The Power and the Glory Part 41

"I'll see to that, Gray," Pros said, rising and preparing to go. "Boy,"

he looked down fondly at the younger man, and set a brown right hand on his shoulder, "you never done a wiser thing nor a kinder in your life, than when you forgave your enemies that time, I'll bet you could ride the Unakas from end to end, the balance o' your days, the safest man that ever travelled their trails."

"Talking silver mine?" inquired MacPherson, putting his quizzical face in at the door.

"No," returned Stoddard. "We were just mentioning my pestilent cotton-mill projects. By this time next year, you and Hardwick will be wanting to have me abated as a nuisance."

"No, no," remonstrated MacPherson, coming in and leaning with affectionate familiarity on the younger man's chair. "There's no pestilence in you, Gray. You couldn't be a nuisance if you tried. People who will work out their theories stand to do good in the world; it's only the fellows who are content with bellowing them out that I object to."

"Better be careful!" laughed Stoddard. "We'll make you vice-president of the company."

"Is that an offer?" countered MacPherson swiftly. "I've got a bit of money to invest in this county; and Hardwick has ever a new brother-in-law or such that looks longingly at my shoes."

"You'd furnish the conservative element, surely," debated Stoddard.

"I'd keep you from bankruptcy," grunted the Scotchman, as he laid a small book on Gray's desk. "I doubt not Providence demands it of me."

Evening was closing in with a greenish-yellow sunset, and a big full moon pushing up to whiten the sky above it. It was late March now, and the air was full of vernal promise. Johnnie stepped out on the porch and glanced toward the west. She was expecting Gray that evening. Would there be time before he came, she wondered, for a little errand she wanted to do? Turning back into the hall, she caught a jacket from the hook where it hung and hurried down to the gate, settling her arms in the sleeves as she ran. There would be time if she went fast. She wished to get the little packet into which she had made Gray's letters months ago, dreading to look even at the folded outsides of them, tucking them away on the high shelf of her dress-closet at the Pap Himes boarding-house, and trying to forget them. n.o.body would know where to look but herself. She got permission from Mavity to go upstairs. Once there, the letters made their own plea; and alone in the little room that was lately her own, she opened the packet, carrying the contents to the fading light and glancing over sheet after sheet. She knew them all by heart. How often she had stood at that very window devouring these same words, not realizing then, as she did now, what deep meaning was in each phrase, how the feeling expressed increased from the first to the last. Across the ravine, one of the loom fixers found the evening warm enough to sit on the porch playing his guitar. The sound of the tw.a.n.ging strings, and the appealing vibration of his young voice in a plaintive minor air, came over to her. She gathered the sheets together and pressed them to her face as though they were flowers, or the hands of little children.

"I've got to tell him--to-night," she whispered to herself, in the dusky, small, dismantled room. "I've got to get him to see it as I do. I must make myself worthy of him before I let him take me for his own."

She thrust the letters into the breast-pocket of her coat and ran downstairs. Mavity Bence stood in the hall, plainly awaiting her.

"Honey," she began fondly, "I've been putting away Pap's things to-day--jest like you oncet found me putting away Lou's. I came on this here." And then Johnnie noticed a folded bandanna in her hands.

"You-all asked me to let ye go through and find that nickel ore, and ye brung it out in a pasteboard box; but this here is what it was in on the day your Uncle Pros fetched hit here, and I thought maybe you'd take a interest in having the handkercher that your fortune come down the mountains in."

"Yes, indeed, Aunt Mavity," said Johnnie, taking the bandanna into her own hands.

"Pap, he's gone," the poor woman went on tremulously, "an' the evil what he done--or wanted to do--is a thing that I reckon you can afford to forget. You're a mighty happy woman, Johnnie Consadine; the Lord knows you deserve to be."

She stood looking after the girl as she went out into the twilit street.

Johnnie was dressed as she chose now, not as she must, and her clothing showed itself to be of the best. Anything that might be had in Wautaga was within her means; and the tall, graceful figure pa.s.sing so quietly down the street would never have been taken for other than a member of what we are learning to call the "leisure cla.s.s." When the shadows at the end of the block swallowed her up, Mavity turned, wiping her eyes, and addressed herself to her tasks.

"I reckon Lou would 'a' been just like that if she'd 'a' lived," she said to Mandy Meacham, with the tender fatuity of mothers. "Johnnie seems like a daughter to me--an' I know in my soul no daughter could be kinder. Look at her makin' me keep every cent Pap had in the bank, when Laurelly could have claimed it all and kep' it."

"Yes, an' addin' somethin' to it," put in Mandy. "I do love 'em both--Johnnie an' Deanie. Ef I ever was so fortunate as to get a man and be wedded and have chaps o' my own, I know mighty well and good I couldn't love any one of 'em any better than I do Deanie. An' yet Johnnie's quare. I always will say that Johnnie Consadine is quare. What in the nation does she want to go chasin' off to Yurrup for, when she's got everything that heart could desire or mind think of right here in Cottonville?"

