The Girl at the Halfway House Part 11

But again there was a transfer of the general attention toward the upper end of the hall. The door once more opened, and there appeared a little group of three persons, on whom there was fixed a regard so steadfast and so silent that it might well have been seen that they were strangers to all present. Indeed, there was but one sound audible in the sudden silence which fell as these three entered the room. Sam, the driver, sc.r.a.ped one foot unwittingly upon the floor as he half leaned forward and looked eagerly at them as they advanced.

Of the three, one was a tall and slender man, who carried himself with that ease which, itself unconscious, causes self-consciousness in those still some generations back of it. Upon the arm of this gentleman was a lady, also tall, thin, pale, with wide, dark eyes, which now opened with surprise that was more than half shock. Lastly, with head up and eyes also wide, like those of a stag which sees some new thing, there came a young woman, whose presence was such as had never yet been seen in the hotel at Ellisville. Tall as the older lady by her side, erect, supple, n.o.ble, evidently startled but not afraid, there was that about this girl which was new to Ellisville, which caused the eye of every man to fall upon her and the head of every woman to go up a degree the higher in scorn and disapprobation. This was a being of another world.

There was some visitation here. Mortal woman, woman of the Plains, never yet grew like this. Nor had gowns like these--soft, clinging, defining, draping--ever occurred in history. There was some mistake.

This creature had fallen here by error, while floating in search of some other world.

Astonished, as they might have been by the spectacle before them of the two rows of separated s.e.x, all of whom gazed steadfastly in their direction; greeted by no welcoming hand, ushered to no convenient seat, these three faced the long, half-lit room in the full sense of what might have been called an awkward situation. Yet they did not shuffle or cough, or talk one with another, or smile in anguish, as had others who thus faced the same ordeal. Perhaps the older lady pressed the closer to the gentleman's side, while the younger placed her hand upon his shoulder; yet the three walked slowly, calmly, deliberately down into what must have been one of the most singular scenes. .h.i.therto witnessed in their lives. The man did not forsake his companions to join the row of unfortunates. As they reached the head of the social rank, where sat Mrs. McDermott, the wife of the section boss and _arbiter elegantiarum_ for all Ellisville, the gentleman bowed and spoke some few words, though obviously to a total stranger--a very stiff and suspicious stranger, who was too startled to reply.

The ladies bowed to the wife of the section boss and to the others as they came in turn. Then the three pa.s.sed on a few seats apart from and beyond the other occupants of that side of the house, thus leaving a break in the ranks which caused Mrs. McDermott a distinct sniff and made the red-headed girl draw up in pride. The newcomers sat near to the second lamp from the musicians' stand, and in such fashion that they were half hid in the deep shadows cast by that erratic luminary.

There was now much tension, and the unhappiness and suspense could have endured but little longer. Again the accordion protested and the fiddle wept. The cornet uttered a faint note of woe. Yet once more there was a pause in this time of joy.

Again the door was pushed open, not timidly, but flung boldly back.

There stood two figures at the head of the hall and in the place of greatest light. Of these, one was tall and very thin, but upright as a shaft of pine. Over his shoulder hung a cloak, which he swept aside over his arm with a careless and free gesture of unconcern. He was clad in dark garments; thus much might be said. His face, clean shaven but for the long and pointed mustaches and goatee, was high and bold, his gaze confident and merry. His waistcoat sat high and close. At wrist and neck there showed a touch of white, and a bit of white appeared protruding at the bosom of his coat. His tread was supple and easy as that of a boy of twenty. "Ned, me boy," he whispered to his companion as they entered, "I'm feelin' fine the night; and as for yerself, ye're fit for the court o' St. James at a diplomats' ball."

Franklin, indeed, deserved somewhat of the compliment. He was of that rare figure of man which looks well whether clad for the gymnasium or the ball, upon which clothing does not merely hang, but which fills out and dignifies the apparel that may be worn. In height the ex-captain was just below the six-foot mark which so often means stature but not strength, and he carried every inch of his size with proportions which indicated vigour and activity. He walked now with the long, easy hip-stride of the man whose sides and back are not weak, but strong and hardened. His head, well set upon the neck, was carried with the chin unconsciously correct, easily, not stiffly. His shoulders were broad enough to hang nicely over the hips, and they kept still the setting-up of the army drill. Dressed in the full uniform of a captain, he looked the picture of the young army officer of the United States, though lacking any of the arrogance which might come from the purely military life. Simply, easily, much as had the little group that immediately preceded himself and friend, Franklin pa.s.sed on up into the hall, between the batteries which lined the walls.

