John March, Southerner Part 15

"She's got a perfect right to take me or throw me, but she's no right to do both!"

Only the Northerners enjoyed Halliday. The Suez men turned away in disdain.

The music struck a quadrille, sweetly whining and hooting twice over before starting into doubtful history,

"In eighteen hundred and sixty-one--to the war! to the war!"

The dance springs out! Gray jackets and white trousers; tarlatan, flowers, and fans; here and there a touch of powder or rouge; some black broadcloth and much wrinkled doeskin. Jeff-Jack and Fannie move hand in hand, and despite the ba.s.soon's contemptuous "pooh! pooh! poo-poo-pooh!"

the fiddles declare, with petulant vehemence, that--

"In eighteen-hundred-and-sixty-one, the Yankees _they_ the war _begun_, but we'll all! get! blind! drunk! when Johnnie comes marching home."

"You see we play the national--oh! no, I believe that's not one--but we do play them!" said a native.

John didn't march home, although when some one wanted a window open which had been decorated to stay shut, neither he nor his committee could be found. He came in, warm and anxious, just in time to claim Fannie for their schottische. At ten they walked out on the veranda and took seats at its dark end. She was radiant, and without a sign of the mild dismay that was in her bosom. When she said, "Now, tell me, John, why you're so sad," there was no way for him to see that she was secretly charging herself not to lie and not to cry.

"Miss Fannie," he replied, "you're breaking my heart."

"Aw, now, John, are you going to spoil our friendship this way?"

"Friendship!--Oh, Fannie!"

"Miss Fannie, if you please, Mister John."

"Ah! has it come to that? And do you hide that face?"--For Fannie had omitted to charge herself not to smile at the wrong time--"Have you forgotten the day we parted here five years ago?"

"Why, no. I don't remember what day of the week it was, but I--I remember it. Was it Friday? What day was it?"

"Fannie, you mock me! Ah! you thought me but a boy, then, but I loved you with a love beyond my years; and now as a man, I----"

"Oh! a man! Mr. March, there's an end to this bench. No! John, I don't mock you; I honor you; I've always been proud of you--Now--now, John, let go my hand! John, if you don't let go my hand I'll leave you; you naughty boy!--No, I won't answer a thing till you let me go! John March, let go my hand this instant! Now I shall sit here. You'll keep the bench, please. Yes, I do remember it all, and regret it!" She turned away in real dejection, saying, in her heart, "But I shall do no better till I die--or--or get married!"

She faced John again. "Oh, if I'd thought you'd remember it forty days it shouldn't have occurred! I saw in you just a brave, pure-hearted, sensible boy. I thought it would be pleasant, and even elevating--to you--while it lasted, and that you'd soon see how--how ineligible--indeed I did!" Both were silent.

"Fannie Halliday," said John at last, standing before her as slim and rank as a sapling, but in the dignity of injured trust, "when year after year you saw I loved you, why did you still play me false!"

"Now, Mr. March, you're cruel."

"Miss Fannie Halliday, have you been kind?"

"I meant to be! I never meant to cheat you! I kept hoping you'd understand! Sometimes I tried to make you understand, didn't I? I'm very sorry, John. I know I've done wrong. But I--I meant well. I really did!"

The youth waved an arm. "You've wrecked my life. Oh, Fannie, I'm no mere sentimentalist. I can say in perfect command of these wild emotions, 'Enchantress, fare thee well!'"

"Oh, fare thee fiddlesticks!" Fannie rose abruptly. "No, no, I didn't mean that, John, but--aw! now, I didn't _mean_ to smile! Oh, let's forget the past--oh! now, yes, you can! Let's just be simple, true friends! And one of these days you'll love some sweet, true girl, and she'll love you and I'll love her, and--" she took his arm. He looked down on her.

"_I_ love again!--_I_--? Ah! how little you women understand men! Oh, Fannie! to love twice is never to have loved. You are my first--my last!"

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Fannie, blithely and aloud, as they reentered the room. Then softly, behind her fan, "I've a better one in store for you, now!"

"Two!" groaned the ba.s.s viol and ba.s.soon. "Two! two! two-to-to-two!" and with a propitiative smile on John's open anguish, Fannie, gayer in speech and readier in laughter, but not lighter in heart, let a partner waltz her away. As John turned, one of his committee seized his arm and showed a watch.

XIX.

MR. RAVENEL SHOWS A "MORE EXCELLENT WAY"

Urged by all sorts and on all sides, the Northerners lingered a day or two more, visiting battle-fields and things. At Turkey Creek Halliday was talkative, Garnet overflowed with information, Captains Champion and Shotwell were boyish, and Colonel Proudfit got tight. They ate cold fried chicken and drank--

"Whew!--stop, stop!--I can't take--Why, half that would"--etc.

"Where's Mr. Ravenel?"

"Who, Jeff-Jack? Oh, he's over yonder pickin' blackberries--no, he seldom ever touches--he has to be careful how he--Yes, sometimes he disremembers."

In town again, Halliday led the way to the public grammar and high schools. Garnet mentioned Montrose boastfully more than once.

"Why don't we go there?" asked one of the projectors, innocently.

"Oh--ah--wha'd you say, Colonel Proudfit? Yess, that's so, we pa.s.s right by it on ow way to Rosemont"--and they did, to the sweet satisfaction of the Misses Kinsington, who were resolved no railroad should come to Suez if they could prevent it.

At Rosemont Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew told each Northerner, as soon as he could get him from Mrs. Garnet's presence, that Virginia was the Mother of Presidents; that the first slaves ever brought to this country came in Yankee ships; that Northern envy of Southern opulence and refinement had been the mainspring of the abolition movement; and--with a smile of almost womanly heroism--that he--or his father at least--had lost all his slaves in the war.

At Widewood, whither Garnet and Ravenel led, the travelers saw only Judge March and the scenery. He brought them water to the fence in a piggin, and with a wavering hand served it out in a gourd.

"I could 'a' served it in a gla.s.s, gentlemen, but we Southe'ne's think it's sweeteh drank fum a G.o.de."

"We met your son at the cotillion," said one, and the father lighted up with such confident expectation of a compliment that the stranger added, cordially, "He's quite noted," though he had not heard of the affair with Leggett.

On the way back Garnet praised everything and everybody. He wished they could have seen Daphne Dalrymple! If it were not for the Northern prejudice against Southern writers, her poems would--"See that fox--ah!

he's hid, now."

But the wariest game was less coy than the poetess. She wrote, that day,

"O! hide me from the Northron's eye!

Let me not hear his fawning voice, I heard the Southland matron sigh And saw the piteous tear that" ...

Thus it ended; "as if," said Garnet to John, who with restrained pride showed him the ma.n.u.script, "as if grief for the past choked utterance--for the present. There's a wonderful eloquence in that silence, March, tell her to leave it as it is; dry so."

John would have done this had he not become extremely preoccupied. The affair at the old bridge was everybody's burning secret till the prospectors were gone. But the day after they left it was everybody's blazing news. Oddly enough, not what anybody had done, but what Leggett had said--in contempt of the color line--was the microscopic germ of all the fever. From window to window, and from porch to porch, women fed alarm with rumor and rumor with alarm, while on every sidewalk men collaborated in the invention of plans for defensive vengeance.

"Well, they've caught him--pulled him out of a dry well in Libertyville."

"I beg your pardon, he crossed the Ohio this morning at daylight."

John March was light-headed with much drinking of praise for having made it practicable to "smash this unutterable horror in the egg!"