That same question was being put even more searchingly to Johnnie by somebody else at the instant when Mandy enunciated it. She had found Gray waiting for her at the gate of her home.

"Let's walk here a little while before we go in," he suggested. "I went up to the house and found you were out. The air is delightful, and I've got something I want to say to you."

He had put his arm under hers, and they strolled together down the long walk that led to the front of the lawn. The evening air was pure and keen, tingling with the breath of the wakening season.

"Sweetheart," Gray broke out suddenly, "I've been thinking day and night since we last talked together about this year abroad that you're planning. I certainly don't want to put my preferences before yours. I only want to be very sure that I know what your real preferences are,"

and he turned and searched her face with a pair of ardent eyes.

"I think I ought to go," the girl said in a very low voice, her head drooped, her own eyes bent toward the path at her feet.

"Why?" whispered her lover.

"I--oh, Gray--you know. If we should ever be married--well, then," in answer to a swift, impatient exclamation, "when we are married, if you should show that you were ashamed of me--I think it would kill me. No, don't say there's not any danger. You might have plenty of reason. And I--I want to be safe, Gray--safe, if I can."

Gray regarded the beautiful, anxious face long and thoughtfully. Yes, of course it was possible for her to feel that way. a.s.surance was so deep and perfect in his own heart, that he had not reflected what it might lack in hers.

"Dear girl," he said, pausing and making her look at him, "how little you do know of me, after all! Do I care so much for what people say?

Aren't you always having to reprove me because I so persistently like what I like, without reference to the opinions of the world? Besides, you're a beauty," with tender brusqueness, "and a charmer that steals the hearts of men. If you don't know all this, it isn't from lack of telling. Moreover, I can keep on informing you. A year of European travel could not make you any more beautiful, Johnnie--or sweeter. You may not believe me, but there's little the 'European capitals' could add to your native bearing--you must have learned that simple dignity from these mountains of yours. Of course, if you wanted to go for pleasure--"

His head a little on one side, he regarded her with a tender, half-quizzical smile, hoping he had sounded the note that would bring him swift surrender.

"It isn't altogether for myself--there are the others," Johnnie told him, lifting honest eyes to his in the dim moonlight. "They're all I had in the world, Gray, till you came into my life, and I must keep my own.

I belong to a people who never give up anything they love."

Stoddard dropped an arm about his beloved, and turned her that she might face the windows of the house behind them, bending to set his cheek against hers and direct her gaze.

"Look there," he whispered, laughingly.

She looked and saw her mother, clad in such wear as Laurella's taste could select and Laurella's beauty make effective. The slight, dark little woman was coming in from the dining room with her children all about her, a n.o.ble group.

"Your mother is much more the fine lady than you'll ever be, Johnnie Stoddard," Gray said, giving her the name that always brought the blood to the girl's cheek and made her dumb before him. "You know your Uncle Pros and I are warmly attached to each other.

"What is it you'd be waiting for, girl? Why, Johnnie, a man has just so long to live on this earth, and the years in which he has loved are the only years that count--would you be throwing one of these away? A year--twelve months--three hundred and sixty-five days--cast to the void. You reckless creature!"

He cupped his hands about her beautiful, fair face and lifted it, studying it.

"Johnnie--Johnnie--Johnnie Stoddard; the one woman out of all the world for me," he murmured, his deep voice dropping to a wooing cadence. "I couldn't love you better--I shall never love you less. Don't let us foolishly throw away a year out of the days which will be vouchsafed us together. Don't do it, darling--it's folly."

Hard-pressed, Johnnie made only a sort of inarticulate response.

"Come, love, sit a moment with me, here," pleaded Gray, indicating a small bench hidden among the evergreens and shrubs at the end of the path. "Sit down, and let's reason this thing out."

"Reasoning with you," began Johnnie, helplessly, "isn't--it isn't reasonable!"

"It is," he told her, in that deep, masterful tone which, like a true woman, she both loved and dreaded. "It's the height of reasonableness.

Why, dear, the great primal reason of all things speaks through me. And I won't let you throw away a year of our love. Johnnie, it isn't as though we'd been neighbours, and grown up side by side. I came from the ends of the earth to find you, darling--and I knew my own as soon as I saw you."

He put out his arms and gathered her into a close embrace.

For a s.p.a.ce they rested so, murmuring question and reply, checked or answered by swift, sweet kisses.

"The first time I ever saw you, love...."

"Oh, in thoze dusty old shoes and a sunbonnet! Could you love me then, Gray?"

"The same as at this moment, sweetheart. Shoes and sunbonnets--I'm ashamed of you now, Johnnie, in earnest. What do such things matter?"

"And that morning on the mountain, when we got the moccasin flowers,"

the girl's voice took up the theme. "I--it was sweet to be with you--and bitter, too. I could not dream then that you were for me. And afterward--the long, black, dreadful time when you seemed so utterly lost to me--"

At the mention of those months, Gray stopped her words with a kiss.