John March, Southerner Part 67

"Why, what?" he asked with a perplexed smile.

"Law! Mr. Mahch, you cayn't all of a sudden do dat; dey'll on'y talk wuss."

"Well, Johanna--I'm not going to try it. I'm going to take the express train this evening." He started on, but checked up once more and faced around. "O--eh--Johanna, I'd rather you'd not speak of this, you understand. I natu'ly don't want Mrs. Ravenel to know why I go; but I'm even more particular about General Halliday. It's none o' his--hm! I say I don't want him to know. Well, good-by. O--eh--Johanna, have you no word--of course, you know, the North's a mighty sizable place, and still it's just possible I might chance some day to meet up with--eh--eh--however, it's aft' all so utterly improbable, that, really--well, good-by!"

A while later Johanna stopped at that familiar point which overlooked the valley of the Swanee and the slopes about Rosemont. The sun had nearly set, but she realized her hope. Far down on the gray turnpike she saw the diminished figure of John March speeding townward across the battle-field. At the culvert he drew rein, faced about, and stood gazing upon Widewood's hills. She could but just be sure it was he, yet her tender spirit felt the swelling of his heart, and the tears rose in her eyes, that were not in his only because a man--mustn't.

While she wondered wistfully if he could see her, his arm went slowly up and waved a wide farewell to the scene. She s.n.a.t.c.hed out her handkerchief, flaunted it, and saw him start gratefully at sight of her and reply with his own. Then he wheeled and sped on.

"Go," she cried, "go; and de Lawd be wid you, Mr. Jawn Mahch, Gen'lemun!--O Lawd, Lawd! Mr. Jawn Mahch, I wisht I knowed a n.i.g.g.e.r like you!"

LXIX.

IN YANKEE LAND

It was still early May when Barbara Garnet had been six weeks in college. The inst.i.tution stood in one of New England's oldest towns, a place of unfenced greenswards, among which the streets wound and loitered, hunting for historic gambrel-roofed houses, many of which had given room to other sorts less picturesque and homelike. In the same search great elms followed them down into river meadows or up among flowery hills, casting off their dainty blossoms, putting on their leaves, and waving majestic greetings to the sower as he strode across his stony fields.

Yet for all the sudden beauty of the land and season Miss Garnet was able to retain enough of her "nostalgia" to comfort her Southern conscience. She had arrived in March and caught Dame Nature in the midst of her spring cleaning, scolding her patient children; and at any rate her loyalty to Dixie forbade her to be quite satisfied with these tardy blandishments. Let the cold Connecticut turn as blue as heaven, by so much the more was it not the green Swanee? She had made more than one warm friendship among her fellow-students, but the well-trimmed lamp of her home feeling waxed not dim. It only smoked a trifle even in Boston, that maze of allurements into which no Southerner of her father's generation ever sent his brother, no Southerness her sister, without some fear of apostasy.

Barbara had made three visits to that city, where Mrs. Fair, the ladies said, "did a great deal for her." Yet when Mrs. Fair said, with kind elation, "My dear, you have met Boston, and it is yours!" the smiling exile, as she put her hand into both hands of her hostess, remembered older friends and silently apologized to herself for having so lost her heart to this new one.

At that point came in one who was at least an older acquaintance--the son. Thoroughly as Barbara had always liked Henry Fair, he seemed to her to have saved his best attractiveness until now, and with a gentleness as masculine as it was refined, fitted into his beautiful home, his city, the whole environing country, indeed, and shone from them, in her enlivened fancy, like an ancestor's portrait from its frame. He came to take her to an exhibition of paintings, and thence to the railway station, where a fellow-student was to rejoin her for the trip back to college. Mrs. Fair had to attend a meeting of the society for something or other, of which she was president.

"These people make every minute count," wrote Barbara to Fannie; "and yet they're far from being always at work. I'm learning the art of recreation from them. Even the men have a knack for it that our Southern men know nothing about."

