow, squarely framing the fair, open country
beyond; for the town had never crossed the river. Joe found the cool
shadow in the bridge gracious to his hot brow, and through the slender
chinks of the worn flooring he caught bright glimpses of running water.
When he came out of the other end he felt enough refreshed to light a
cigar.
"Well, here I am," he said. "Across Main Street bridge--and it must be
getting on toward noon!" He spoke almost with the aspect of daring,
and immediately stood still, listening. "'REMEMBER,"' he ventured to
repeat, again daring, "'REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!'"
And again he listened. Then he chuckled faintly with relief, for the
voice did not return. "Thank God, I've got rid of that!" he whispered.
"And of the circus band too!"
A dust road turned to the right, following the river and shaded by big
sycamores on the bank; the mongrel, intensely preoccupied with this
road, scampered away, his nose to the ground. "Good enough," said the
master. "Lead on and I'll come after you."
But he had not far to follow. The chase led him to a half-hollow log
which lay on a low, grass-grown levee above the stream, where the dog's
interest in the pursuit became vivid; temporarily, however, for after a
few minutes of agitated investigation, he was seized with indifference
to the whole world; panted briefly; slept. Joe sat upon the log, which
was in the shade, and smoked.
"'REMEMBER!'" He tried it once more. "'ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT
NOON!'" Safety still; the voice came not. But the sound of his own
repetition of the words brought him an eerie tremor; for the mist of a
memory came with it; nothing tangible, nothing definite, but something
very far away and shadowy, yet just poignant enough to give him a queer
feeling that he was really keeping an appointment here. Was it with
some water-sprite that would rise from the river? Was it with a dryad
of the sycamores? He knew too well that he might expect strange
fancies to get hold of him this morning, and, as this one grew
uncannily stronger, he moved his head briskly as if to shake it off.
The result surprised him; the fancy remained, but his headache and
dizziness had left him.
A breeze wandered up the river and touched the leaves and grass to
life. Sparrows hopped and chirped in the branches, absurdly surprised;
without doubt having concluded in the Sunday stillness that the world
would drowse forever; and the mongrel lifted his head, blinked at them,
hopelessly wishing they would alight near him, scratched his ear with
the manner of one who has neglected such matters overlong; reversed his
position; slept again. The young corn, deep green in the bottomland,
moved with a staccato flurry, and the dust ghost of a mad whirling
dervish sped up the main road to vanish at the bridge in a climax of
lunacy. The stirring air brought a smell of blossoms; the distance took
on faint lavender hazes which blended the outlines of the fields, lying
like square coverlets upon the long slope of rising ground beyond the
bottom-land, and empurpled the blue woodland shadows of the groves.
For the first time, it struck Joe that it was a beautiful day, and it
came to him that a beautiful day was a thing which nothing except
death, sickness, or imprisonment could take from him--not even the ban
of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did
not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he
left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of
"the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with
the sweetness of it.
"Go ahead!" he whispered. "Do that all you want to. If you'll keep it
up like this awhile, I'll follow with 'Little Brown Jug, How I Love
Thee!' It seems to pay, after all!"
The welcome strains, however, were but the prelude to a harsher sound
which interrupted and annihilated them: the Court-house bell clanging
out twelve. "All right," said Joe. "It's noon and I'm 'across Main
Street bridge.'"
He opened his eyes and looked about him whimsically. Then he shook his
head again.
A lady had just emerged from the bridge and was coming toward him.
It would be hard to get at Joe's first impressions of her. We can find
conveyance for only the broadest and heaviest. Ancient and modern
instances multiply the case of the sleeper who dreams out a long story
in accurate color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and
shutting of a door. So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady's
approach. And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been--in
fact it was, in his recollections, later--a blur of emotion.
At first sight of her, perhaps it was pre-eminently the shock of seeing
anything so exquisite where he had expected to see nothing at all. For
she was exquisite--horrid as have been the uses of the word, its best
and truest belong to her; she was that and much more, from the ivory
ferrule of the parasol she carried, to the light and slender footprint
she left in the dust of the road. Joe knew at once that nothing like
her had ever before been seen in Canaan.
He had little knowledge of the millinery arts, and he needed none to
see the harmony--harmony like that of the day he had discovered a
little while ago. Her dress and hat and gloves and parasol showed a
pale lavender overtint like that which he had seen overspreading the
western slope. (Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that
day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The
charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to
her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the
expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it. She was tall, but
if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have
been capable of calling her lips "red," in which case he would not have
been Joe, and would have been as far from the truth as her lips were
from red, or as her supreme delicateness was from mere slenderness.
Under the summer hat her very dark hair swept back over her temples
with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld
from being fluffy. It may be that this approach to trimness, which
was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key
to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe. Let us
say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the
hint of floridity was abhorrent to her. "Trim" is as clumsy as
"slender"; she had escaped from the trimness of girlhood as wholly as
she had gone through its coltishness. "Exquisite." Let us go back to
Joe's own blurred first thought of her and be content with that!
She was to pass him--so he thought--and as she drew nearer, his breath
came faster.
"REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!" Was THIS the fay of
whom the voice had warned him? With that, there befell him the mystery
of last night. He did not remember, but it was as if he lived again,
dimly, the highest hour of happiness in a life a thousand years ago;
perfume and music, roses, nightingales and plucked harp-strings. Yes;
something wonderful was happening to him.
She had stopped directly in front of him; stopped and stood looking at
him with her clear eyes. He did not lift his own to hers; he had long
experience of the averted gaze of women; but it was not only that; a
great shyness beset him. He had risen and removed his hat, trying
(ineffectually) not to clear his throat; his every-day sense urging
upon him that she was a stranger in Canaan who had lost her way--the
preposterousness of any one's losing the way in Canaan not just now
appealing to his every--day sense.
"Can I--can I--" he stammered, blushing miserably, meaning to finish
with "direct you," or "show you the way."
Then he looked at her again and saw what seemed to him the strangest
sight of his life. The lady's eyes had filled with tears--filled and
overfilled. "I'll sit here on the log with you," she said. And her
voice was the voice which he had heard saying, "REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN
STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!"
"WHAT!" he gasped.
"You don't need to dust it!" she went on, tremulously. And even then
he did not know who she was.