John March, Southerner Part 71

She left the window with silent speed, saying, in her heart, "You needn't! You shan't!"

As March with clouded brow was lifting his hand toward a tortuous bra.s.s knocker the door opened and Barbara, carrying a book and pencil in one hand, while the other held down her hat-brim, tripped across the doorstep.

The cloud vanished. "Miss Barb--good-morning!"

"O!--Mr.--March." Her manner so lacked both surprise and pleasure that he colored. He had counted on a sweet Southern handshake, but she kept hold of the hat-brim, let her dry smile of inquiry fade into a formal deference, and took comfort in his disconcertion.

"I was just coming," he said, "I--thought you'd let me come back just to say good-by--but I see you're on your way to a recitation--I--"

Her smile was cruel. "Why, my recitations are not so serious as that,"

she drawled. "Just to say good-by ought not to con-sti-tute any se-ri-ous de-ten-tion."

John's heart sank like a stone. Scarcely could he believe his senses.

Yet this was she; that new queen of his ambitions whose heavenly friendship had lifted first love--boy love--from its grave and clad it in the shining white of humility and abnegation to worship her sweet dignity, purity, and tenderness, asking for nothing, not even for hope, in return. This was she who at every new encounter had opened to him a higher revelation of woman's worth and loveliness than the world had ever shown him; she to whom he had been writing letters half last night and all this morning, tearing each to bits before he had finished it because he could see no life ahead which an unselfish love could ask her to live, and as he rent the result of each fresh effort hearing the voice of his father saying to him as in childhood days, "I'd be proud faw you to have the kitt'n, son, but, you know, she wouldn't suit yo'

dear motheh's high-strung natu'e. You couldn't ever be happy with anything that was a constant tawment to her, could you?"

These thoughts filled but a moment, and before the lovely presence confronting him could fully note the depth of his quick distress a wave of self-condemnation brought what seemed to him the answer of the riddle: that this was _rightly_ she, the same angelic incarnation of wisdom and rect.i.tude, as of gentleness and beauty, to whom in yesterday's sunset hour of surprise and ecstatic yearning he had implied things so contrary to their "perfect understanding," and who now, not for herself selfishly, but in the name and defence of all blameless womanhood, was punishing him for his wild presumption. O but if she would only accuse him--here--this instant, so that contrition might try its value! But under the shade of her hat her eyes merely waited with a beautiful sort of patient urgency for his parting word. The moment's silence seemed an hour, but no word did he find. One after another almost came, but failed, and at last, just as he took in his breath to say he knew not what--anything so it were something--he saw her smile melt with sudden kindness, while her lips parted for speech, and to his immeasurable confusion and terror heard himself ask her with cheerful cordiality, "Won't you walk in?"

It would have been hard to tell which of the two turned the redder.

"Why, Mr. March, you in-ti-ma-ted that you had no ti-i-ime!"

They stood still. "Time and bad news are about the only things I have got, Miss Barb. Wrapped up in your father's interests as you are, I reckon I ought to show you this." He handed her the telegram doubled small. "Let me hold your book."

Barbara unfolded and read the despatch. It was from Springfield, repeated at New York, and notified Mr. John March that owing to a failure of Gamble to come to terms with certain much larger railroad owners for the reception of his road into their "system," intelligence of which had just reached them, it would be "useless for him," March, "to come up," as there was "nothing more to say or hear." She read it twice. Her notions of its consequences were dim, but she saw it was a door politely closed in his face; and yet she lingered over it. There was a bliss in these business confidences, which each one thought was her or his own exclusive and unsuspected theft, and which was all the sweeter for the confidences' practical worthlessness. As she looked up she uttered a troubled "O!" to find him smiling unconsciously into her book where she had written, "I stole this book from Barbara Garnet." It seemed as if fate were always showing her very worst sides to him at the very worst times! She took the volume with hurried thanks and returned the telegram.

"It would have been better on every account if you hadn't come up at all, wouldn't it?" she asked, bent on self-cruelty; but he accepted the cruelty as meant for him.

"Yes," he meekly replied. "I--I reckon it would." Then more bravely: "I've got to give up here and try the West. Your father's advised it strongly these last three weeks."

"Has he?" she pensively asked. Here was a new vexation. Obviously March, in writing him, had mentioned the rapid and happy growth of their acquaintance!

"Yes," he replied, betraying fresh pain under an effort to speak lightly. "It may be a right smart while before I see you again, Miss Barb. I take the first express to Chicago, and next month I sail for Europe to----"

"Why, Mr. March!" said Barbara with a nervous laugh.

"Yes," responded John once more, thinking that if she was going to treat the thing as a joke he had better do the same, "immigrants for Widewood have got to be got, and they're not to be got on this side the big water."

"Why, Mr. March!"--her laugh grew--"How long shall you stay?"

"Stay! Gracious knows! I must just stay till I get them!--as your father says."

"Why, Mr. March! When did--" the questioner's eyes dropped sedately to the ground--"when did you decide to go? Since--since--yesterday?"

"Yes, it was!" The answer came as though it were a whole heart-load.

The maiden's color rose, but she lifted her quiet, characteristic gaze to his and said, "You're glad you're going, are you not?"

"O--I--why, yes! If I'm not I know I ought to be! To see Europe and all that is great, of course. It's beyond my dreams. And yet I know it really isn't as much what I'm going to as what I'm going from that I ought to--to be g-glad of! I hope I'll come back with a little more sense. I'm going to try. I promise you, Miss Barb. It's only right I _should_ promise--_you_!"

