The Voice of the People Part 36

"Did she happen to say anything about--Dudley?" he inquired.

"Oh, yes. She said he sent me a message in a letter."

"Did she tell you what 'twas?"

"No. I didn't ask her."

He put the stem of his pipe between his teeth and hung on it desperately for a moment; then he took it out again.

"He's a fine young fellow," he said at last. "I don't know a finer--and, bless my soul! I'd see you married to him to-morrow."

But Eugenia laughed and beat his shoulder.

"You don't want to see me married to anybody," she said, "and you know it."

At the end of the ensuing week Dudley came to Kingsborough, and upon the first evening of his visit he walked out to Battle Hall. He was looking smooth and well groomed, and the ma.s.s of his thick dark hair waving over his white brow gave him an air of earnestness and ardour. Eugenia wondered that she had never noticed before that he was like the portrait of an old-time orator, and that his hands were finely rounded.

His voice, with its suggestion of suavity, fell soothingly on her nerves. She had never liked him so much, and she had never shown it so plainly. Once as she met his genial gaze she held her breath at the marvel that he should grow to love her, and in vain. Was it that beside his splendid shallows the more luminous depths of Nicholas's nature still showed supreme? Or was it a question of fate--and of first and last? Had Dudley come upon her in the red sunset, in the little shanty beside the road, would she have gone out to him in the mere leaping of youth and womanhood? Was it the moment, after all, and not the man? Or was it something more unerring still--more profound--the prophetic call of individual to individual, despite the specious pleading of the race?

But she put the thought aside and returned casually to Dudley.

His heartiness was a tonic, and her vanity responded to the unaffected admiration in his eyes; but his chief claim to her regard lay in the fact that it was the general, and not herself, whom he endeavoured to propitiate.

"Well, my dear General!" he exclaimed cordially as he threw himself upon the worn horsehair sofa in what was called the "sitting-room," "I find your story about the fighting Texans capped by one Major Mason was telling me last night about the North Carolinians--" He got no farther.

"I've fought side by side with North Carolina regiments, and I tell you, sir, they're the best fighters G.o.d ever made!" cried the general. "Did you ever hear that story about 'em when I was wounded?"

Dudley shook his head and leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees and an expression of flattering absorption on his face.

"I can't recall it now, sir," he delightfully lied.

The general cleared his throat, laid his pipe aside, and drew up his chair.

"It was in my last battle," he began. "You know I got that ball in my shoulder and was laid up when Lee surrendered--well, sir, I was propped up there close by a company of those raw-boned mountaineers from North Carolina, and they stood as still as the pine wood behind 'em, while their colonel swore at 'em like mad.

"'d.a.m.n you for a troop of babies!' he yelled. 'Ain't you goin' into the fight? Can't you lick a blamed Yankee?' And, bless your soul! those scraggy fellows stood stock still and sung out:

"'We ain't mad!'

"Well, sir, they'd no sooner yelled that back than a bullet whizzed along and took off one of their own men, and, on my oath, the bullet hadn't ceased singing in my ears before that company charged the enemy to a man--and whipped 'em, too, sir--whipped 'em clean off the field!"

He paused, clapped his knee, and roared.

"That's your North Carolinian," he said. "He's a G.o.d Almighty fighter, but you've got to make him mad first."

Miss Chris brought her knitting to the lamp, and Eugenia, sitting with her hands in her lap, followed the conversation with abstracted interest.

It was not until Dudley rose to go that he came over to her and took her hand.

"Good-night," he said, his ardent eyes upon her. "I'm to have that ride to-morrow? You know I came for it."

The unreasoning blood beat in her face as she turned away, and she was conscious that he had seen and misconstrued the senseless blush. It was her misfortune to go red or pale without cause and to show an impa.s.sive face above deep emotion.

The next morning she rode with Dudley, and the day after he came out before returning to Richmond. She experienced a certain pleasure in the contact with his bouyant optimism, but it was not without a sensation of relief that she watched him depart after his last visit. It seemed to leave her more to herself--and to Nicholas.

That afternoon she walked with him far across the fields, and they laid together phantasmal foundations of their future lives. Perhaps the chief thing to be said of their intercourse was that it was to each a mental stimulant as well as an emotional delight. Eugenia's quick, untutored mind, which had run to seed like an uncultivated garden, blossomed from contact with his practical, unpolished intellect. He taught her logic and a little law; she taught him poetry and pa.s.sion. He argued his cases to her and swept her back into the days of his old political dreams--dreams from which he had awakened, but which still hovered as memories in his waking hours. Sometimes he brought his books to Battle Hall, and they read together beneath the general's unseeing eyes; but more often they sat side by side in the pasture or the wood, the volume lying open between them. He was the first man who had ever spurred her into thought; she was the first woman he had ever loved.

As they walked across the fields this afternoon they drifted back to the question of themselves and their own happiness. It was only a matter of waiting, she said, of the patient pa.s.sage of time; and they were so sure of each other that all else was unimportant--to be disregarded.

"But am I sure of you?" he demanded.

It was not a personal distrust of Eugenia that he voiced; it was the hardened state of disbelief in his own happiness which showed itself when the first intoxication of pa.s.sion was lived out.

"Why, of course you are," she readily rejoined. "Am I not sure of you?

You are as much mine as my eyes--or my hand."

"Oh, I am different!" he exclaimed. "A beggar doesn't prove faithless to a princess--but what do you see in me, after all?"

She laughed. "I see a very moody lover."

They had reached a little deserted spring in the pasture called "Poplar Spring," after the six great poplars which grew beside it. Eugenia seated herself on a fallen log beside the tiny stream which trickled over the smooth, round stones, bearing away, like miniature floats, the yellow leaves that fell ceaselessly from the huge branches above.

"I don't believe you know how I love you," he said suddenly.

"Tell me," she insatiably demanded.

"If I could tell you I shouldn't love you as I do. There are some things one can't talk about--but you are life itself--and you are all heaven and all h.e.l.l to me."

"I don't want to be h.e.l.lish," she put in provokingly.

"But you are--when I think you may slip from me, after all."

The yellow leaves fluttered over them--over the fallen log and over the bright green moss beside the little spring. As Eugenia turned towards him, a single leaf fell from her hair to the ground.

"Oh! You are thinking of Dudley Webb!" she said, and laughed because jealousy was her own darling sin.

"Yes, I am thinking--" he began, when she stopped him.

"Well, you needn't. You may just stop at once. I--love--you--Nick--Burr.

Say it after me."

He shook his head. Her hand lay on the log beside him, and his own closed over it. As it did so, she contrasted its hardened palm with the smooth surface of Dudley Webb's. The contrast touched her, and, with a swift, warm gesture, she raised the clasped hands to her cheek.

"I told you once I liked your hand," she said. "Well--I love it."

He turned upon her a hungry glance.

"I would work it to the bone for you," he answered. "But--it is long to wait."

"Yes, it is long to wait," she repeated, but her tone had not the heaviness of his. Waiting in its wider sense means little to a woman--and in a moment she cheerfully returned to a prophetic future.