For the Major Part 6

The stranger had, indeed, unlimited genius, if signs of this kind were to be taken as evidences of it; he interrupted people in the middle of their sentences; he left them abruptly while they were still talking to him; he yawned (as has already been mentioned), and not always in corners; he went to see the persons he fancied, whether they had asked him to do so or not; he never dreamed of going to see the persons he did not fancy, no matter how many times they had invited him. He had a liking for flower-gardens, and had been discovered more than once, soon after his arrival, sitting in honeysuckle arbors which the owners had supposed were for their own private enjoyment. When found, he had not apologized; he had complimented the owners upon their honeysuckles.

Strangers were so rare in Far Edgerley--high, ancient little village in the mountains, far from railways, unmentioned in guide-books--that this admirer of flower-gardens was known by sight through all the town before he had been two days in the place. He was named Dupont, and he was staying at the village inn, the Washington Hotel--an old red brick structure, whose sign, a weather-beaten portrait of the Father of his Country, crowned the top of a thick blue pole set out in the middle of Edgerley Street. He was apparently about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, tall, slender, carelessly dressed, yet possessing, too, some picturesque articles of attire to which Far Edgerley was not accustomed; notably, low shoes with red silk stockings above them, and a red silk handkerchief to match the stockings peeping from the breast pocket of the coat; a cream-colored umbrella lined with red silk; a quant.i.ty of cream-colored gauze wound round a straw hat.

But it was not these articles, remarkable as they were, nor his taste for opening gates without permission, nor his habit of walking in the middle of the street, ignoring sidewalks, nor another habit he had of rising and going out of church just before the sermon--it was none of these which had given him his privilege of entering "the best society."

The best society had opened its doors to Genius, and to Genius alone.

This genius was of the musical kind. Dupont played and sang his own compositions. "What," said Madam Carroll, "is genius, if not this?"

Madam Carroll's opinion was followed in Far Edgerley, and Dupont now had the benefit of it. The Rendleshams invited him to tea; the Greers sang for him; he was offered the _Sat.u.r.day Review_; even Mrs. General Hibbard, joining the gentle tide, invited him to Chapultepec, and when he came, showed him the duck yard. Miss Honoria Ashley did not yield to the current. But then Miss Honoria never yielded to anything. Her father, the junior warden, freely announced (outside his own gate) that the "singing man" amused him. Mr. Phipps hated him, but that was because Dupont had shown some interest in Miss Lucy Rendlesham, who was pretty.

Not that they cared much, however, for beauty in Far Edgerley; it was so much better to be intellectual. Ferdinand Kenneway, when he learned that the new-comer had been received both at Chapultepec and the Farms, called at the inn, and left one of his engraved cards--"Mr. F. Kenneway, Baltimore." He had once lived in Baltimore six months. Dupont made an excellent caricature of Ferdinand on the back of the card, and never returned the call. On the whole, the musician had reason to congratulate himself upon so complete a conquest of Far Edgerley's highest circle.

Only two persons (besides Phipps) in all that circle disliked him. True, these two disliked him strongly; but they remained only two, and they were, in public, at least, silent. They were Miss Carroll and the rector of St. John's.

Perhaps it was but natural that a clergyman should look askance at a man who always rose and walked out of church at the very moment when he was preparing to begin his sermon. Miss Carroll, however, had no such sufficient reason to give for her dislike; when Dupont came to the Farms he was as respectfully polite to her as he could be in the very small opportunity she vouchsafed him. He came often to their flower-garden.

She complained of his constant presence. "I am never sure that he is not there. He is either lying at full length in the shade of the rhododendrons, or else sitting in the rose arbor, drumming on the table."

"Very harmless amus.e.m.e.nts they seem to me," replied Madam Carroll.

"Yes. But why should we be compelled to provide his amus.e.m.e.nts? I think that office we might decline."

"You are rather unkind, aren't you? What harm has the poor fellow done to us?"

"Oh, if you are going to pity him, mamma--"

"Why should not one pity him a little?--a young man who is so alone in the world, as he tells us he is, not strong in health, and often moody.

Then, too, there is his genius."

"I am tired of his genius. I do not believe in his genius. There is no power in it. Always a 'little song!' A 'little song!' His little songs are too sweet; they have no force."

"Do you wish him to shout?"

