The Conquest of Canaan Part 16

"Go where, Happy?"

Mr. Fear looked grave. "Don't you rec'lect meetin' me last night?"

Louden shook his head. "No. Did I?"

The other's jaw fell and his brow corrugated with self-reproach.

"Well, if that don't show what a thick-head I am! I thought ye was all right er I'd gone on with ye. n.o.body c'd 'a' walked straighter ner talked straighter. Said ye was goin' to leave Canaan fer good and didn't want n.o.body to know it. Said ye was goin' to take the 'leven-o'clock through train fer the West, and told me I couldn't come to the deepo with ye. Said ye'd had enough o' Canaan, and of everything! I follered ye part way to the deepo, but ye turned and made a motion fer me to go back, and I done it, because ye seemed to be kind of in trouble, and I thought ye'd ruther be by yerself. Well, sir, it's one on me!"

"Not at all," said Joe. "I was all right."

"Was ye?" returned the other. "DO remember, do ye?"

"Almost," Joe smiled, faintly.

"ALMOST," echoed Happy, shaking his head seriously. "I tell ye, Joe, ef I was YOU--" he began slowly, then paused and shook his head again. He seemed on the point of delivering some advice, but evidently perceiving the sn.o.bbishness of such a proceeding, or else convinced by his own experience of the futility of it, he swerved to cheerfulness:

"I hear the boys is all goin' to work hard fer the primaries. Mike says ye got some chances ye don't know about; HE swears ye'll be the next Mayor of Canaan."

"Nonsense! Folly and nonsense, Happy! That's the kind of thing I used to think when I was a boy. But now--pshaw!" Joe broke off with a tired laugh. "Tell them not to waste their time. Are you going out to the Beach this afternoon?"

The little man lowered his eyes moodily. "I'll be near there," he said, sc.r.a.ping his patched shoe up and down the curbstone. "That feller's in town agin."

"What fellow?"

"'Nashville' they call him; Ed's the name he give the hospital: Cory--him that I soaked the night you come back to Canaan. He's after Claudine to git his evens with me. He's made a raise somewheres, and plays the spender. And her--well, I reckon she's tired waitin' table at the National House; tired o' me, too. I got a hint that they're goin' out to the Beach together this afternoon."

Joe pa.s.sed his hand wearily over his aching forehead. "I understand,"

he said, "and you'd better try to. Cory's laying for you, of course.

You say he's after your wife? He must have set about it pretty openly if they're going to the Beach to-day, for there is always a crowd there on Sundays. Is it hard for you to see why he's doing it? It's because he wants to make you jealous. What for? So that you'll tackle him again. And why does he want that? Because he's ready for you!"

The other's eyes suddenly became bloodshot, his nostrils expanding incredibly. "READY, is he? He BETTER be ready. I--"

"That's enough!" Joe interrupted, swiftly. "We'll have no talk like that. I'll settle this for you, myself. You send word to Claudine that I want to see her at my office to-morrow morning, and you--you stay away from the Beach to-day. Give me your word."

Mr. Fear's expression softened. "All right, Joe," he said. "I'll do whatever you tell me to. Any of us 'll do that; we sure know who's our friend."

"Keep out of trouble, Happy." Joe turned to go and they shook hands.

"Good day, and--keep out of trouble!"

When he had gone, Mr. Fear's countenance again gloomed ominously, and, shaking his head, he ruminatively entered an adjacent bar through the alley door.

The Main Street bridge was an old-fashioned, wooden, covered one, dust-colored and very narrow, squarely framing the fair, open country beyond; for the town had never crossed the river. Joe found the cool shadow in the bridge gracious to his hot brow, and through the slender c.h.i.n.ks of the worn flooring he caught bright glimpses of running water.

When he came out of the other end he felt enough refreshed to light a cigar.

"Well, here I am," he said. "Across Main Street bridge--and it must be getting on toward noon!" He spoke almost with the aspect of daring, and immediately stood still, listening. "'REMEMBER,"' he ventured to repeat, again daring, "'REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!'"

And again he listened. Then he chuckled faintly with relief, for the voice did not return. "Thank G.o.d, I've got rid of that!" he whispered.

"And of the circus band too!"

A dust road turned to the right, following the river and shaded by big sycamores on the bank; the mongrel, intensely preoccupied with this road, scampered away, his nose to the ground. "Good enough," said the master. "Lead on and I'll come after you."

But he had not far to follow. The chase led him to a half-hollow log which lay on a low, gra.s.s-grown levee above the stream, where the dog's interest in the pursuit became vivid; temporarily, however, for after a few minutes of agitated investigation, he was seized with indifference to the whole world; panted briefly; slept. Joe sat upon the log, which was in the shade, and smoked.

"'REMEMBER!'" He tried it once more. "'ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!'" Safety still; the voice came not. But the sound of his own repet.i.tion of the words brought him an eerie tremor; for the mist of a memory came with it; nothing tangible, nothing definite, but something very far away and shadowy, yet just poignant enough to give him a queer feeling that he was really keeping an appointment here. Was it with some water-sprite that would rise from the river? Was it with a dryad of the sycamores? He knew too well that he might expect strange fancies to get hold of him this morning, and, as this one grew uncannily stronger, he moved his head briskly as if to shake it off.

The result surprised him; the fancy remained, but his headache and dizziness had left him.

