The Tempering Part 56

Anne sickened at the thought of her mother's disappointment and at the thought too of how, for her, the future was to be met. Then as if that were too gigantic a problem, her mind veered to lesser, yet disturbing, complications.

Today's papers had printed advance details of the wedding. The type of one heading seemed to stand at the moment before her eyes, "Happy Event of Interest to Society," but when she spoke somewhat timidly of these things to Morgan he contemptuously waved them aside.

"d.a.m.n the invitations and the wedding guests," he exclaimed. "We weren't getting married for their benefit. Leave that to me. The papers will announce that I've got to go to Europe--and that because of a turn in your mother's condition you've decided to defer the wedding until I come back. That's all they need to know."

He turned to the window and after a minute wheeled suddenly back.

"I have one thing still to ask. I have no longer any claim, of course.

But until three months have pa.s.sed--you won't send for Boone Wellver, will you?"

The girl's head came up with a tilted chin.

"I shall never send for him," she vehemently declared. "He's done with me and that's all there is to it!"

It was not undiluted fiction which Morgan gave to the morning papers that night, as he regretfully reported the sudden heart attack of Mrs.

Masters, which necessitated an eleventh hour postponement of his wedding. There had been a heart attack which might have been averted had the good lady been able to receive his tidings with a less flurried spirit, but that he did not regard it necessary to explain, and a flinty something in his eye discouraged unnecessary questions.

So Morgan set out alone on the trip which was to have been a honeymoon, and the lady whose dreams of a rehabilitated place in society had been dashed afforded her daughter a fulness of anxiety by hanging precariously between life and death.

It is doubtful whether those circles in which Anne and Morgan moved were wholly beguiled, and it is certain that sympathy followed the traveller.

"The engagement will never be renewed," mused an elderly lady who had been fond of Anne from childhood. "She won't take up again with her wild man of the mountains either, you may rest a.s.sured of that."

"But why?" challenged the gentleman to whom these sage observations were addressed. "Presumably a persistent interest in young Wellver caused this break with--"

A quiet laugh interrupted him, and the gentleman's eyes for some reason grew grave. He and the woman with whom he talked had been lovers once, engaged years upon years ago, and society had always wondered that neither of them had ever married. Now with snow upon both their heads he still sedately marched where he had once danced attendance upon her.

"Because," she soberly replied, "there is such a thing as letting the psychological moment go by. Life isn't all mating season."

"As to that," he entered dignified demurrer, "we have always disagreed."

The lady, ignoring the observation, went on, holding intact the thread of her reflections. "If the break with Boone had been remediable it would never have widened till so many months ran between them. No, she has given each his _conge_, and she hasn't a penny of her own in the world and--" She paused dramatically, and the man finished the sentiment for her in a less alarmed tone.

"It would seem to leave her flat; still she has a good mind and wonderful charm."

"Yes,"--the retort was dry. "The mind is untrained, and the charm is a menace."

Mrs. Masters died early that summer, though the physicians a.s.sured her self-accusing daughter that no possible connection of cause and effect could be traced between her death and the heart attack provoked by the doldrums of disappointment. But the girl's eyes were haunted when she came back from the funeral to the empty house, which was not her own house, and sat down, ghost-pale, against the black of her mourning. The world which she must now face was an absolutely changed world from which, as from dismantled furniture, all the easy cushioning and draperies had been ripped away, leaving sharp and uncovered angles of contact.

In it there was no place for her, save such a place as she could gain by invoking some miracle, for which she had no formula, to exchange b.u.t.terfly beauty for the provident effectiveness of the ant hill.

Morgan, whose frequent letters had gone unanswered, became obsessed with an anxiety which drove him homeward by a fast steamer that had seemed to him intolerably slow.

When its voyage had ended, a fog had held it in the harbour for half a day, and during that half day Morgan paced the decks, fuming over a dozen apprehensions.

It was to a Morgan Wallifarro unaccustomedly pale and agitated that the same lady, who had pessimistically forecast Anne's future, gave him, on his arrival at home, what information she could.

"No one seems to have her address, Morgan," she said. "I suppose she wanted, for a while, to be in new surroundings. As for myself, I had a brief note sent back with a book I'd lent her. She said that she was going to New York--but that was all, and when I telephoned she had gone."

