Crittenden Part 10

Crittenden pulled a telegram from his pocket.

"To-morrow morning. I got this just as I was leaving town."

"To-morrow!"

"It means life or death to me--this telegram. And if it doesn't mean life, I don't care for the other. I shall come out with a commission or--not at all. If dead, I shall be a hero--if alive," he smiled, "I don't know what I'll be, but think of me as a hero, dead or alive, with my past and my present. I can feel a change already, a sort of growing pain, at the very thought."

"When do you go to Cuba?"

"Within four days."

"Four days! And you can talk as you do, when you are going to war to live the life of a common soldier--to die of fever, to be killed, maybe," her lip shook and she stopped, but she went on thickly, "and be thrown into an unknown grave or lie unburied in a jungle." She spoke with such sudden pa.s.sion that Crittenden was startled.

"Listen!"

Judge Page appeared in the doorway, welcoming Crittenden with old-time grace and courtesy. Through supper, Judith was silent and thoughtful and, when she did talk, it was with a perceptible effort. There was a light in her eyes that he would have understood once--that would have put his heart on fire. And once he met a look that he was wholly at loss to understand. After supper, she disappeared while the two men smoked on the porch. The moon was rising when she came out again. The breath of honeysuckles was heavy on the air, and from garden and fields floated innumerable odours of flower and clover blossom and moist gra.s.ses.

Crittenden lived often through that scene afterward--Judith on the highest step of the porch, the light from the hallway on her dress and her tightly folded hands; her face back in shadow, from which her eyes glowed with a fire in them that he had never seen before.

Judge Page rose soon to go indoors. He did not believe there was going to be much of a war, and his manner was almost cheery when he bade the young man good-by.

"Good luck to you," he said. "If the chance comes, you will give a good account of yourself. I never knew a man of your name who didn't."

"Thank you, sir."

There was a long silence.

"Basil will hardly have time to get his commission, and get to Tampa."

"No. But he can come after us."

She turned suddenly upon him.

"Yes--something has happened to you. I didn't know what you meant that day we drove home, but I do now. I feel it, but I don't understand."

Crittenden flushed, but made no answer.

"You could not have spoken to me in the old days as you do now. Your instinct would have held you back. And something has happened to me."

Then she began talking to him as frankly and simply as a child to a child. It was foolish and selfish, but it had hurt her when he told her that he no longer had his old feeling for her. It was selfish and cruel, but it was true, however selfish and cruel it seemed, and was--but she had felt hurt. Perhaps that was vanity, which was not to her credit--but that, too, she could not help. It had hurt her every time he had said anything from which she could infer that her influence over him was less than it once was--although, as a rule, she did not like to have influence over people. Maybe he wounded her as his friend in this way, and perhaps there was a little vanity in this, too--but a curious change was taking place in their relations. Once he was always trying to please her, and in those days she would have made him suffer if he had spoken to her then as he had lately--but he would not have spoken that way then. And now she wondered why she was not angry instead of being hurt.

And she wondered why she did not like him less. Somehow, it seemed quite fair that she should be the one to suffer now, and she was glad to take her share--she had caused him and others so much pain.

"_He_"--not even now did she mention his name--"wrote to me again, not long ago, asking to see me again. It was impossible. And it was the thought of you that made me know how impossible it was--_you_." The girl laughed, almost hardly, but she was thinking of herself when she did--not of him.

The time and circ.u.mstance that make woman the thing apart in a man's life must come sooner or later to all women, and women must yield; she knew that, but she had never thought they could come to her--but they had come, and she, too, must give way.

"It is all very strange," she said, as though she were talking to herself, and she rose and walked into the warm, fragrant night, and down the path to the stiles, Crittenden silently following. The night was breathless and the moonlit woods had the still beauty of a dream; and Judith went on speaking of herself as she had never done--of the man whose name she had never mentioned, and whose name Crittenden had never asked. Until that night, he had not known even whether the man were still alive or dead. She had thought that was love--until lately she had never questioned but that when that was gone from her heart, all was gone that would ever be possible for her to know. That was why she had told Crittenden to conquer his love for her. And now she was beginning to doubt and to wonder--ever since she came back and heard him at the old auditorium--and why and whence the change now? That puzzled her. One thing was curious--through it all, as far back as she could remember, her feeling for him had never changed, except lately. Perhaps it was an unconscious response in her to the n.o.bler change that in spite of his new hardness her instinct told her was at work in him.

She was leaning on the fence now, her elbow on the top plank, her hand under her chin, and her face uplifted--the moon lighting her hair, her face, and eyes, and her voice the voice of one slowly threading the mazes of a half-forgotten dream. Crittenden's own face grew tense as he watched her. There was a tone in her voice that he had hungered for all his life; that he had never heard but in his imaginings and in his dreams; that he had heard sounding in the ears of another and sounding at the same time the death-knell of the one hope that until now had made effort worth while. All evening she had played about his spirit as a wistful, changeful light will play over the fields when the moon is bright and clouds run swiftly. She turned on him like a flame now.

