The Romance of a Plain Man Part 19

"Thanks to you, sir."

"So you ain't swelled yet. Well, I've given you six years of hard training, and I made it all the blamed harder because I liked you.

You've got the look of success about you, I've seen enough of it to know it. They used to say of me in Washington that I could sit in my office chair and overlook a line of men and spot every last one of them that was going to get on. I never went wrong but once, and that was because the poor devil began to swell and thought he was as big as his own shadow. But if the look's there, I see it--it's something in the eye and the jaw, and the grip of the hands that n.o.body can give you except G.o.d Almighty--and by George, it turns me into a downright heathen and makes me believe in fate. When a man has that something in the eye and in the jaw and in the grip of the hand, there ain't enough devils in the universe to keep him from coming out on top at the last. He may go under, but he won't stay under--no, sir, not if they pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on top his shoulders."

"Anyway, you've started me rolling, General, whether I spin on or come to a dead stop."

"Then remember," he retorted slyly, as we parted,' "that my earnest advice to a young man starting in business is--don't begin to swell!"

There was small danger of that, I thought, as I went on alone with my vision of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. From my childhood I had seen the big road, as I saw it to-day, sweeping in a bright track over the entire South, lengthening, branching, winding away toward the distant horizon, girdling the cotton fields, the rice fields, and the coal fields, like a protecting arm. One by one, I saw now, the small adjunct lines, absorbed by the main system, until in the whole South only the Great South Midland and Atlantic would be left. To dominate that living organism, to control, in my turn, that splendid liberator of a people's resources, this was still the inaccessible hope upon which I had fixed my heart.

In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he at once informed me, "a good half an hour."

"I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your fingers all thumbs?"

"They must be," I replied with a humility I had never a.s.sumed before the General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life."

"I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked dispa.s.sionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you're the kind of chap who can put on a turned-down collar with your evening clothes, or a tie that's been twisted through a wringer, and not look ridiculous. It's the rest of us that seem fops because we're properly dressed."

"I'd prefer to wear the right thing, you know," I returned, crestfallen.

"You never will. Anybody might as well expect a mountain to put forth rose-bushes instead of pine. It suits you, somehow, like your hair, which would make the rest of us look a regular guy. But I'm forgetting my mission. I've brought you an invitation to a party."

"What on earth should I do at a party?"

"Look pleasant. Did I take you to Miss Lessie Bell's dancing cla.s.s for nothing? and were you put through the steps of the Highland Fling in vain?"

"I wasn't put through, I never learned."

"Well, you kicked at it anyway. I say, is all your pirouetting to be done with stocks? Are you going to pa.s.s away in ignorance of polite society and the manners of the ladies?"

"When I make a fortune, perhaps--"

"Perhaps is always too late. To-morrow is better."

"Where is the party?"

"The Blands are giving it. Uncle George was puffing and blowing about you when we dined there last Sunday, and Sally Mickleborough told me to bring you to her party on Wednesday night."

Rising hurriedly I walked away from young George to the fireplace. A mist was before my eyes, I smelt again the scent of wallflowers, and I saw in a dream the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains parted from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the crooked pavement.

"I'll go, George," I said, wheeling about, "if you'll pledge yourself that I go properly dressed."

"Done," he responded, with his unfailing amiability. "I'll tie your cravat myself; and thank your stars, Ben, that whatever you are, you can't be little, for that's the unforgivable sin in Sally's eyes."

On Wednesday night he proved as good as his promise, and when nine o'clock struck, it found me, in irreproachable evening clothes, following him down Franklin Street, to the old house, where a softly coloured light streamed through the windows and lay in a rosy pool under the sycamores. All day I had been very nervous. At the moment when I was reading telegrams for the General, I had suddenly remembered that I possessed no gloves suitable to be worn at my first party, and I had committed so many blunders that the great man had roared the word "Swelled!" in a furious tone. Now, however, when the sound of a waltz, played softly on stringed instruments, fell on my ears, my nervousness departed as quickly as it had come. The big mahogany doors swung open before us, and as I pa.s.sed with George, into the brilliantly lighted hall, where the perfume of roses filled the air, I managed to move, if not with grace, at least with the necessary dignity of an invited guest.

The lamps, placed here and there amid feathery palm branches, glowed under pink shades like enormous roses in full bloom, and up and down the wide staircase, carpeted in white, a number of pretty girls tripped under trailing garlands of Southern smilax. As we entered the door on the right, I saw Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, standing very erect in their black brocades and old lace, with outstretched hands and constantly smiling lips.

George presented me, with the slightly formal manner which seemed appropriate to the occasion. I had held the little hand of each lady for a minute in my own, and had looked once into each pair of brightly shining eyes, when my glance, dropping from theirs, flew straight as a bird to Sally Mickleborough, who stood talking animatedly to an elderly gentleman with grey side-whiskers and a pleasant laugh. She was dressed all in white, and her pale brown hair, which I had last seen flying like the wing of a bird, was now braided and wound in a wreath about her head. As the elderly gentleman bowed and pa.s.sed on, she lifted her eyes, and her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my face.

Between us there stretched an expanse of polished floor, in which the pink-shaded lamps and the nodding roses were mirrored as in a pool.

