Mr. Opp Part 21

As he lay in the hammock he turned his head at every noise within the house, and listened. He had become amazingly dependent upon a soft, drawling voice which day after day read to him for hours at a time. At first he had met Guinevere's offers of help with moody irritability.

"Pray, don't bother about me," he had said. "I am quite able to look after myself; besides, I like to be alone."

But her un.o.btrusive sympathy and childish frankness soon conquered his pride. She read to him from books she did not understand, played games with him, and showed him new walks in the woods. And incidentally, she revealed to him her struggling, starving, wistful soul that no one else had ever discovered.

She never talked to him of her love affair, but she dwelt vaguely on the virtues of duty and loyalty and self-sacrifice. The facts in the case were supplied by Mrs. Gusty.

Hinton looked at his watch again, and groaned when he found it was only a quarter past two. Feeling his way cautiously along the porch and down the steps, he moved idly about the yard. He could not distinguish Menelaus from Paris now, and Helen of Troy was no longer to be recognized.

At long intervals a vehicle rattled past, leaving a cloud of dust behind. The air shimmered with the heat, and the low, insistent buzzing of bees beat on his ears mercilessly. He wondered impatiently why Guinevere did not come down, then checked himself as he remembered the constant demands he made upon her time.

At three o'clock he could stand it no longer. He felt a queer, dull sensation about his head, and he constantly drew his hand across his eyes to dispel the impression of a mist before them.

"Oh, Miss Guinevere!" he called up to her window. "Would you mind coming down just for a little while!"

Guinevere's head appeared so promptly that it was evident it had been lying on the window-sill.

"Is it time for your medicine?" she asked guiltily. "Mother said it didn't come till four."

"Oh, no," said Hinton, with forced cheerfulness; "it isn't that. You remember the old song, don't you, 'When a man's afraid, a beautiful maid is a cheering sight to see'?"

She disappeared from the window, and in a moment joined him behind the screen of honeysuckles on the porch. The hammock hung, inviting ease, but neither of them took it. She sat primly on the straight-backed, green settee, and he sat on the step at her feet with his hat pulled over his eyes.

"What an infernal nuisance I have been to you!" he said ruefully; "but no more than I have been to myself. The only difference was that I had to stand it, and you stood it out of the goodness of that kind little heart of yours. Well, it's nearly over now; I'm expecting to go to the city any day. I guess you'll not be sorry to get rid of me, will you, Miss Guinevere?"

Instead of answering, she drew a quick breath and turned her head away.

When she did speak, it was after a long pause.

"I like the way you say my name. n.o.body says it like that down here."

"Guinevere?" he repeated.

She nodded. "When you say it like that, I feel like I was another person. It makes me think of flowers, and poetry, and the wind in the trees, and all those things I've been reading you out of your books.

Guin-never and Guinevere _don't_ seem the same at all, do they?"

"They aren't the same," he said, "and you aren't the same girl I met on the boat last March. I guess we've both grown a bit since then. You know I was rather keen on dying about that time,--'in love with easeful death,'--well, now I am not keen about anything, but I am willing to play the game out."

They sat in silence for a while, then he said slowly, without raising his eyes: "I am not much good at telling what I feel, but before I go away I want you to know how much you've helped me. You have been the one light that was left to show me the way down into the darkness."

A soft touch on his shoulder made him lift his head. Guinevere was bending toward him, all restraint banished from her face by the compa.s.sion and love that suffused it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Oh, my G.o.d, it has come'"]

Instinctively he swayed toward her, all the need of her crying out suddenly within him, then he pulled himself sharply together, and, resolutely thrusting his hands in his pockets, rose and took a turn up and down the porch.

"Do you mind reading to me a little?" he asked at length. "There are forty devils in my head to-day, all hammering on the back of my eyeb.a.l.l.s. I'll get my Tennyson; you like him better than you do the others. Wait; I'm going."

But she was up the steps before him, eager to serve, and determined to spare him every effort.

Through the long afternoon Guinevere read, stumbling over the strange words and faltering through the difficult pa.s.sages, but vibrant to the beauty and the pathos of it all. On and on she read, and the sun went down, and the fragrance of dying locust bloom came faintly from the hill, and overhead in the tree-tops the evening breeze murmured its world-old plaint of loneliness and longing.

Suddenly Guinevere's voice faltered, then steadied, then faltered again, then without warning she flung her arms across the back of the bench, and, dropping her head upon them, burst into pa.s.sionate sobs.

