The Tempering Part 20

During these periods Boone found life a strange and paradoxical pattern, woven of a web of ecstasy and a woof of torture. Since that night when he had dragged suddenly at his bridle curb and had told himself, "I might as well fall in love with a star up there in heaven," he had never departed from his resolute conviction that it would be sheer insanity for him to entertain any thought of Anne, save that of the willing and faithful slave who would joyously have laid his life down for her.

She dominated his world of boyhood dreams, and since he was not deaf to the talk about himself and "Cyrus Spradling's gal," he wondered if he ought not to tell Happy the whole truth. But after long reflection he shook his head.

"It would only hurt Happy, like telling her about dreams that come at night--of some sort of heaven where I don't see her, herself." And so he did not tell her.

One day in the spring of the year when Anne was sixteen, Mrs. Larry Masters dropped into the office of her kinsman, Tom Wallifarro, to talk over some small matter of business. It was one of the regrets of the lady's life--a life somewhat touched and frost-bitten by bitterness--that all of her business was small. It was, however, one of her compensations that this gentleman gave to her petty affairs as much care and consideration as to the major features of his large practice.

"My dear," observed the Colonel irrelevantly as he looked at the weary eyes of the woman who had in her day been an almost famous beauty, "you seem worried. You are altogether too young to let lines creep into your face."

Mrs. Masters laughed mirthlessly.

"I have a daughter growing up. I am ambitious for her. She has charm, grace, breeding--and she's the poor member of a rich family. Such things bring wrinkles around maternal eyes, Cousin Tom."

"Happily she lives in Kentucky," the lawyer reminded his visitor. "We are yet provincial enough to think something of blood, even when it's not gilded with money."

"Yes, thank G.o.d--and thanks to you, she has had educational advantages.

If Larry had only had business sense--but I can't talk patiently about Larry."

"No--I wish you could bring yourself to think of him more indulgently, but--" Colonel Tom knew the fruitlessness of that line of counsel, so he brushed lightly by to other topics. "But that isn't what I wanted to talk about. I think Morgan ought to travel abroad for several months, don't you?"

Mrs. Masters sighed. There was a thought in her mind which had long been there. If Morgan and Anne could be brought to a fancy for each other, her problem in life would be settled. The girl would no longer be a charity child. But what she said was an amendment to the original thought. "Isn't he a bit inexperienced--and headstrong yet, to be turned loose alone in Europe?"

The Colonel's eyes twinkled. "I mean to have a check-rein on him."

"What fashion of check-rein, Cousin Tom?"

"I thought," said the lawyer off-handedly, since he always surrounded his beneficences with a show of the casual, "that it would be a good thing for Anne too. Now if you and she and Morgan made a European trip together, the responsibility of two ladies on his hands would steady the young scapegrace."

Mrs. Masters almost gasped in her effort to control her delighted astonishment. Morgan had always thought of Anne as a "kid" to be teased and badgered, and of himself as a very finished and mature young gentleman. Now they would see each other in a new guise. Their eyes might be opened. In short, the possibilities were immense.

"Your goodness to us--" she began feelingly, but the Colonel cleared his throat and raised a hand in defence against the embarra.s.sment of verbal grat.i.tude.

A month later the three sat in the _salle-a-manger_ of the Elysee Palace Hotel, by a window that commanded a view of the Arc de Triomphe, and many things had happened. Among them was the surprising discovery by the young man, that while few eyes seemed concerned with him, many turned toward Anne, and having turned, lingered.

Only last night they had been to a dance, and Anne had been so occupied with uniforms that she had found no time to waltz with him--though he was sure that he danced circles about these stiff-kneed gentry with petty t.i.tles.

Now over the _pet.i.t dejeuner_ he took his young and inconsiderate cousin to task.

"Last night, Anne, I camped on your trail all evening, and you couldn't manage to slip me in one dance. Nothing would do but goggling Britishers and smirking frog-eaters. I'm getting jolly well fed up with these foreigners."

Anne lifted her brows, but her eyes sparkled mischief.

"Oh, Morgan, I can dance with you any time," she a.s.sured him. "You're just kin-folks. Is it because you're 'jolly well fed up' with foreigners that you like to ape English slang?"