Any emergency brings forward its own remedy. The times produce the man, each war bringing forth its own generals, its heroes, its solvers of great problems. Thus there came now to these persons a.s.sembled, deadlocked, unguided, unhappy, who might else have sat forever rooted to this spot, the man who was to save them, to lead them forth out of their wilderness of incert.i.tude.

None had chosen Battersleigh to the leadership. He came as mere guest, invited as were the others. There had been no election for master of ceremonies, nor had Battersleigh yet had time to fully realize how desperate was this strait in which these folk had fallen. It appeared to him merely that, himself having arrived, there was naught else to cause delay. At the centre of the room he stopped, near by the head of the stern column of womanhood which held the position on the right as one entered the hall. Here Battersleigh paused, making a deep and sweeping bow, and uttered the first open speech which had been heard that evening.

"Ladies and gintlemen," he said in tones easily distinguishable at all parts of the room, "I'm pleased to meet ye all this evenin'. Perhaps ye all know Battersleigh, and I hope ye'll all meet me friend Captain Franklin, at me side. We claim the inthroduction of this roof, me good friends, and we welcome everybody to the first dance at Ellisville.

Ladies, yer very dutiful servant! It's well ye're lookin', Mrs.

McDermott; and Nora, gyurl, sure ye're charmin' the night. Kittie, darlin', how do ye do? Do ye remember Captain Franklin, all of ye?

Pipe up, ye naygurs--that's right. Now, thin, all hands, choose yer partners fer the gr-rand march. Mrs. McDermott, darlin', we'll lead the march, sure, with Jerry's permission--how'll he help himself, I wonder, if the lady says yis? Thank ye, Mrs. McDermott, and me arm--so."

The sheepish figures of the musicians now leaned together for a moment.

The violins wailed in sad search for the accord, the a.s.sistant instrument less tentative. All at once the slack shoulders straightened up firmly, confidently, and then, their feet beating in unison upon the floor, their faces set, stern and relentless, the three musicians fell to the work and reeled off the opening bars.

A sigh went up from the a.s.sembly. There was a general shuffling of shoes, a wide rustling of calico. Feet were thrust forward, the body yet unable to follow them in the wish of the owner. Then, slowly, sadly, as though going to his doom, Curly arose from out the long line of the unhappy upon his side of the room. He crossed the intervening s.p.a.ce, his limbs below the knees curiously affected, jerking his feet into half time with the tune. He bowed so low before the littlest waiter girl that his neck scarf fell forward from his chest and hung before him like a shield. "May I hev the honour, Miss Kitty?" he choked out; and as the littlest waiter girl rose and took his arm with a vast air of unconcern, Curly drew a long breath.

In his seat Sam writhed, but could not rise. Nora looked straight in front. It was Hank Peterson, who led her forth, and who, after the occasion was over, wished he had not done so, for his wife sat till the last upon the row. Seeing this awful thing happen, seeing the hand of Nora laid upon another's arm, Sam sat up as one deeply smitten with a hurt. Then, silently, un.o.bserved in the confusion, he stole away from the fateful scene and betook himself to his stable, where he fell violently to currying one of the horses.

"Oh, kick!" he exclaimed, getting speech in these surroundings. "Kick!

I deserve it. Of all the low-down, d----n cowards that ever was borned I sure am the worst! But the gall of that feller Peterson! An' him a merried man!"

When Sam left the ballroom there remained no person who was able to claim acquaintance with the little group who now sat under the shadow of the swinging lamp at the lower end of the hall, and farthest from the door. Sam himself might have been more courteous had not his mental perturbation been so great. As it was, the "grand march" was over, and Battersleigh was again walking along the lines in company with his friend Franklin, before either could have been said to have noticed fully these strangers, whom no one seemed to know, and who sat quite apart and unengaged. Battersleigh, master of ceremonies by natural right, and comfortable gentleman at heart, spied out these three, and needed but a glance to satisfy himself of their ident.i.ty.

Folk were few in that country, and Sam had often been very explicit in his descriptions.

"Sir," said Battersleigh, approaching and bowing as he addressed the stranger, "I shall make bold to introjuce meself--Battersleigh of Ellisville, sir, at your service. If I am not mistaken, you will be from below, toward the next town. I bid ye a very good welcome, and we shall all hope to see ye often, sir. We're none too many here yet, and a gintleman and his family are always welcome among gintlemen. Allow me, sir, to presint me friend Captain Franklin, Captain Ned Franklin of the--th' Illinois in the late unplisantness.--Ned, me boy, Colonel--ye'll pardon me not knowin' the name?"

"My name is Buford, sir," said the other as he rose. "I am very glad to see you gentlemen. Colonel Battersleigh, Captain Franklin. I was so unlucky as to be of the Kentucky troops, sir, in the same unpleasantness. I want to introduce my wife, gentlemen, and my niece, Miss Beauchamp."