Hinton, who had been sitting for a long time with his hands pressed over his eyes, sprang up to go to her.

"Guinevere," he said, "what's the matter? Don't cry, dear!" Then, as he stumbled, a look of terror crossed his face and he caught at the railing for support. "Where are you?" he asked sharply. "Speak to me! Give me your hand! I can't see--I can't--oh, my G.o.d, it has come!"

XV

The warning note sounded by Mrs. Fallows at the beginning of the oil boom was echoed by many before the summer was over. The coldest thing in the world is an exhausted enthusiasm, and when weeks slipped into months, and notes fell due, and the bank became cautious about lending money, a spirit of distrust got abroad, and a financial frost settled upon the community.

Notwithstanding these conditions, "The Opp Eagle" persistently screamed prosperity. It attributed the local depression to the financial disturbance that had agitated the country at large, and a.s.sured the readers that the Cove was on the eve of the greatest period in its history.

"The ascending, soaring bubble of inflated prices cannot last much longer," one editorial said; "the financial flurry in the Wall Streets of the North were pretty well over before we become aware of it, in a major sense. 'The Opp Eagle' has in the past, present, and future waged n.o.ble warfare against the calamity jays. Panic or no panic, Cove City refuses to remain in the backgrounds. There has been a large order for job-work in this office within the past ten days, also several new and important subscribers, all of which does not make much of a showing for hard times, at least not from our point of looking at it."

But in the same issue, in an inconspicuous corner, were a couple of lines to the effect that "the editor would be glad to take a load of wood on subscription."

The truth was that it required all of Mr. Opp's diplomacy to rise to the occasion. The effort to meet his own obligations was becoming daily more embarra.s.sing, and he was reduced to economies entirely beneath the dignity of the editor of "The Opp Eagle." But while he cheerfully restricted his diet to two meals a day, and wore shirt-fronts in lieu of the genuine article, he was, according to Nick's ideas, rashly extravagant in other ways.

"What did you go and buy Widow Green's oil-shares back for?" Nick demanded upon one of these occasions.

"Well, you see," explained Mr. Opp, "it was purely a business proposition. Any day, now, things may open up in a way that will surprise you. I have good reason to believe that those shares are bound to go up; and besides," he added lamely in an undertone, "I happen to know that that there lady was in immediate need of a little ready money."

"So are we," protested Nick; "we need every cent we can get for the paper. If we don't get ahead some by the first of the year, we are going under, sure as you live."

Mr. Opp laid a hand upon his shoulder and smiled tolerantly.

"Financiers get used to these fluctuations in money circles. Don't you worry, Nick; you leave that to the larger brains in the concern."

But in spite of his superior att.i.tude of confidence, Nick's words rankled in his mind, and the first of the year became a time which he preferred not to consider.

One day in September the mail-packet brought two letters of great importance to Mr. Opp. One was from Willard Hinton, the first since his operation, and the other was from Mr. Mathews, stating that he would arrive at the Cove that day to lay an important matter of business before the stock-holders of the Turtle Creek Land Company.

Mr. Opp rushed across the road, a letter in each hand, to share the news with Guinevere.

"It's as good as settled," he cried, bursting in upon her, where she sat at the side door wrestling with a bit of needlework. "Mr. Mathews will be here to-day. He is either going to open up work or sell out to a syndicate. I'm going to use all my influence for the latter; it's the surest and safest plan. Miss Guin-never,"--his voice softened,--"this is all I been waiting for to make my last and final arrangement with your mother. It was just yesterday she was asking me what I'd decided to do, and I don't mind telling you, now it's all over, I never went to bed all last night--just sat up trying to figure it out. But this will settle it. I'll be in a position to have a little home of my own and take care of Kippy, too. I don't know as I ever was so happy in all my life put together before." He laughed nervously, but his eyes anxiously studied her averted face.

"Then there's more news," he plunged on, when she did not speak--"a letter from Mr. Hinton. I thought maybe you'd like to hear what he had to say."

Guinevere's scissors dropped with a sharp ring on the stepping-stone below, and as they both stooped to get them, their fingers touched. Mr.

Opp ardently seized her hand in both of his, but unfortunately he seized her needle as well.

"Oh, I am so sorry!" she said. "Wait, let me do it," and with a compa.s.sion which he considered nothing short of divine she extricated the needle, and comforted the wounded member. Mr. Opp would have gladly suffered the fate of a St. Sebastian to have elicited such sympathy.

"Is--is Mr. Hinton better?" she asked, still bending over his hand.