Atlantic Narratives Part 46

But I was going all the way to the county seat and I considered these pa.s.sengers much below my own level as travelers. They were merely making a convenience of the 'bus, you see, which just happened to go past their homes; whereas I was off for adventure, my home quite in the other direction, and the world spread wide before me.

It was with a tourist's pleasure, then, that I looked at that little grouping of houses and the elm-and poplar-shaded pike, which in those days was called, and I believe is still called, Latonia; and at the old Latonia Springs Hotel. It was a typical relic of Southern before-the-war hotel architecture, with its white pillars, its long verandas, its wide doorway, its large lawn sombred by very old shade trees.

I had known something of travel. I had lived in France for two years, at school; but there I had always had some one to go about with me. Here, on the contrary, I was alone. I liked the flavor of the adventure; it was novel, and very stimulating. This journey, however poor a thing it might seem to others, had Audrey's superlative virtue: it was mine own.

The old hotel, then, already romantic enough, took on an additional romance in my eyes.

The driver came around now from sponging his horses' heads and noses at the trough.

'Going all the way, are you?'

I nodded.

'Well, you can get out and stretch your legs if you like, for we'll be here ten minutes.'

But I did not 'like.' In the 'bus I felt safe enough; but if I got out--adventurous spirit though I was--I knew with unconquerable shyness that everybody would be staring at me.

I contented myself with watching the lazy coming and going of a few people; a dog snapping at flies; some chickens taking dust-baths in the road.

What a still, lazy place it was! Some one asked the time. The driver's watch had stopped. n.o.body knew; it appeared not to matter. This seemed no place for clocks. A stout lame man, having the look of a Southern war veteran, stopped on his cane in the middle of the road, looked around carefully at the outlying country and the shadows, then took a calculating glance at the heavens.

'Well, I should reckon, colonel,' he said, addressing the stage-driver, 'it mout be about twenty-two minutes past two. You gen'lly get here about two, but you was a bit late to-day, a leetle bit late, I should say maybe to the amount of about twelve minutes.'

He leaned on his cane again and began dotting his way slowly and heavily through the dust toward the hotel.

I could not have told whether he was in jest or earnest. But as I look back on it now, it seems to me curiously fitting that the little town should have had so scant dependence on timepieces, for it lay away from all the world, and there was so little to occupy the attention, that the houses, the dusty pike, with its slowly lengthening and slowly shortening shadows, the fields beyond, with their great sycamores and maples, and the sky so little interrupted from edge to edge, must each, indeed, have been to those who had so long observed them, a sundial to make clocks seem mere bustling contrivances.

A big fly sailed in one of the 'bus windows, round and round, droning, and then out; it went with every effect of careful choice and deliberation, to settle on the nose of the old dog that lay, alternately napping and snapping, four feet in the sun.

I can give you no idea of the keen enjoyment with which I noted all these details. I take pleasure now in remembering that, despite the fact that I had lived in Paris, among its thrilling boulevards and monuments, and had seen some stagey Swiss villages and dramatic little French towns, this little cl.u.s.ter of houses known as Latonia, on a dusty pike in Kentucky, only a few miles from my own home,--this village which never a tourist would have gone to see,--was to me in that droning, incredibly quiet afternoon a very piece of romance; the air itself,--I beg you to have patience with me, for really, I tell you only the truth,--the very air itself being 'ambient' for me; the green fields 'amburbial'; the white clouds, so nearly at rest in the blue sky, 'huge symbols of a high romance'; the silver poplars and elms not less than 'immemorial'; and the old hotel a thing made of dreams, haunted with green and shaded memories of before-the-war days, across whose veranda might have stepped at any moment, before my unastonished eyes, the actors in some n.o.ble human drama.

I remember, too, that my eye found some dusty marigolds, their blooms leaning through a low paling fence of one of the houses. My eye must have pa.s.sed over many a marigold before that; I probably never saw one until then. I remember noting their singularity and softness of color, so individual and particular compared with the more customary reds and yellows of commoner flowers, so far more memorable and desirable and foreign; a part they seemed, too, of the quietness and strangeness and romance in the midst of which I found myself.

The 'bus driver was making ready to leave.

The lame war veteran,--for I still take him to have been such,--having got as far as the gate of the Latonia Hotel, was met by a long, lazy-legged darkey coming down the walk, carrying two traveling satchels. Noticeably new-looking they were, and handsome, for that part of the world. He had one under his arm, the other dangling from the same hand, which left his other hand free to manipulate a long piece of ribbon-gra.s.s which he was chewing lazily. The veteran held the gate open, the weight of his body leaning against it.

'Going away, are they?'

'Ya.s.suh.'

There emerged from the hotel at this moment a man and a woman.

The darkey crossed the road and put the two satchels in the 'bus--and stood with his hand on the handle of the door, holding it wide open, waiting.

II

I watched the two strangers as they approached. When they reached the 'bus the man a.s.sisted the woman, in a somewhat formal yet indifferent way. She entered and took her seat nearly diagonally opposite to me. The man plunged his hand in his pocket, brought out a coin, and put it in the darkey's hand, and stooping, for he was tall, entered the 'bus after her. It swayed a little perilously with his weight, and rocked quite a bit before he finally comfortably seated himself directly across from me.