"But her affairs must be arranged for her. She has nothing," protested the man desperately. "In G.o.d's name what is she going to do? How did she suppose I was going to find her?"

The lady laid a hand on the young man's elbow, and tears came into her own eyes,

"She didn't confide in me, Morgan. What I think is only guess-work--but I don't believe she wanted you to find her."

CHAPTER XLIII

To Boone Wellver, Louisville had become a city lying without the zone of personal experience. Like a steamer which has altered its sailings, he made it no longer a port of call.

That mad hiatus of apostacy, in which he had been willing to throw down all the shrines of his acquired faith, had become to him an evil dream of the past--yet out of it something had remained. The fog which had bemused him then had left uncleared certain minors of realization. Just as he had not yet recognized that the Commonwealth's attorney had sent him away unsatisfied because he had come making his demands to the arrogant tune of insult, so he failed, too, to appreciate that Anne had held the silence, which, without her permission, he was resolved not to break, because he had violently rebuffed her.

He had refused to read the papers on the day set for her wedding, because he could not bear the torture of what he had expected to find there, and McCalloway had not spoken of the postponement because it fell within the boundaries of a topic upon which he had set a ban of silence, unless the younger man broached it. So with what would have seemed an impossible coincidence, it was weeks later that Boone ceased to flagellate himself with the thought of a honeymoon that had never begun.

Even then he, unlike the more sophisticated of the circle to which he had once been admitted, accepted without question the reason given for the deferred marriage, and saw for himself no brightening of possibility.

With the curtain rung down on the thrilling drama whose theme had been dominated by love, work seemed to Boone increasingly the motif of things. Service appeared more and more the purpose meant in the blind gropings of existence toward some end. Otherwise there was nothing.

But one day long after all this, when the months had run to seasons, Boone broke his law of self-appointed exile and went to Louisville. He did not go from Marlin Town but came the other way--from Washington.

For now the mountain man had his place on Capitol Hill and no longer felt the uncertainty of diffidence in answering when he heard himself recognized from the speaker's chair as "the gentleman from Kentucky."

It was not at all the Washington he had pictured. In many ways it was a more wonderful, and in many a less wonderful, place than that known from photographs and print and fancy.

Life had caught him out of meagre and primitive beginnings and led him, for a while, through corridors of romanticism. Before his eyes, imagination-kindled, had been the colours of dreams and the beckoning of an evening star. The colours had been evanescent, and the star had set.

The corridor of visionary promise had come to an end, and its door had opened on Commonplace.

He told himself that he was done with romance. In his life it had been, perhaps, necessary as a stage through which experience must lead him.

Henceforth his deity was to be Reason, a cold and austere G.o.ddess but a constant one.

But Boone did not quite know himself. Sentiment still lay as strong in him as the spring life that sleeps under the winter sleet. The man in whom it does not survive is one whose spiritual arteries have hardened.

One lesson he modestly believed he had learned out of his journeying from his log-cabin down to the Bluegra.s.s and up to Capitol Hill. He had become an apostle of Life's mutability, chained to no fixed post of unplastic thought.

Upon these things his reflections had been running as he made the journey back to Kentucky, and of them he was thinking now, as, having arrived, he stood with bared head in the billowing stretches of Cave Hill Cemetery.

Victor McCalloway had been in Marlin County hardly at all during these last two years and he was not there now. As usual, when the veteran was absent, Boone had no idea to what quarter of the globe, or in response to what mysterious call, his steps had turned. He thought, though, that it would be his preceptor's wish to be represented as the body of General Prince was lowered to its last rest.

He saw again in memory two figures before a cabin hearth, debating with the heat of devotees, the calibre and qualities of today's and yesterday's military leaders in general, of Hector Dinwiddie in particular. He saw himself again sitting huddled in the chimney corner, nursing the patched knees of an illiterate boy.

Now one was dead--he could not even be sure that both were not dead--and Boone, no longer in homespun, had come from Washington to uncover his head under the winter sky as the words of the last rites were spoken over the body of General Prince.

Into that grave, it seemed to him, was going something unreplaceable.

This man was the embodiment of a pa.s.sing tradition, almost of a dead era, in the altering life of the nation itself.

The ideas and beliefs for which his early life had stood were already buried, and now he lay himself at rest, a link between present and past--as much an exemplification of chivalry as though his feet had been crossed and his sword laid in the crusader's posture of repose.