Franklin really lost a part of what the speaker was saying. He was gazing at this form half hidden in the shadows, a figure with hands drooping, with face upturned, and just caught barely by one vagrant ray of light which left the ma.s.sed shades piled strongly about the heavy hair. There came upon him at that moment, as with a flood-tide of memory, all the vague longing, the restlessness, the incert.i.tude of life which had harried him before he had come to this far land, whose swift activity had helped him to forget. Yet even here he had been unsettled, unhappy. He had missed, he had lacked--he knew not what.

Sometimes there had come vague dreams, recurrent, often of one figure, which he could not hold in his consciousness long enough to trace to any definite experience or a.s.sociation--a lady of dreams, against whom he strove and whom he sought to banish. Whom he had banished! Whom he had forgotten! Whom he had never known! Who had ever been in his life a vague, delicious mystery!

The young woman rose, and stood out a pace or two from the shadows.

Her hand rested upon the arm of the elder lady. She turned her face toward Franklin. He felt her gaze take in the uniform of blue, felt the stroke of mental dislike for the uniform--a dislike which he knew existed, but which he could not fathom. He saw the girl turn more fully toward him, saw upon her face a querying wonder, like that which he had known in his own dreams! With a strange, half-shivering gesture the girl advanced half a step and laid her head almost upon the shoulder of the elder woman, standing thus for one moment, the arms of the two unconsciously entwined, as is sometimes the way with women.

Franklin approached rudeness as he looked at this att.i.tude of the two, still puzzling, still seeking to solve this troubling problem of the past.

There came a shift in the music. The air swept from the merry tune into the minor from which the negro is never musically free. Then in a flash Franklin saw it all. He saw the picture. His heart stopped!

This music, it was the wail of trumpets! These steps, ordered, measured, were those of marching men. These sounds, high, commingling, they were the voices of a day gone swiftly by. These two, this one--this picture--it was not here, but upon the field of wheat and flowers that he saw it now again--that picture of grief so infinitely sad.

Franklin saw, and as he gazed, eager, half advancing, indecision and irresolution dropped from him forever. Resolved from out the shadows, wherein it had never in his most intimate self-searching taken any actual form, he saw the image of that unformulated dream which had haunted his sub-consciousness so long, and which was now to haunt him openly and forever.

CHAPTER XV

ANOTHER DAY

The morning after the first official ball in Ellisville dawned upon another world.

The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the hors.e.m.e.n who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as usual to the Cottage--all these departed with the more or less recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new significance. Really this was Magna Charta. All those who, tired and sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something had been done. Each might have told you in his way that a new web of human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom.

Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.

There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who cla.s.sify all things rural as crude and unworthy, ent.i.tled only to tolerance, if they be spared contempt. They are but provincials themselves who are guilty of such att.i.tude, and they proclaim only an ignorance which itself is not ent.i.tled to the dignity of being called intolerance. The city is no better than the town, the town is no better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from the other. Everywhere the problems are the same. Everywhere it is Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured, to be enjoyed. Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.

Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains admittedly a town. A sun had set, and a sun had arisen. It was another day.

In the mind of Edward Franklin, when he was but a boy, there came often problems upon which he pondered with all the melancholy seriousness of youth, and as he grew to young manhood he found always more problems to engage his thoughts, to challenge his imagination. They told the boy that this earth was but a part of a grand scheme, a dot among the myriad stars. He was not satisfied, but asked always where was the Edge. No recurrent quotient would do for him; he demanded that the figures be conclusive. They told him of the positive and negative poles, and he wished to see the adjoining lines of the two hemispheres of force. Carrying his questionings into youth and manhood, they told him--men and women told him, the birds told him, the flowers told him--that there were marrying and giving in marriage, that there was Love. He studied upon this and looked about him, discovering a world indeed divided into two hemispheres, always about to be joined since ever time began. But it seemed to him that this union must never be that of mere chance. There could be but one way right and fit for the meeting of the two halves of life. He looked about him in the little village where he was brought up, and found that the men had married the women who were there for them to marry. They had never sailed across seas, had never searched the stars, had never questioned their own souls, asking, "Is this, then, the Other of me?" Seeing that this was the way of human beings, he was ashamed. It aroused him to hear of this man or that who, having attained a certain number of cattle or a given amount of household goods, conceived himself now ready to marry, and who therefore made court to the neighbour's daughter, and who forthwith did marry her. To his dreamer's heart it seemed that there should be search, that there should be a sign, so that it should be sure that the moment had come, that the Other had been found. With some men this delusion lasts very late. With some women it endures forever. For these there may be, after all, another world somewhere in the recurrent quotient which runs indefinitely out into the stars.