"I wish him to take himself elsewhere. I am speaking freely, mamma; for I have noticed that you seem to like him."

"He is a variety--that is the explanation; we have so little variety here. But I do like him, Sara, or, rather, I like his songs. To me they are very beautiful."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE CAME OFTEN TO THEIR FLOWER GARDEN."]

Nothing more was said on either side. Sara had announced her dislike, and it had been ignored; her regard for Madam Carroll kept her from again expressing the feeling.

The present reception was considered an especially delightful one. One reason for this was that Madam Carroll had altered her hours; instead of from five to eight, they were now from eight to ten. True, the time was shorter; but this was compensated for by the change from afternoon to evening. For choice as had been the tone of elegant culture which had underlain these social meetings heretofore, there was no doubt but that they gained in the element of gayety by being deferred to candle-light.

The candles inspired everybody; it was felt to be more festal. The ladies wore flowers in their hair, and Ferdinand Kenneway came out in white gloves. The Major, too, had not appeared so well all summer as he did this evening; every one remarked it. Not that the Major did not always appear well. "He is, and always has been, the first gentleman of our state. But to-night, how peculiarly distinguished he looks! His gray hair but adds to his n.o.ble appearance--don't you think so?--his gray hair and his wounded arm? And dear Madam Carroll, too, when have you seen her look so bright?"

Thus the ladies. But the daughter of the house, meanwhile, had never been more silent. To-night she merited, without doubt, their adjective "cold." She had not been able to be of much use to her father this evening. During the three quarters of an hour he had given to his guests Madam Carroll had not left him; together they had gone through the rooms, exchanging greetings, holding short conversations, inquiring after the health of the absent. As had been remarked, the little wife looked very bright. She had more color than usual; her complexion had never had, they said, a more exquisite bloom. She was dressed in white, with a large bunch of pink roses fastened in her belt, and as she stood by the side of her tall, gray-haired husband she looked, the junior warden declared, like "a Hebe." And then he carefully explained that he meant an American Hebe of delicate outlines, and not the Hebe of the ancient Greeks--"who always weighed two hundred."

The American Hebe talked with much animation; Far Edgerley admired her more than ever. After the Major had retired she was even gay; the junior warden having lost the spray of sweet-pea from his b.u.t.ton-hole, with charming sportiveness she called him to her and replaced it with one of her pink roses.

Meanwhile Mr. Dupont was conducting himself after his usual fantasied fashion. He strolled about and leaned against the walls--a thing never done in Far Edgerley, on account of the paper; he stared at the head-dress of Mrs. General Hibbard, an impressive edifice of black lace and bugles; he talked a little to Miss Lucy Rendlesham, to the rage of Phipps; he turned his back on F. Kenneway; and he laughed at the poetical quotations of Mrs. Greer. And then he made no less than six profound bows before Miss Corinna, the dignified leader of St. John's choir.

He bowed whenever he met her, stopping especially for the purpose, drawing his feet together, and bending his head and body to an angle heretofore unwitnessed in that community. Miss Corinna, in chaste black silk, became at last, martial though she was, disconcerted by this extreme respect. She could not return it properly, because, most unfortunately, as she had always thought, the days of the courtesy, the only stately salutation for a lady, were gone by. She bowed as majestically as she could. But when it came to the seventh time, she said to her second sister, "Really, Camilla, his attentions are becoming too pressing. Let us retire." So they retired--to the wall. But even here they were not secure, Dupont discovering their retreat, and coming by expressly every now and then to bestow upon the stately maiden another salute.

Towards the end of the evening--or rather, of the reception--he sang, accompanying himself upon the guitar. His guitar had a long loop of red ribbon attached to it; Miss Carroll surveyed it and its owner with coldest eye, as, seated upon a low ottoman in the centre of the room, he began what she had called his "little songs." His songs were, in truth, always brief; but they were not entirely valueless, in spite of her prejudice against them. They had a character of their own. Sometimes they contained minor strains too old for Far Edgerley to remember, the wild, soft, plaintive cadences of the Indian women of tribes long gone towards the setting sun, of the first African slaves poling their flatboats along the Southern rivers. And sometimes they were love-songs, of a style far too modern for the little, old-fashioned town to comprehend. Dupont's voice was a tenor, not powerful, but deliciously, sensuously sweet. As he sat there singing, with his large, bold dark eyes roving about the room, with his slender dark fingers touching the strings, with his black moustache, waxed at the ends, the gleam of his red handkerchief, and the red flower in his coat, he seemed to some of the ladies present romantically handsome. To Sara Carroll he seemed a living impertinence.