The driver meanwhile had swung himself up on the high driver's seat. He opened the peep-hole and looked down, then gathered the reins, and clucked to his horses, and the 'bus drove off.

If the town had interested me before, I forgot it now--forgot it quite in the attention, direct and indirect, which I gave to my fellow pa.s.sengers.

The man was faultlessly dressed. Such clothes were not customary in that corner of the world. The neat derby, the band of which he was even now wiping with a lavender-edged silk handkerchief, was a thing foreign to those parts at that season, cheap straw hats being rather the rule. The tips of the fingers of a pair of new tan gloves were to be seen just looking out from the left breast-pocket of his well-b.u.t.toned light gray suit. I could see that he wore a white vest, and his shirt had a little hair-line of purple in it. His hands were large and very white and well kept, the fingers close fitted together. On one of them a conspicuous Mexican opal smouldered in a ma.s.sive, very dark gold setting.

I have no words, even to this day, to describe the woman who sat a foot or two from him and to whom he addressed his remarks in an indifferently possessive manner.

She was slight; her hair was of a light brown, her eyes of a distinct orange color. Her face sloped delicately from the forehead, which was low enough to be beautiful, and high enough to suggest n.o.bility of thought, down to the lovely line of chin. Her throat was slender and very white, rising from a turned-down Puritan collar. A Puritan cloak of dust-colored linen, with strappings of orange, fell away under the collar in soft and cool lines. Her brown veil had at its edge a line of orange color also. The brown was a shade lighter than her hair; the orange a shade darker than her eyes. The veil carried with it I cannot say what manner of ethereal graciousness, and fell into a wave or floating line of loveliness as she turned her head. Once, as we dipped into a shaded hollow and across a running stream, a little breeze of coolness came in at the windows. The veil, lifted by it, floated and clung like a living thing to her throat and lips, until her delicate hand put it away gently.

I watched her, very fascinated. She was a creature of another world.

That she and the horse-radish woman could live on the same planet spoke volumes for the infinite scale of life.

At first these two new pa.s.sengers spoke hardly at all. Once the man bent his ma.s.sive figure to get a better look at the landscape from the window opposite him, and called the attention of his companion to some point in it.

'There! As I recollect it, the property is not unlike that, Louise. It rolls that way, I mean; and Felton's line comes into it just as that snake fence comes across there. It is on the other side that the vein of coal is said to begin.'

Though she gave a courteous hearing, I had the impression that she was not really interested.

She watched the country with a kind of well-bred inattentive glance. For myself I could not take my eyes off her. I watched her with that hunger for beauty which is native to the heart of a child. Above all I watched her eyes. The strange, unusual color of them was in itself a kind of romance. She gave one the impression of being a woman unique; something rare and choice, not to be found again or elsewhere.

Once she turned her head and met my full gaze. I was embarra.s.sed, but I need not have been. She set the matter right by addressing me with a gentle courtesy.

'Do you live out here?'

I shook my head. I meant to reply more fully in a moment when I had recovered myself; but the man spoke.

'Never heard of Thomas Felton, I suppose, did you? Used to live once in Owen County not far from here.'

I shook my head again and formed the word 'No.'

The woman gave him a gentle glance; nothing reproving, but he took it in the manner of reproof.

'Well, I did not know but she might have,' he explained. Then he settled back a little. 'Maybe some one else will get in later who does know. I thought them confoundedly stupid at the hotel. Didn't seem anxious to give any information either. n.o.body knows anything in a place like that.'

There was silence again. The fields at one side of the road climbed now, here and there. Low pastures rose to be foothills. Around one of these hills a rocky road appeared sloping down to the pike. Up the road, at a little distance, was a rustic archway like an entrance to a private property. Waiting by the side of the road, stood a figure strange to me, in the garb of some monastic order.

The woman did not notice him. Her glance was far off at the horizon at the other side. The man did. He regarded the stranger with a stolid bold curiosity. Then some idea of his own occurred to him, suddenly. As the 'bus stopped to take on this new pa.s.senger, the heavy man rose, to take advantage of its steadiness, no doubt, and stooping so as not to knock his derby against the ceiling of the vehicle, tapped imperatively on the lid of the little peep-hole, and when it was raised, spoke to the driver.

'This road leading up at the side here doesn't happen to be the Chorley road, does it, that leads into Felton's woods? They said there was a road at the foot of a hill that led into some timber lands belonging to a man named Felton.'

The driver did not understand. The question had to be repeated. While the man repeated it, the Franciscan--though I am not entirely sure he was of that order--opened the door of the 'bus. The woman turned her head now. I saw her orange-colored eyes grow wide and large as they noted him. With habitually bent head and regarding none of us, he entered. As he seated himself in the corner, he looked up, however, and his eyes met hers. I saw him start really violently. His color, which was a dark olive, with a too bright crimson under it at the cheek-bones, became suddenly ashy.

There was just that one look between them. The next instant she had turned to the other, returning from his questions with the driver. He had not seen the look that I had noted.

The Franciscan now drew his eyes away from the woman's face, fumbled in the skirt of his habit, and brought out a prayer-book which he opened with fingers that shook.

The heavy man seated himself, exactly opposite the woman, and beside me and within touch of the Franciscan. He addressed the woman.

'I just thought that that might be Chorley's road. They said it ran up a slope. It wasn't, though. I thought I'd like to get a sight of the timber. We may try to make him throw that in, in payment.'