The Red Debt Part 30

With the tail of her eye, Belle-Ann caught a parting glimpse of her profile in the mirror. She noted with a little laugh that her lips were moving. All unconsciously she was repeating over and over the phrase that drifted to and fro through her half-incredulous mind:

"A grandfather--an inheritance--Belle-Ann Benson--with a legacy?"

Colonel Tennytown, who had been called to New York on business, had now returned to Lexington. To-day, when Miss Worth returned to the school she imparted to Belle-Ann that she had received a message from the Colonel stating that he would be up to see them in the evening. He had been absent for two weeks and Belle-Ann had not seen him since she had learned that he was her grandfather.

With a lingering, tender embrace, twilight untwined her nebulous arms from the sable-l.u.s.tre mantle of night and parted with a promise.

The tryst place had been the dim, infinite dome of the world.

Plenipotent, majestic night settled on the throne of the supernal cosmos, diademed with a million twinkling jewels to dazzle his mundane subjects. His ancient serfs, patrolling the heavens at his behest, all a-glitter, trembled in his presence. And between the limits of these fire-touched planets, the milky-highroad developed like a mystic wand leading across a vast ethereal universe, and trailing adown into immeasurable cyclopic s.p.a.ces, fading away between the gigantic vapor-tombs and ghost biers of a thousand dead centuries.

And all the soul-stirring agencies of rapturous nature pulsed and glowed down upon the night-world of mankind. A neutral moon whose fixed face, young yet, unsmiled and uncreased with the joys and woes upheld by the supplicant ages, seemed now to soften with mellow sympathy upon a girl-heart below. Could even a stoic moon look upon this girl unmoved?

Belle-Ann leaned listlessly against the bronze rail that girded the fountain, gazing with expectant eyes, along the moonlit path leading to the seminary.

The Chapel bells chimed out their angelus across the fantasmal gloaming, tinkling through the girl's mood in utter harmony with the music of her soul, and the supernal smiles that lingered about her cupid lips.

Beneath the enchanting rays of the moon, Belle-Ann's wraith-like, relaxed form looked even taller. Arrayed in a vision of delicate blue silk and lace, clinging to the p.r.o.nounced curves of her subtle outlines, she presented an unforgettable picture; a rare h.e.l.lenism of feminine beauty. A type to ravish the senses. The shimmering blackness of the girlish curls that crowded around her small features, contrasted adorably with her eburnean skin, natural as the purity of rose petals, soft and fine-textured, from which the mountain tan had long since vanished.

A bouquet of great roses was pinned at her bosom, and the musk of calcanthus was in her curls. Her lips parted and she hummed a soft ditty. The sweet dulcet timbre of her voice was a mellowed sound wafted straight from the realms of Dixie. Her whole palpable self irradiated and pulsed with the subtle witchery and glamour of the South.

As she stood in the half-shadow of the fountain gazing intently along the hedge-hemmed path, a sudden gladness stirred her as she discerned what her eyes had sought. Two vague forms descended from the porch, coupled perilously near together. Then, as they halted beneath the dappled shadows of the rose-tree, Belle-Ann fancied she saw a white sleeve against a sable shoulder. It may have been the trick of her imagination, but it seemed that the man stooped his head and lingered over the white-clad figure.

She knew it was Colonel Tennytown and Miss Worth who tarried there.

Belle-Ann had known all evening that he would seek her out. She had not laid eyes on him since the Sunday preceding that memorable dawn when Miss Worth had revealed his relationship. But now with a heart full to the brim with grat.i.tude she awaited his coming, and to acknowledge her grandfather.

Presently, the Colonel's tall figure emerged from the shadows and came toward her. With his broad hat in his hand he halted before her and smilingly bowed in courtly grace. As Belle-Ann looked straight into his eyes, her face was now all aflush with pleasure and the baffling dimples were at play.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A CONFESSION

"Belle-Ann," Colonel Tennytown began gently, with a strange new exultation noticeable in his tones, "I have come to ask you to do me a favor--a very great kindness--do you deem me deserving of a kindness in view of my grim shortcomings?"

"Isn't it singular, Colonel Tennytown," interjected Belle-Ann laughingly, "that when I saw you coming down thah, I thought how happy I'd be if I had the power to do you-all some kindness?"

"Ah!" rejoined the Colonel, "now we have it--happily, you possess a naturally charitable spirit, Belle-Ann," he said. He had never called her Belle-Ann before. His Southern chivalry had never permitted him to diverge from the prefix of Miss to her surname. "As you now know all, Belle-Ann," he continued, "I wish you, henceforth and onward, to call me grandfather--I beg you to forgive me for my seeming tardiness in coming to the front to acknowledge my granddaughter--my approach has doubtless appeared to you masked in a form of deception, and now that I am here to inflict the brazen audacity of a complete confession, you can plainly see, Belle-Ann, that I am in need of your uttermost indulgence. The truth is, I regret to say, that we never knew of your existence until you came here to school when my esteemed friend, Reverend Peterson, made me acquainted with the fact.

"Then, the moment I laid eyes on you my heart melted and my soul went out to you--I instantly saw in you purity and beauty--indeed you are even more beautiful than your mother was, Belle-Ann--your mother whose sole offense was her stubborn refusal to marry the man whom we thought best fitted for her; and then she ran away and married a mountaineer far beneath her station, doubtless a good man--but practically a stranger, and one to whom she gave her life, and her duty, but not her heart.