What right had this person of unknown antecedents, position, and character to be posturing there before them?--to be admitted at all to the house of her father? And then her eyes happened to fall upon her father's wife, who, in the chair nearest the musician, was listening to him with noticeable enjoyment. She turned and left the room.

By doing this she came directly upon Frederick Owen, who had apparently performed the same action a little while before. They were alone in the wide hall; every one else was in the drawing-room, gathered round the singer.

"It--it was cooler here," Owen explained, rather awkwardly. At this instant Dupont's voice floated out to them in one of his long, soft notes. "It has 'a dying fall,' has it not?" said the clergyman; he was trying to speak politely of her guest. But as his eyes met those of Miss Carroll, he suddenly read in them a feeling of the same strength and nature as his own, regarding that guest. This was a surprise, and a satisfaction. It was the first corresponding dislike he had been able to discover. For his own dislike had been so strong that he had been searching in all directions for a corresponding one, with the hope, perhaps, of proving to himself that his was not mere baseless prejudice.

But until this evening he had not succeeded in finding what he sought.

It was all the other way.

It should be mentioned here that Owen had not betrayed this dislike of his. If he had done so, if his objection to the musician had been known, or even suspected, it is probable that Dupont would hardly have attained his present position in Far Edgerley. For after Madam Carroll's opinion, the opinion of the rector of St. John's came next. But he had not betrayed it. There was nothing of essential importance against Dupont.

The fact that he was precisely the kind of fellow whom Frederick Owen particularly disliked was simply a matter between the two men themselves, or rather, as Dupont cared nothing about it, between Owen and his own conscience; for he could hardly go about denouncing a man because he happened to play the guitar. But after three weeks of enduring him--for he met him wherever he went--it was great comfort to have caught that gleam of contempt in Miss Carroll's fair gray eyes; he was glad that he had been at just the right spot in the hall to receive it as she came from the drawing-room with that alluring voice floating forth behind her.

"It is a beautiful evening," he said, dropping the subject of the musician; "the moonlight is so bright that one can see all the mountains. Shall we go out and look at them?"

And Miss Carroll was so displeased with the scene within that she consented to withdraw to the scene without; and there they remained as long as the singing lasted. They walked up and down the broad piazza; he talked about the mountain scenery, and the waterfalls. She did not appear to be much interested in them. Her companion, however, was not so much chilled by this manner of hers as he had sometimes been; he had had a glimpse behind it.

CHAPTER V.

Early in the week following the reception, Frederick Owen learned that Dupont was about to take his departure from Far Edgerley, and with no expectation of returning. This was good news. He was beginning to have the feeling that the fellow would never go away, that he and his guitar would become a permanent feature of Madam Carroll's receptions, his lounging figure under the cream-colored umbrella a daily ornament of the centre of Edgerley Street. Was he really, then, going? It seemed too good to be true. But the tidings had been brought by Miss Dalley, who was both good and true, and who was accurate as well; she had the very hour--"On Friday, at nine."

"Hangman's day!" thought Owen, with satisfaction, doing his thinking this time with the remnants of boyhood feelings; for though he was in his third decade--the beginning of it--and a clergyman, the boy in him was by no means entirely outgrown. Miss Dalley had come to return a book, Longfellow's "Outre Mer," and to borrow anything he might have about Ferrara.

"I was so much interested in our American poet's description of the Italian poet's grave, on the Janiculum," she said. "It was such a touching pa.s.sage, and it contained this truly poetical sentence: 'He sleeps midway between his cradle at Sorrento and his dungeon at Ferrara.' I can never go in _person_, Mr. Owen; Fate has denied me that.

But I can think of the inscription, which Longfellow gives: 'Torquati Ta.s.so ossa hic jacet,' and be there in _mind_."

She had called it "hic jacket." "Jacent, I think," said the rector, gently.

"Yes, certainly; that is what I meant--jacinth," said Miss Dalley, correcting herself. "A beautiful word, is it not? And so appropriate, too, for a poet's grave, mentioned, as it is, in Revelations!"