Around us there was the music of stringed instruments, playing a waltz softly; the sound, too, of many voices, now laughing, now whispering; of Miss Mitty's repeated "It was so good of you to come"; of Miss Matoaca's gently murmured "We are _so_ glad to have you with us"; of Dr.

Theophilus's "You grow younger every day, ladies. Will you dance to-night?"; of General Bolingbroke's "I never missed an opportunity of coming to you in my life, ma'am"; of a confused chorus of girlish murmurs, of youthful merriment.

For one delirious instant it seemed to me that if I stepped on the shining floor, I should go down as on a frozen pool. Then her look summoned me, and as I drew nearer she held out her hand and stood waiting. There was a white rose in her wreath of plaits, and when I bent to speak to her the fragrance floated about me.

"Do you still remember me because of the blue-eyed collie?" I asked, for it was all I could think of.

Her firm square chin was tilted a little upward, and as she smiled at me, her thick black eyebrows were raised in the old childish expression of charming archness. It was the face of an idea rather than the face of a woman, and the power, the humour, the radiant energy in her look, appeared to divide her, as by an immeasurable distance, from the pretty girls of her own age among whom she stood. She seemed at once older and younger than her companions--older by some deeper and sadder knowledge of life, younger because of the peculiar buoyancy with which she moved and spoke. As I looked at her mouth, very full, of an almost violent red, and tremulous with expression, I remembered Miss Hatty's "delicate bow" with an odd feeling of anger.

"It has been a long time, but I haven't forgotten you, Ben Starr," she said.

"Do you remember the night of the storm and the cup of milk you wouldn't drink?"

"How horrid I was! And the geranium you gave me?"

"And the churchyard and the red shoes and Samuel?"

"Poor Samuel. I can't have any dogs now. Aunt Mitty doesn't like them--"

Some one came up to speak to her, and while I bowed awkwardly and turned away, I saw her gaze looking back at me from the roses and the pink-shaded lamps. A touch on my arm brought the face of young George between me and my ecstatic visions.

"I say, Ben, there's an awfully pretty girl over there I want you to waltz with--Bessy Dandridge."

In spite of my protest he led me the next instant to a slim figure in pink tarlatan, with a crown of azaleas, who sat in one corner between two very stout ladies. As I approached, the stout ladies smiled at me benignly, hiding suppressed yawns behind feather fans. Miss Dandridge was, as George said, "awfully pretty," with large shallow eyes of pale blue, an insipid mouth, and a shy little smile that looked as if she had put it on with her crown of azaleas and would take it off again and lay it away in her bureau drawer when the party was over.

"Get up and dance, dear," urged one of the stout ladies sleepily, "we ought to have come earlier."

"The girls look very well," remarked the other, suddenly alert and interested, "but I don't like this new fashion of wearing the hair.

Sally Mickleborough is handsome, though it's a pity she takes so much after her father."

My arm was already around the pink tarlatan waist of my partner, the crown of azaleas had brushed my shoulder like a gentle caress, and I had whirled halfway down the room in triumphant agony, when a floating phrase uttered in a girlish voice entered my ears and carried confusion into my brain.

"Get out of the way. Doesn't Bessy look for all the world like a rose-bush uprooted by a whirlwind?"

I caught the words as I went, and they proved too much for the trembling balance of my self-confidence. My strained gaze, fixed on the gla.s.sy surface beneath my feet, plunged suddenly downward amid the reflected roses and lamps. The music went wild and out of tune on the air. My blood beat violently in my pulses, I made a single false step, tripped over a flounce of pink tarlatan, which seemed to shriek as I went down, and the next instant my partner and I were flat on the polished floor, clutching desperately for support at the mirrored roses beneath.

The wreck lasted only a minute. A single suppressed t.i.tter fell on my ears, and was instantly checked. I looked up in time to see a smile freeze on Miss Mitty's face, and melt immediately into an expression of sympathy. The pretty girl, with the crown of azalea hanging awry on her flaxen tresses, and her flounce of pink tarlatan held disconsolately in her hand, looked for one dreadful instant as if she were about to burst into tears. A few dancers had stopped and gathered sympathetically around us, but the rest were happily whirling on, while the music, after a piercing crescendo, came breathlessly to a pause amid a silence that I felt to be far louder than sound. The perspiration, forced out by inward agony, stood in drops on my forehead, and as I wiped it away, I said almost defiantly:--

"It was the fault of George Bolingbroke. I told him I didn't know how to dance."

"I think I'd better go home," murmured the heroine of the disaster, catching her lower lip in her teeth to bite back a sob, "I wonder where mamma can be?"

"Here, dear," responded a commiserating voice, and I was about to turn away in disgrace without a further apology, when the little circle around us divided with a flutter, and Sally appeared, leaning on the arm of a youth with bulging eyes and a lantern jaw.

"Go home, Bessy? Why, how silly!" she exclaimed, and her energetic voice seemed suddenly to dominate the situation. "It wasn't so many years ago, I'm sure, that you used to tumble for the pleasure of it. Here, let me pin on your crown, and then run straight upstairs to the red room and get mammy to mend your flounce. It won't take her a minute. There, now, you're all the prettier for a high colour."

When she had pushed Bessy across the threshold with her small, strong hands, she turned to me, laughing a little, and slipped her arm into mine with the air of a young queen bestowing a favour.