The young man blushed hotly, but he chose to ignore the question with which she had capped her response. Inasmuch as it was a fair hit, he had need to ignore it, but his eyes snapped with furious indignation. "Anne, I don't understand you," he announced in a carefully schooled voice.

"You can play with absurd little dignitaries, or with mountain illiterates--anything abnormal--but for your own blood--" He paused there a moment, searching his abundant and soph.o.m.oric vocabulary for the exact combination of withering words; and, while he hesitated, she interrupted in a tone which was both quiet and ominous:

"Let's take up one thing at a time, Morgan. Just who is the illiterate in the mountains?"

"You know as well as I do--Boone Wellver."

"Boone Wellver. I thought so. At all events, he's a man, even if he's not quite twenty-one yet."

"A man: that is to say, a specimen of the _genus h.o.m.o_. So is the fellow that brought in the eggs just now. So is the chap that drives the taxi."

The young aristocrat shrugged his shoulders and snapped his fingers in excellent imitation of Gallic expressiveness; then as Anne's twinkle reminded him of his being "jolly well fed up with foreigners," the change in his tone became as abrupt as the break in a boy's altering voice, and he added: "The point is that he's hardly a gentleman. I commend his ambition--but there's something in birth as well. Unless you attach some importance to the elegances and nuances of life, you are only a member of the mob."

"The elegances of life--as, for instance"--the dancing sparkle stole mischievously back into the blue eyes and the voice took on a purring softness--"as, for instance, the handling of the small sword--or fencing foil?"

Morgan rose petulantly from the table and pushed back his chair. "If you ladies will excuse me," he announced with superdignity, "I will leave you for a while to your own devices."

Anne's laughter pursued him in exit with an echo of musical mockery.

But that evening Mrs. Larry Masters posted a letter to Colonel Tom Wallifarro.

"Morgan has discovered Anne!" she said in part. "He has been too close to her until now to realize her attractiveness; but she has been noticed by other men, and at last Morgan is awake. They have quarrelled, and next to making love that's the most significant of developments. My dear kinsman and benefactor, you know what our mutual hope has been, and I think its fulfilment is not so far away! Tonight when I sipped my claret at dinner I drank a silent toast, 'To my girl and your boy.'"

While Mrs. Masters was writing that note, her daughter was sitting at another desk in the same room, and her letter was addressed to a post-office back of Cedar Mountain.

When Boone received that second missive, he turned the envelope over in his hand and gazed at it for a long while. Even then he did not open it until he sat alone in a place where the forests were silent, save for the call of a blue-jay and the diligent rapping of a "c.o.c.k of the woods"

who was sapping and mining for grubs.

The boy held between thumb and forefinger an envelope of a sort he had never seen before, of thin outer paper over a dark coloured lining. In one corner was a stamp of the French Republic, and there in writing that had crossed the sea was his name and address.

"She found time to write to me," he said rapturously to himself, and then dropping intentionally and whimsically into his old, childhood speech he added, nodding his head sagely to a pert squirrel that frisked its tail near by, "She's done writ me a letter cl'ar from t'other world."

It was that same summer, when Anne had gone to Europe, that Boone came back from college, very serious and taciturn, and McCalloway was prompt to guess the reason.

"You went down to Louisville, didn't you?" he inquired, as the two sat by the doorstep on the day of the boy's return, and Boone nodded.

The man did not nag him with questions. His seasoned wisdom contented itself with smoking on in silence, and after a little the lad jerked his head.

"I reckon you know what took me there--sir."

The final word came in afterthought. No mountaineer says "sir," by habit.

A part of that stubborn independence which is at once the virtue and the fault of the race balks at even such small measure of implied deference, but Boone had noticed that "down below," where courtesy flowers into graciousness, the form of address was general.

McCalloway responded slowly.

"Yes, I can guess your errand there. How is he?"

The boy's eyes gazed off across the slopes through contracted lids, and his voice came in deliberate but repressed tenseness.

"I hunted up Colonel Wallifarro's office and he went over there with me.... I reckon, except for that, they wouldn't have let me see him."