On Friday Dupont really did go. The rector himself saw him pa.s.s in the high red wagon of the Washington Inn on his way down the mountain to the lower town, the eastward-bound stage, and thence--wherever he pleased, the gazer thought, so long as he did not return. But although the rector gave this vagueness to the musician's destination, it was understood in other quarters that he was going back to the West India Islands--"where he used to live, you know."

"Upon which one did he live?" asked the junior warden. "There are about fifty thousand of them, large and small; he can't have lived on them all."

"For my part, I think him _quite_ capable of it," answered Miss Honoria, grimly.

Having seen the musician depart, Owen jumped on his horse and went off to one of his mission stations far up among the crags of Lonely Mountain. For, not content with a rector's usual duties, all of which he attended to with a modern promptness unknown in the days of good old Parson Montgomery, he had established mission stations at various points in the mountains above Far Edgerley. Wherever there were a few log-houses gathered together, there he held services, or started a Sunday-school. He was by far the most energetic rector the parish of St.

John in the Wilderness had ever had; so much so, indeed, that the parish hardly knew how to take his energy, and thought that he was perhaps rather too much in the wilderness--more than necessity demanded or his bishop required. Miss Honoria Ashley had even called these journeyings of his "itinerant;" but Miss Honoria was known to disapprove, on general principles, of everything the rector did: she had once seen him wearing a sack-coat.

On this particular Friday he was out all day among the peaks, close up under the sky. Coming down at sunset, and entering Edgerley Street, with its knolls and flower-gardens and rambling old houses, his home seemed to him a peaceful and pleasant one. And then, as he pa.s.sed Carroll Farms, he became conscious that the cause for its seeming especially peaceful to him this evening was the absence of the intruder, that man from another world, who was no longer there to contaminate its sweet, old-fashioned simplicity with his dubious beauty, his dangerous character, and his enchanting voice. For Owen believed that the musician's character was dangerous; his face bore the marks of dissipation, and though indolent, and often full of gay good-nature, he had at times a reckless expression in his eyes. Nothing deterred him from amusing himself; and probably, in the same way, nothing would deter him from any course towards which he should happen to feel an inclination. He was not dangerous by plan or calculation; he was dangerous from the very lack of them. He was essentially erratic, and followed his fancies, and no one could tell whither they would lead him.

But he might have been all this, and the clergyman would still have felt able to guard his parish and people from any harm his presence might do them, had it not been for the favor shown him by Madam Carroll. This had been a blow to Owen. He said to himself that the gentle lady's love of music had blinded her judgment, and carried her astray. It was a satisfaction that Miss Carroll's judgment remained unblinded. But it was greatest satisfaction of all that the man was gone; he congratulated himself upon this anew as he rode by the gateway of the Farms.

It was well that he had this taste of comfort. It did not last long.

Less than three weeks had pa.s.sed when he learned one afternoon that Dupont had returned. And not long afterwards he was in possession of other knowledge, which troubled him more than anything that had happened since he came to Far Edgerley.

In the meantime his parish, unaware of its rector's opinion, had welcomed back the summer visitor with various graceful little attentions. The summer visitor had been seriously ill, and needed attentions, graceful or otherwise. He had journeyed as far as New York, and there had fallen ill of a fever, which was not surprising, the parish thought, when one considered the dangerously torrid climate of that business metropolis at this season. Upon recovery, he had longed with a great longing for "our pure Chillawa.s.see air," and had returned to pa.s.s the time of convalescence "among our n.o.ble peaks;" this was repeated from knoll to knoll. Dupont's appearance bore testimony to the truth of the tale. He had evidently been ill: his cheeks were hollow, and he moved about slowly, as though he had not much strength; his eyes, large and dark, looked larger and darker than ever, set in his thin, brown face. But he was still Dupont; his moustache was still waxed, and he had some new articles of finery, a gold watch-chain, and a seal-ring on his long-fingered hand. This time he did not stay at the inn; he preferred to try a farm-house, and selected Walley's Cove, a small farm a little above the village, in one of the high ravines which, when wide enough for a few fields along the mountain-brook that flowed through the centre, were called coves. Dupont liked the place on account of the view; and also, he said, because he could throw a stone from the cove's mouth "into every chimney in Far Edgerley." This was repeated. "Do you suppose," said Mrs. General Hibbard, solemnly--"do you suppose he is going to do it?"