"You might endorse that 'Fair _versus_ March,'" replied Ravenel to his wife, one evening, as he lingered a moment at tea. She had playfully shown him the pa.s.sage as a timorous hint at better self-care; but he smilingly rose and went out. She kept a bright face, and as she sat alone re-reading the letter, said, laughingly, "Poor John!" and a full minute afterward, without knowing it, sighed.

This may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that Barbara's long but tardy letter was the first one Fannie had received from her. It told how a full correspondence between the writer's father and his fellow college president had made it perfectly comfortable for her to appear at the inst.i.tution for the first time quite unescorted, having within the hour parted from Mr. and Mrs. Fair, who, though less than three hours' run from their own home, would have gone with her if she could have consented. She had known that the dormitories were full and that like many other students she would have to make her home with a private family, and had found it with three very lovable sisters, two spinsters and a widow, who turned out to be old friends--former intimates--of the Fairs. And now this intimacy had been revived; Mrs.

Fair had already been to see them once, although to do so she had come up from Boston alone. How she had gone back the letter did not say.

Fannie felt the omission.

"I didn't think Barb would do me that way," she mused; and was no better pleased when she recalled a recent word of Jeff-Jack's: that few small things so sting a woman as to disappoint her fondness and her curiosity at the same time. Now with men--However! All Barbara had omitted was that Mrs. Fair had gone back with her son, who on his way homeward from a trip to New York had been "only too glad" to join her here, and spend two or three hours under spring skies and shingle roof with the three pleasant sisters.

This was in the third of those six weeks during which Barbara had been at college. About half of the two or three hours was spent in a stroll along the windings of a small woodland river. The widow and Mrs. Fair led the van, the two spinsters were the main body, and Henry and Barbara straggled in the rear stooping side by side among white and blue violets, making perilous ventures for cowslips and maple blossoms, and commercing in sweet word-lore and dainty likes and dislikes.

When the procession turned, the two stragglers took seats on a great bowlder round which the stream broke in rapids, Barbara gravely confessing to the spinsters, as they lingeringly pa.s.sed, that she had never done so much walking in her life before as now and here in a place where an unprotected girl could hire four hacks for a dollar.

The widow and Mrs. Fair left the others behind. They had once been room-mates at school, and this walk brought back something of that old relation. They talked about the young man at their back, and paused to smile across the stream at some children in daring colors on a green hillside getting sprouts of dandelion.

"Do you think," asked the widow, "it's really been this serious with him all along?"

"Yes, I do. Henry's always been such a pattern of prudence and moderation that no one ever suspects the whole depth of his feelings. He realizes she's very young, and he may have held back until her mind--her whole nature--should ripen; although, like him, as you see, she's ripe beyond her years. But above all he's a dutiful son, and I believe he's simply been waiting till he could see her effect on us and ours on her.

Tell me frankly, dear, how do you like her?"

The Yankee widow had bright black eyes and they twinkled with restrained enthusiasm as she murmured, "I hope she'll get him!"

"Ah!" Mrs. Fair smiled gratefully, made a pretty mouth and ended with a wise gesture and a dubious toss, as who should say, "I admit he's priceless, but I hope he may get her."

Whereupon the widow ventured one question more, and Mrs. Fair told her of John March. "Yes," she said at the end, "he happened to be in Boston for his company last Sat.u.r.day when Miss Garnet was with us, and Henry brought him to the house. I wasn't half glad, though I like him, quite.

He's a big, handsome, swinging fellow that everybody invites to everything. He makes good speeches before the clubs and flaunts his Southern politics just enough to please our Yankee fondness for being politely _sa.s.sed_."

"Why, dear, isn't that a rather good trait in us? It's zest for the overlooked fact, isn't it?"

"O!--it has its uses. It certainly furnishes a larger feeling of superiority to both sides at once than anything else I know of."

"You say Henry brought him to the house while Miss Garnet was with you----"

"Yes; and, my dear, I wish you might have seen those two Southerners meet! They didn't leave us any feeling of superiority then; at least _he_ didn't. Except that they're both so Southern, they're not alike.