"Until lately," she was saying, and she was not saying at all what she meant to say; but here lately a change was taking place; something had come into her feeling for him that was new and strange--she could not understand--perhaps it had always been there; perhaps she was merely becoming conscious of it. And when she thought, as she had been thinking all day, of his long years of devotion--how badly she had requited them--it seemed that the least she could do was to tell him that he was now first in her life of all men--that much she could say; and perhaps he had always been, she did not know; perhaps, now that the half-G.o.ds were gone, it was at last the coming of the--the--She was deeply agitated now; her voice was trembling; she faltered, and she turned suddenly, sharply, and with a little catch in her breath, her lips and eyes opening slowly--her first consciousness, perhaps, a wonder at his strange silence--and dazed by her own feeling and flushing painfully, she looked at him for the first time since she began to talk, and she saw him staring fixedly at her with a half-agonized look, as though he were speechlessly trying to stop her, his face white, bitter, shamed, helpless, Not a word more dropped from her lips--not a sound. She moved; it seemed that she was about to fall, and Crittenden started toward her, but she drew herself erect, and, as she turned--lifting her head proudly--the moonlight showed that her throat was drawn--nothing more. Motionless and speechless, Crittenden watched her white shape move slowly and quietly up the walk and grow dim; heard her light, even step on the gravel, up the steps, across the porch, and through the doorway.

Not once did she look around.

He was in his room now and at his window, his face hard as stone when his heart was parching for tears. It was true, then. He was the brute he feared he was. He had killed his life, and he had killed his love--beyond even her power to recall. His soul, too, must be dead, and it were just as well that his body die. And, still bitter, still shamed and hopeless, he stretched out his arms to the South with a fierce longing for the quick fate--no matter what--that was waiting for him there.

IX

By and by bulletins began to come in to the mother at Canewood from her boy at Tampa. There was little psychology in Basil's bulletin:

"I got here all right. My commission hasn't come, and I've joined the Rough Riders, for fear it won't get here in time. The Colonel was very kind to me--called me Mister.

"I've got a lieutenant's uniform of khaki, but I'm keeping it out of sight. I may have no use for it. I've got two left spurs, and I'm writing in the Waldorf-Astoria. I like these Northern fellows; they are gentlemen and plucky--I can see that. Very few of them swear. I wish I knew where brother is. The Colonel calls everybody Mister--even the Indians.

"Word comes to-night that we are to be off to the front. Please send me a piece of cotton to clean my gun. And please be easy about me--do be easy. And if you insist on giving me a t.i.tle, don't call me Private--call me _Trooper_.

"Yes, we are going; the thing is serious. We are all packed up now; have rolled up camping outfit and are ready to start.

"Baggage on the transport now, and we sail this afternoon. Am sorry to leave all of you, and I have a tear in my eye now that I can't keep back. It isn't a summer picnic, and I don't feel like shouting when I think of home; but I'm always lucky, and I'll come out all right. I'm afraid I sha'n't see brother at all. I tried to look cheerful for my picture (enclosed). Good-by.

"Some delay; actually on board and steam up.

"Waiting--waiting--waiting. It's bad enough to go to Cuba in boats like these, but to lie around for days is trying. No one goes ash.o.r.e, and I can hear nothing of brother. I wonder why the General didn't give him that commission instead of me. There is a curious sort of fellow here, who says he knows brother. His name is Blackford, and he is very kind to me. He used to be a regular, and he says he thinks brother took his place in the --th and is a regular now himself--a private; I don't understand. There is mighty little Rough Riding about this.

"P. S.--My bunkie is from Boston--Bob Sumner. His father _commanded a negro regiment in a fight once against my father_; think of it!

"Hurrah! we're off."

It was a tropical holiday--that sail down to Cuba--a strange, huge pleasure-trip of steamships, sailing in a lordly column of three; at night, sailing always, it seemed, in a harbour of brilliant lights under mult.i.tudinous stars and over thickly sown beds of tiny phosph.o.r.escent stars that were blown about like flowers in a wind-storm by the frothing wake of the ships; by day, through a brilliant sunlit sea, a cool breeze--so cool that only at noon was the heat tropical--and over smooth water, blue as sapphire. Music night and morning, on each ship, and music coming across the little waves at any hour from the ships about.

Porpoises frisking at the bows and chasing each other in a circle around bow and stern as though the transports sat motionless; schools of flying-fish with filmy, rainbow wings rising from one wave and shimmering through the sunlight to the foamy crest of another--sometimes hundreds of yards away. Beautiful clear sunsets of rose, gold-green, and crimson, with one big, pure radiant star ever like a censor over them; every night the stars more deeply and thickly sown and growing ever softer and more brilliant as the boats neared the tropics; every day dawn rich with beauty and richer for the dewy memories of the dawns that were left behind.

Now and then a little torpedo-boat would cut like a knife-blade through the water on messenger service; or a gunboat would drop lightly down the hill of the sea, along the top of which it patrolled so vigilantly; and ever on the horizon hung a battle-ship that looked like a great gray floating cathedral. But n.o.body was looking for a fight--n.o.body thought the Spaniard would fight--and so these were only symbols of war; and even they seemed merely playing the game.

It was as Grafton said. Far ahead went the flag-ship with the huge Commander-in-Chief and his staff, the gorgeous attaches, and the artists and correspondents, with valets, orderlies, stenographers, and secretaries. Somewhere, far to the rear, one ship was filled with newspaper men from stem to stern. But wily Grafton was with Lawton and Chaffee, the only correspondent aboard their transport. On the second day, as he sat on the p.o.o.p-deck, a negro boy came up to him, grinning uneasily:

"I seed you back in ole Kentuck, suh."

"You did? Well, I don't remember seeing you. What do you want?"

"Captain say he gwine to throw me overboard."

"What for?"

"I ain't got no business here, suh."

"Then what are you here for?"