"We struggled for years to reconcile her, pledging absolute forgiveness, but her blood told, Belle-Ann--the blood of her father--her high-bred spirit met our pleadings with unbroken stoic silence. She lost herself completely--the grand young man who had just been elected to the state senate of Kentucky, and who loved her, declined from that day and died a broken man. The remorse that gnawed at my heart for years, Belle-Ann, has left its scars--is a skein of secret, silent woe, untold, my dear little girl--a blight across the old man's life that no language is sufficiently adequate to reveal.

"Bah!--what an awful lesson I have had--and then I found you. You were sent by a kind Providence to a.s.suage my great sorrow, Belle-Ann. You see--my daughter--we wished to be certain that you inherited your mother's lovable traits. I did not wish to take a step which might, perforce, have to be retraced later; to be plain, we sought to make sure that we liked you, and I can say to-night that we do like you, Belle-Ann--we do more than that, we all love you--we do more than love you; we idolize you; we worship you; we all adore you. Will you adopt us? Will you take me with all my arrant failings and use me as best you can for a grandfather?"

He dropped his hat on the gra.s.s and stood erect before her in the moonlight the image of a southern n.o.bleman, holding his hands out to her. All throughout his earnest words she had been deeply and happily moved. Her bosom rose and fell, riding the roses pinned over her heart.

Her star-like eyes were misty, and there was pathos in her sweet treble utterance as she thrust her two hands into his waiting palms.

"Col--grandpa," she corrected, "it is a proud distinction to claim you for my grandfather--I feel wholly unworthy. I feet almost like an interloper--I owe you so much--I shall struggle with all my heart to take and fill my mother's place."

The Colonel stooped and pressed his lips to her forehead and kissed the curls near the little wreath of flowers.

"Belle-Ann," he went on, a new line of serious thought suggested to him, "you must promise me one more thing--in fact, if you don't promise, it will disrupt my plan of years--it will--well--it will place me in a very unhappy position."

"What is it, grandpa?" she quizzed through her smiles.

"Well--you see--that is--of course it's a secret," he ended lamely, with a furtive look toward a dim white figure beneath the trees. "As I said before--it's like this----Oh!--plague--take it!--to-night I asked Miss Worth to marry me, and she said she would if she could; but that she couldn't unless you promised to come immediately with us to Lexington and make your home with us--so you see where the whole thing hinges.

Will you do me this favor, Belle-Ann?" he pressed anxiously.

Belle-Ann could not restrain herself and laughed outright.

"Don't look so solemn, Grandpa--go tell Miss Worth I said to marry you by all means--I'll do my part."

There was a boyish ring in the Colonel's laugh as he picked his hat up off the gra.s.s and with Belle-Ann's arm through his, started toward the porch.

"But--Grandpa," protested Belle-Ann, as her lovely face suddenly sobered, and a grave note crept into her voice, "I must go up to Moon mountain before I think of anything else--some hearts up thah are beating against my return--but I'll promise to come back heah, in three days, Grandpa."

Colonel Tennytown stopped short on the path.

"Ah!--now we have it," he exclaimed. "I know all about those folks. Tell me, my dear, plainly--do you love that boy, Lem?"

Belle-Ann's cheeks turned visibly crimson in the moonlight as she looked up quickly upon this unexpected query.

"I might--might learn to--Grandpa," she murmured grudgingly.

"Now," said the Colonel decisively, "you shall start up there Monday morning--and you tell that Lem Lutts for me that I want a good, steady, dependable man. I'll give him charge of my entire stock farm--seven hundred acres--and three hundred head of the best horse-blood on the face of the earth. I'll train Lem and make him manager. If he will, he can go to school and polish himself up first. And that little Buddy Lutts--you tell him I'll give him a pony all for his own, and keep him in clothes and spending money if he'll come down to Lexington and go to school once in awhile."

"Now, I want to ask you, Belle-Ann--about that old negro chap, Slab. Is the lobe of his left ear missing?"

"Oh, yes--yes!" exclaimed the mystified girl.

"And is he a very long, narrow gentleman?"

"Surely--he's quite tall----"

"Did you ever hear him sing 'Kitty Wells'?"

Belle-Ann clapped her hands in childish glee.

"I've heard that song every night all my life, Grandpa; how did you-all know Slab, Grandpa?"

"Ah! now we have it--when Miss Worth mentioned him, telling me things about him as you had told her, I would always say that he is the same old Slab--and I'll bet the best horse I've got that he is the same. He belonged to my uncle who lived on the plantation adjoining my father's.

Slab was asleep in the shade of a porch one day when I, a boy of seven years, meaning to startle him, slipped up and held a snapping turtle close to his face. When I started to arouse him with one hand, the turtle suddenly shot his neck out and gabbed old Slab by the ear. Then Slab woke up. You ask him about that; and you ask him if he remembers the time old Hickamohawk ran away with him--and you bring him down here with you. Just tell him that Amos Tennytown wants him and he'll come--bring the whole family--there's room for us all, Belle-Ann."

She had listened to his warm-hearted suggestions with growing enthusiasm that sent her blood bounding, as she pictured the surprise and gladness the Colonel's message would inspire in those lonely, isolated hearts up on h.e.l.lsfork.

"Grandpa," observed the girl, out of her unutterable joy and grat.i.tude, "G.o.d made your heart awful big."