The Tempering Part 22

Anne had been talking with vivacious enthusiasm of the things she had seen abroad, and Boone had followed her with rapt attentiveness. She had a natural gift for vivid description, and he had seemed to stand with her, by moonlight in the ruins of the Coliseum, and to look out with her from the top of Cheops' pyramid over the sands of Ghizeh and the ribbon of the Nile.

But at last they had fallen silent, and with something like a sigh the girl said, "Tomorrow I go back to Louisville."

He had forgotten that for the moment, and he flinched at the reminder, but his only reply was, "And in a few days I've got to go back to Lexington. I always miss the hills down there."

Her violet eyes challenged him with full directness, "Won't you miss--anything else?"

Boone, who was looking at her, closed his eyes. He was sure that they would betray him, and when he ventured to open them again he had prudently averted his gaze. But though he looked elsewhere, he still saw her. He saw the hair that had enmeshed his heart like a snare, saw the eyes that held an inner sparkle--which was for him an altar fire.

"I'm not the sort of feller that can help missing his friends," he guardedly said, but his tongue felt dry and unwieldy.

Usually people were not so n.i.g.g.ardly as that with their compliments to Anne, and as she held a half-piqued silence Boone knew that she was offended, so his next question came with a stammering incert.i.tude.

"You _are_ a friend of mine, aren't you?"

She rose then from the rock where she had been sitting and stood there lance-like, with her chin high and her glance averted. To his question she offered no response save a short laugh, until the pulses in his temples began to throb, and once more he closed his eyes as one instinctively closes them under a wave of physical pain.

Boone had made valiant and chivalrous resolves of silence, but he had heard a laugh touched with bitterness from lips upon which bitterness was by nature alien.

"Anne!" he exclaimed in a frightened tone, "what made you laugh like that?"

Then she wheeled, and her words came torrentially. There was anger and perplexity and a little scorn in her voice but also a dominant disappointment.

"I mean, Boone Wellver, that I don't know how to take you. Sometimes I think you really like me--lots. Not just lumped in with everybody that you can manage to call a friend. I have no use for lukewarm friendships--I'd rather have none at all. You seem to be in deadly fear of spoiling me with your lordly favour."

The boy stood before her with a face that had grown ashen. It seemed incredible to him that she could so misconstrue his att.i.tude; an att.i.tude based on hard and studied self-control.

"You think that, do you?" he inquired in a low voice, almost fierce in its intensity. "Do you think I'm fool enough not to take thankfully what I can get, without crying for the moon?"

"What has the moon to do with it?" she demanded.

But the vow of silence which Boone had taken with the grave solemnity of a Trappist monk was no longer a dependable bulwark. The dam had broken.

"Just this," he said soberly. "You're as far out of my reach as the moon itself. You say I seem afraid to tell you that I really like you. I _am_ afraid. I'm so mortally afraid that I'd sworn I'd never tell you.... G.o.d knows that I couldn't start talking about that without saying the whole of it. I can't say I like you because I don't like you--I love you--I love you like--" The rapid flood of words broke off in abrupt silence.

Then the boy raised his hands and let them fall again in a gesture of despair. "There isn't anything in the world to liken it to," he declared.

Anne's eyes had widened in astonishment. She said nothing at all, and Boone waited, steeling himself against the expected sentence of exile.

Nothing less than banishment, he had always told himself, could be the penalty of such an outburst.

"Now," he continued in a bitter desperation, "I've done what I said I'd never do. I've foresworn myself and told you that I love you. I might as well finish ... because I reckon I can guess what _you'll_ say presently. From the first day when you came here, I've been in love with you.... I've never seen the evening star rise up over the Kaintuck'

Ridges that I haven't looked at it ... and thought of it as your own star.... I've never seen it either that I haven't said to myself, 'You might as well love that star,' and I've tried just to live from hour to hour when I was with you and not think about the day when you'd be gone away."

Anne still stood with wide and questioning eyes, but no anger had come into them yet. Her voice shook a little as she asked, "Just why do you think of me that way, Boone? Why am I--so far--out of reach?"

"Why!"--his question was an exclamation of amazement. "You've seen that cabin where I was born, haven't you? You know what your people call my people, don't you?... 'Poor white trash!' Between you and me there's a gorge two hundred years wide. Your folks are those that won the West, and mine are those that fell by the roadside and petered out and dry rotted."

As he finished the speech which had been such a long one for him, he stood waiting. Into the unsteady voice with which she put her last question he had read the reserve of controlled anger--such as a just judge would seek to hold in abeyance until everything was said. So he braced himself and tried not to look at her--but he felt that the length of time she held him in that tight-drawn suspense was a shade cruel--unintentionally so, of course.