She moved right in among us without the smallest misstep. He made a dozen delicious blunders. It was lovely to see how sweetly she and Henry helped him up and brushed him off, and the boyish manfulness with which he always took it. I couldn't tell, sometimes, which of the three to like best."

Those behind called them to hearken to the notes of a woodlark, and when Mrs. Fair asked her son the hour it was time to get to the station.

Barbara would not say just when she could be in Boston again; but the cla.s.smate she liked best was a Boston girl, and by the time this college life had lasted six weeks her visits to the city had been three, as aforesaid. In every instance, with an un.o.btrusiveness all his own, Henry Fair had made her pleasure his business. On the second visit she had expected to meet Mr. March again--a matter wholly of his contriving--but had only got his telegram from New York at the last moment of her stay, stating that he was unavoidably detained by business, and leaving s.p.a.ce for six words unused. The main purpose of her third visit had been to attend with Mrs. Fair a reception given by that lady's club. It had ended with dancing; but Mr. Fair had not danced to suit her and Mr.

March had not danced at all, but had allowed himself to betray dejection, and had torn her dress. Back at college she had told the favorite cla.s.smate how she had chided Mr. March for certain trivial oversights and feared she had been severe; and when the cla.s.smate insisted she had not been nearly severe enough she said good-night and went to her room to mend the torn dress; and as she sewed she gnawed her lip, wished she had never left Suez, and salted her needle with slow tears.

Thus ended the sixth week--stop! I was about to forget the thing for which I began the chapter--and, anyhow, this was not Sat.u.r.day, it was Friday! While Barbara was so employed, John March, writing to Henry Fair from somewhere among the Rhode Island cotton-spinners, said:

"To-night I go to New York, where I have an important appointment to-morrow noon, but I can leave there Monday morning at five and be in Springfield at ten-twenty-five. If you will get there half an hour later by the train that leaves Boston at seven, I will telegraph the Springfield men to meet us in the bank at eleven. They a.s.sure me that if you confirm my answers to their questions they will do all I've asked.

Please telegraph your reply, if favorable, to my New York address."

About three o'clock of Sat.u.r.day March was relieved of much anxiety by receipt of Fair's telegram. It was a long time before Monday morning, but in a sudden elation he strapped his valise and said to the porter--"Grand Central Depot."

"Back to Boston again?"

"Not much! But I'm not going to get up at four o'clock Monday morning either."

In Boston that evening a servant of the Fairs told one of their familiar friends who happened to drop in, that Mr. Fair, senior, was in, but that Mr. Henry had gone to spend Sunday at some Connecticut River town, he was not sure which, but--near Springfield.

LXX.

ACROSS THE MEADOWS

Next morning, John March, for the first time in his life, saw and heard the bobolink.

"Ah! you turncoat scoundrel!" he laughed in a sort of fond dejection, "you've come North to be a lover too, have you? You were songless enough down South!"

But the quivering gallant went singing across the fields, too drunk with the joy of loving to notice accusers.

On the previous evening March had come up by rail some fifteen miles beyond the brisk inland city just mentioned and stopped at a certain "Mount"--no matter what--known to him only through casual allusions in one or two letters of--a friend. Here he had crossed a hand-ferry, climbed a noted hill, put up at its solitary mountain house--being tired of walls and pavements, as he had more than once needlessly explained--and at his chamber window sat looking down, until most of them had vanished, upon a cl.u.s.ter of soft lights on the other side of the valley, shining among the trees of the embowered town where one who now was never absent from his thoughts was at school.

The knowledge that he loved her was not of yesterday only. He could count its age in weeks and a fraction, beginning with the evening when "those two Southerners" had met in Mrs. Fair's drawing-room. Since then the dear trouble of it had ever been with him, deep, silent, dark--like this night on the mountain--shot with meteors of brief exultation, and starlighted with recollections of her every motion, glance, and word.