"Why, Mr. Mar--" Her voice was low, but her color increased.

"Miss Barb--O Miss Barb, I didn't come just to say good-by. I hope I know what I owe you better than that. I--Miss Barb, I came to acknowledge that I said too much yesterday!--and to--ask your pardon."

Barbara was crimson. "Mr. March!" she said, half choking, "as long as I was simple enough to let it pa.s.s unrebuked you might at least have spared me your apologies! No, I can't stay! No, not one instant! Those girls are coming to speak to me--that man"--it was the drummer--"wants to speak to you. Good-by."

Their intruders were upon them. John could only give a heart-broken look as she faltered an instant in the open door. For reply she called back, in poor mockery of a sprightly tone: "I hope you'll have ever so pleasant a voyage!" and shut the door.

So it goes with all of us through all the ungraceful, inartistic realisms of our lives; the high poetry is ever there, the kingdom of romance is at hand; the only trouble is to find the rhymes--O! if we could only find the rhymes!

LXXV.

A YEAR'S VICISSITUDES

It was during the year spent by John March in Europe that Suez first began to be so widely famous. It was then, too, that the Suez _Courier_ emerged into universal notice. The average newspaper reader, from Maine to Oregon, spoke familiarly of Colonel Ravenel as the writer of its much-quoted leaders; a fact which gave no little disgust to Garnet, their author.

Ravenel never let his paper theorize on the causes of Suez's renown or the _Courier's_ vogue.

"It's the luck of the times," he said, and pleasantly smiled to see the nation's eyes turned on Dixie and her near sisters, hardly in faith, yet with a certain highly commercial hope and charity. The lighting of every new c.o.ke furnace, the setting fire to any local rubbish-heap of dead traditions, seemed just then to Northern longings the blush of a new economic and political dawn over the whole South.

"You say you're going South? Well, now if you want to see a very small but most encouraging example of the changes going on down there, just stop over a day in Suez!" Such remarks were common--in the clubs--in the cars.

"Now, for instance, Suez! I know something of Suez myself." So said a certain railway pa.s.senger one day when this fame had entered its second year and the more knowing journals had begun to neglect it. "I was an officer in the Union army and was left down there on duty after the surrender a short while; then I went out West and fought Indians. But Suez--I pledge you my word I wouldn't 'a' given a horseshoe-nail for the whole layout! Now!--well, you'd e'en a'most think you was in a Western town! The way they're a slappin' money, b' Jinks, into improvements and enterprises--quarries, roads, bridges, schools, mills--'twould make a Western town's head swim!"

"What kind of mills?" asked his listener, a young man, but careworn.

"O, eh, saw-mills--tanbark mills--to start with. Was you ever there?"

"Yes, I--before the changes you speak of I----"

"Before! Hoh! then you've never seen Lover's Leap coal mine, or Bridal Veil coal mine, or Sleeping Giant iron mine, or Devil's Garden c.o.ke furnaces! They're putting up smelting works right opposite the steamboat landing! You say you're going South--just stop over a day in Suez. It'll pay you! You could write it up!--call it 'What a man just back f'm Europe saw in Dixie'--only, you don't want to wave the b.l.o.o.d.y Shirt, and don't forget we're dead tired hearing about the 'illiterate South.' _I_ say, let us have peace; my son's in love with a Southern girl! Why, at Suez you'll see school-houses only five miles apart, from Wildcat Ridge--where the n.i.g.g.e.rs and mountaineers had that skirmish last fall--clean down to Leggettstown! School-houses, why,"--the speaker chuckled at what was coming--"one of 'em stands on the very spot where in '65 I found a little freckled boy trying to poke a rabbit out of a log with an old bayon----"

"No!" exclaimed the careworn listener, in one smile from his hat to his handsome boots.

He would have said more, but the story-teller lifted a finger to intimate that the bayonet was not the main point--there was better laughing ahead. "Handsome little chap he was--brave eyes--sweet mouth.

Thinks I right there, 'This's going to be somebody some day.' He reminded me of my own son at home. Well, he clum up behind my saddle and rode with me to the edge of Suez, where we met his father with a team of mules and a wagon of provisions. Talk about the Old South, I'll say this: I _never_ see so fine a gentlemen look so _techingly_ poor. Hold up, let me--now, let me--just wait till I tell you. That little rat--if it hadn't been for that little barefooted rat with his scalp-lock a-stickin' up through a tear in his hat, most likely you'd never so much as heard--of Suez! For that little chap was John March!"

The speaker clapped his hands upon his knees, opened his mouth, and waited for his hearer's laughter and wonder; but the hearer merely smiled, and with a queer look of frolic in the depths of his handsome eyes, asked,

"How lately were you in Suez?"

"Me? O--not since '65; but my son's a commercial tourist--rattling smart fellow--you've probably met him--I never see anybody that hadn't--last year he was in New England--this year he's tryin' Dixie. He sells this celebrated 'Hoptonica' for the great Cincinnati house of Pretzels & Bier. Funny thing--he's been mistaken for John March. A young lady--Southern girl--up in New England about a year ago--it was just for an instant--O of course--Must you go? Well, look here! Try to stop over a day in Suez--That's right; it'll pay you!"

The two travelers parted. The Union veteran went on westward, while the other--March by name--John March--was ticketed, of course, for Suez.