A breeze wandered up the river and touched the leaves and gra.s.s to life. Sparrows hopped and chirped in the branches, absurdly surprised; without doubt having concluded in the Sunday stillness that the world would drowse forever; and the mongrel lifted his head, blinked at them, hopelessly wishing they would alight near him, scratched his ear with the manner of one who has neglected such matters overlong; reversed his position; slept again. The young corn, deep green in the bottomland, moved with a staccato flurry, and the dust ghost of a mad whirling dervish sped up the main road to vanish at the bridge in a climax of lunacy. The stirring air brought a smell of blossoms; the distance took on faint lavender hazes which blended the outlines of the fields, lying like square coverlets upon the long slope of rising ground beyond the bottom-land, and empurpled the blue woodland shadows of the groves.

For the first time, it struck Joe that it was a beautiful day, and it came to him that a beautiful day was a thing which nothing except death, sickness, or imprisonment could take from him--not even the ban of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with the sweetness of it.

"Go ahead!" he whispered. "Do that all you want to. If you'll keep it up like this awhile, I'll follow with 'Little Brown Jug, How I Love Thee!' It seems to pay, after all!"

The welcome strains, however, were but the prelude to a harsher sound which interrupted and annihilated them: the Court-house bell clanging out twelve. "All right," said Joe. "It's noon and I'm 'across Main Street bridge.'"

He opened his eyes and looked about him whimsically. Then he shook his head again.

A lady had just emerged from the bridge and was coming toward him.

It would be hard to get at Joe's first impressions of her. We can find conveyance for only the broadest and heaviest. Ancient and modern instances multiply the case of the sleeper who dreams out a long story in accurate color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and shutting of a door. So with Joseph, in the brief s.p.a.ce of the lady's approach. And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been--in fact it was, in his recollections, later--a blur of emotion.

At first sight of her, perhaps it was pre-eminently the shock of seeing anything so exquisite where he had expected to see nothing at all. For she was exquisite--horrid as have been the uses of the word, its best and truest belong to her; she was that and much more, from the ivory ferrule of the parasol she carried, to the light and slender footprint she left in the dust of the road. Joe knew at once that nothing like her had ever before been seen in Canaan.

He had little knowledge of the millinery arts, and he needed none to see the harmony--harmony like that of the day he had discovered a little while ago. Her dress and hat and gloves and parasol showed a pale lavender overtint like that which he had seen overspreading the western slope. (Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it. She was tall, but if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have been capable of calling her lips "red," in which case he would not have been Joe, and would have been as far from the truth as her lips were from red, or as her supreme delicateness was from mere slenderness.

Under the summer hat her very dark hair swept back over her temples with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld from being fluffy. It may be that this approach to trimness, which was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe. Let us say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the hint of floridity was abhorrent to her. "Trim" is as clumsy as "slender"; she had escaped from the trimness of girlhood as wholly as she had gone through its coltishness. "Exquisite." Let us go back to Joe's own blurred first thought of her and be content with that!

She was to pa.s.s him--so he thought--and as she drew nearer, his breath came faster.

"REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!" Was THIS the fay of whom the voice had warned him? With that, there befell him the mystery of last night. He did not remember, but it was as if he lived again, dimly, the highest hour of happiness in a life a thousand years ago; perfume and music, roses, nightingales and plucked harp-strings. Yes; something wonderful was happening to him.

She had stopped directly in front of him; stopped and stood looking at him with her clear eyes. He did not lift his own to hers; he had long experience of the averted gaze of women; but it was not only that; a great shyness beset him. He had risen and removed his hat, trying (ineffectually) not to clear his throat; his every-day sense urging upon him that she was a stranger in Canaan who had lost her way--the preposterousness of any one's losing the way in Canaan not just now appealing to his every--day sense.

"Can I--can I--" he stammered, blushing miserably, meaning to finish with "direct you," or "show you the way."

Then he looked at her again and saw what seemed to him the strangest sight of his life. The lady's eyes had filled with tears--filled and overfilled. "I'll sit here on the log with you," she said. And her voice was the voice which he had heard saying, "REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!"

"WHAT!" he gasped.

"You don't need to dust it!" she went on, tremulously. And even then he did not know who she was.

XI

WHEN HALF-G.o.dS GO

There was a silence, for if the dazzled young man could have spoken at all, He could have found nothing to say; and, perhaps, the lady would not trust her own voice just then. His eyes had fallen again; he was too dazed, and, in truth, too panic-stricken, now, to look at her, though if he had been quite sure that she was part of a wonderful dream he might have dared. She was seated beside him, and had handed him her parasol in a little way which seemed to imply that of course he had reached for it, so that it was to be seen how used she was to have all tiny things done for her, though this was not then of his tremulous observing. He did perceive, however, that he was to furl the dainty thing; he pressed the catch, and let down the top timidly, as if fearing to break or tear it; and, as it closed, held near his face, he caught a very faint, sweet, spicy emanation from it like wild roses and cinnamon.

He did not know her; but his timidity and a strange little choke in his throat, the sudden fright which had seized upon him, were not caused by embarra.s.sment. He had no thought that she was one he had known but could not, for the moment, recall; there was nothing of the awkwardness of that; no, he was overpowered by the miracle of this meeting. And yet, white with marvelling, he felt it to be so much more touchingly a great happiness than he had ever known that at first it was inexpressibly sad.