With these vague philosophizings, these morbid self-queryings, there came into conflict the sterner and more practical side of Franklin's nature, itself imperious and positive in its demands. Thus he found himself, in his rude surroundings on the Plains, a man still unsettled and restless, ambitious for success, but most of all ambitious with that deadly inner ambition to stand for his own equation, to be himself, to reach his own standards; that ambition which sends so many broken hearts into graves whose headstones tell no history. Franklin wondered deliberately what it must be to succeed, what it must be to achieve. And he wondered deliberately what it must mean to love, to find by good fortune or by just deserts, voyaging somewhere in the weltering sea of life, in the weltering seas of all these unmoved stars, that other being which was to mean that he had found himself.

To the searcher who seeks thus starkly, to the dreamer who has not yielded; but who has deserved his dream, there can be no mistaking when the image comes.

Therefore to Edward Franklin the tawdry hotel parlour on the morning after the ball at Ellisville was no mere four-square habitation, but a chamber of the stars. The dingy chairs and sofas were to him articles of joy and beauty. The curtains at the windows, cracked and seamed, made to him but a map of the many devious happinesses which life should thenceforth show. The noises of the street were but music, the voices from the rooms below were speech of another happy world. Before him, radiant, was that which he had vaguely sought. Not for him to marry merely the neighbour's daughter! This other half of himself, with feet running far to find the missing friend, had sought him out through all the years, through all the miles, through all the spheres! This was fate, and at this thought his heart glowed, his eyes shone, his very stature seemed to increase. He wist not of Nature and her ways of attraction. He only knew that here was that Other whose hand, pathetically sought, he had hitherto missed in the darkness of the foregone days. Now, thought he, it was all happily concluded. The quotient was no indefinite one; it had an end. It ended here, upon the edge of the infinite which he had sought; upon the pinnacle of that universe of which he had learned; here, in this brilliant chamber of delight, this irradiant abode, this n.o.ble hall bedecked with gems and silks and stars and all the warp and woof of his many, many days of dreams!

Mr. and Mrs. Buford had for the time excused themselves by reason of Mrs. Buford's weariness, and after the easy ways of that time and place the young people found themselves alone. Thus it was that Mary Ellen, with a temporary feeling of helplessness, found herself face to face with the very man whom she at that time cared least to see.

CHAPTER XVI

ANOTHER HOUR

"But it seems as though I had always known you," said Franklin, turning again toward the tall figure at the window. There was no reply to this, neither was there wavering in the att.i.tude of the head whose glossy back was turned to him at that moment.

"It was like some forgotten strain of music!" he blundered on, feeling how hopeless, how distinctly absurd was all his speech. "I surely must always have known you, somewhere!" His voice took on a plaintive a.s.sertiveness which in another he would have derided and have recognised as an admission of defeat.

Mary Ellen still gazed out of the window. In her mind there was a scene strangely different from this which she beheld. She recalled the green forests and the yellow farms of Louisburg, the droning bees, the broken flowers and all the details of that sodden, stricken field.

With a shudder there came over her a swift resentment at meeting here, near at hand, one who had had a share in that scene of desolation.

Franklin felt keenly enough that he was at disadvantage, but no man may know what there is in the heart of a girl. To Mary Ellen there seemed to be three ways open. She might address this man bitterly, or haughtily, or humorously. The latter course might have been most deadly of all, had it not been tempered with a certain chivalrousness which abode in Mary Ellen's heart. After all, thought she, here was a man who was one of their few acquaintances in this strange, wild country. It might be that he was not an ill sort of man at heart, and by all means he was less impossible of manner than any other she had seen here. She had heard that the men of a womanless country were sometimes suddenly disconcerted by the appearance of womankind upon their horizon. There was a certain quality about this man which, after all, left him distinctly within the cla.s.sification of gentleman.

Moreover, it would be an ill thing for her to leave a sore heart on the first day of her acquaintance in this town, with which her fortunes were now apparently to be so intimately connected.

Mary Ellen turned at length and seated herself near the window. The light of which many women are afraid, the cross-light of double windows on the morning after a night of dancing, had no terrors for her. Her eye was clear, her skin fresh, her shoulders undrooping. Franklin from his seat opposite gazed eagerly at this glorious young being. From his standpoint there were but few preliminaries to be carried on. This was the design, the scheme. This was what life had had in store for him, and why should he hesitate to enter into possession? Why should he delay to speak that which was foremost in his soul, which a.s.suredly at that very moment must be the foremost concern in all the interlocking universe of worlds? After his fashion he had gone straight. He could not understand the sickening thought that he did not arrive, that his a.s.sertion did not convince, that his desire did not impinge.