The girl's face told him nothing either, at first, but slowly into the eyes came that scornful gleam that he had sometimes seen there when he sought to modify the risk involved in some reckless caprice of her own suggesting: a disdain for all things calculatedly cautious.

At last she spoke.

"You could say every one of those things about Lincoln," was her surprising p.r.o.nunciamento. "You could say most of them about Napoleon or any big man that won out on his own. When I brought you that little bust, I thought you'd like it. I thought you had that same kind of a spirit--and courage."

"But, Anne--"

"I didn't interrupt you," she reminded him. "My idea of a real man is one who doesn't talk timidly about gorges--whether they're two hundred years wide, as you call it, or not. Napoleon wouldn't have been let into a kitchen door at court--so he came in through the front way with a triumphal arch built over it. _He_ knocked down barriers, and got what he wanted."

"Then--" his voice rang out suddenly--"then if I can ever get up to where you stand I won't be 'poor white trash' to you?"

She shook her head and her eyes glowed with invincible spirit. "You'll be a man--that wasn't fainthearted," she told him honestly. "One that was brave enough to live his own life as I mean to live my own."

"Anne," he said fervently, "you asked me if I'd miss anything but the hills. I'll miss _you_--like--all h.e.l.l--because I love you like that."

They were on a mountain top, with no one to see them. They were almost children and inexperienced. They thought that they could lay down their plans and build their lives in accordance, with no deflection of time or circ.u.mstance. A few moments later they stood flushed with the intoxication of that miracle that makes other miracles pallid. The girl's breath came fast and her cheeks were pinkly flushed. The boy's heart hammered, and the leagues of outspread landscape seemed a reeling, whirling but ecstatically beautiful confusion. Their eyes held in a silent caress, and for them both all subsequent things were to be dated from that moment when he had impulsively taken her in his arms and she had returned his first kiss.

CHAPTER XIX

General Basil Prince sat in his law office one murky December morning of the year 1903. It was an office which bespoke the attorney of the older generation, and about it hung the air of an unadorned workship. If one compared it with the room in the same building where young Morgan Wallifarro worked at a flat-topped mahogany table, one found the difference between Spartan simplicity and sybarite elegance. But over one book case hung an ancient and battered cavalry sword, a relic of the days when the General had ridden with the "wizards of the saddle and the sabre."

Just now he was, for the second time, reading a letter which seemed to hold for him a peculiar interest.

"Dear General," it ran:

"Your invitation to come to Louisville and meet at your table that coterie of intimates of whom you have so often spoken is one that tempts me strongly--and yet I must decline.

"You know that my name is not McCalloway--and you do not know what it is. I think I made myself clear on that subject when you waived the circ.u.mstance that I am a person living in hermitage, because my life has not escaped clouding. You generously accepted my unsupported statement that no actual guilt tarnishes the name which I no longer use--yet despite my eagerness to know those friends of yours, those gentlemen who appeal so strongly to my imagination and admiration, I could not, in justice to you or to myself, permit you to foist me on them under an a.s.sumed name. I have resolved upon retirement and must stand to my resolution. The discovery of my actual ident.i.ty would be painful to me and social life might endanger that.

"I'll not deny that in the loneliness here, particularly when the boy is absent, there are times when, for the dinner conversation of gentlemen and ladies, I would almost p.a.w.n my hope of salvation. There are other times, and many, when for the feel of a sabre hilt in my hand, for the command of a brigade, or even a regiment, I would almost offer my blade for hire--almost but not quite.

"I must, however, content myself with my experiment; my wolf-cub.

"You write of my kindness to him, but my dear General, it is the other way about. It is he who has made my hermitage endurable, and filled in the empty s.p.a.ces of my life. My fantastic idea of making him the American who starts the pioneer and ends the modern, begins to a.s.sume the colour of plausibility.

"I now look forward with something like dread to the time when he must go out into a wider world. For then I cannot follow him. I shall have reached the end of my tutorship. I do not think I can then endure this place without him--but there are others as secluded.

"But my dear General, the very cordial tone of your letters emboldens me to ask a favour (and it is a large one), in this connection. When he has finished his course at college I should like to have him read law in Louisville. That will take him into a new phase of the development I have planned. He will need strong counsel and true friends there, for he will still be the pioneer with the rough bark on him, coming into a land of culture, and, though he will never confess it, he will feel the sting of cla.s.s distinctions and financial contrasts.

"There he will see what rapid transitions have left of the old South, and despite the many changes, there still survives much of its spirit.

Its fragrant bouquet, its fine traditions, are not yet gone. G.o.d willing, I hope he will even go further than that, and later know the national phases as well as the sectional--but that, of course, lies on the knees of the G.o.ds."