CHAPTER VI—BESIDE BEAUTIFUL WATERS

WHEN Gaston tried to sleep, he found it impossible. His brain was on fire, every nerve quivering with some new mysterious power and his imagination soaring on tireless wings. He rolled and tossed an hour, then got up, and sat by his open window looking out over the city sleeping in the still white moonlight. He looked into the mirror and grinned.

“What is the matter with me!” he exclaimed. “I believe I’m going crazy.”

He sat down and tried to work the thing out by the formulas of cold reason. “It’s perfectly absurd to say I’m in love. My wild romancing about a passion that will grasp all life in its torrent sweep is only a boy’s day dream. The world is too prosy for that now.”

Yet in spite of this argument the room seemed as bright as day, and the moon was only a pale sister light to the radiance from the face of the girl he had seen that day. Her face seemed to him smiling close into his now. The light of her eyes was tender and soothing like the far away memory of his mother’s voice.

“It’s a passing fancy,” he said at last, after he had sat an hour dreaming and dreaming of scenes he dared not frame in words even alone. He stood by the window again.

“What a beautiful old world this is after all!” he thought as he gazed out on the tops of the oaks whose young leaves were softly sighing at the touch of the night winds. Turning his eye downward to the street he saw the men loading the morning papers into the wagons for the early mail.

“I wonder what sort of report of my speech they put in?” he exclaimed. Unable to sleep he hastily dressed, went down and bought a paper.

On the front page was a flattering portrait, two columns in width, with a report of his speech filling the entire page, and an editorial review of a column and a half. He was hailed as the coming man of the state in this editorial, which contained the most extravagant praise. He knew it was the best thing he had ever done, and he felt for the minute proud of himself and his achievement. This contemplation of his own greatness quieted his nerves and he fell asleep. He was awakened by the first rolling of carts on the pavements at dawn. He knew he had not slept more than two hours but he was as wide awake as though he had slept soundly all night.

“I must be threatened with that spell of fever Auntie has been worrying about since I was a boy!” he laughed as he slowly dressed.

“It’s now six o’clock, and my train don’t leave till nine,” he mused. “But am I going on that train, that’s the question?”

The fact was, now he came to think of it, there was no need of hurrying home. He would stay a while and look this mystery in the face until he was disillusioned. Besides he wanted to find out what McLeod’s visit meant. He had a vague feeling of uneasiness when he recalled the way McLeod had assumed about the General’s house. He had told Sallie he must hurry home on the morning’s train for no earthly reason than that he had intended to do so when he came.

So after breakfast he wrote her a little note.

“My Dear Miss Worth,

“My train left me. Will you have compassion on a stranger in a strange city and let me call to see you again to-day? Charles Gaston.”

He waited impatiently until he heard his train leave, and then told the boy to make tracks for the General’s house.

A peal of laughter rang through the hall when Sallie’s dancing eyes read that note.

“Oh! the storyteller!” she cried.

And this was the answer she sent back.

“Certainly. Come out at once. I ’ll take you buggy driving all by myself over a lovely road up the river. I do this in acknowledgment of the gracious flattery you pay me in the story you told about the train. Of course I know you waited till the train left before you sent the note. Sallie Worth.”

“Now I wonder if that young rascal of a boy told her I wrote that note an hour ago? I ’ll wring his neck if he did. Come here boy!”

The negro came up grinning in hopes of another quarter.

“Did you tell that young lady anything about when I wrote that note?”

“Na-sah! Nebber tole her nuffin. She des laugh and laugh fit ter kill herse’f des quick es she reads de note.”

Gaston smiled and threw him another tip.

“Yassah, she’s a knowin’ lady, sho’s you bawn, I been dar lots er times fo’ dis!”

Gaston was tempted to ask him for whom he carried those former messages. He walked with bounding steps, his being tingling to his finger tips with the joy of living. The avenue leading the full length of the city toward the General’s house was two miles long before it reached the woods at the gate. It seemed only a step this morning.

As he passed through the cool shade of the woods a squirrel was playing hide and seek with his mate on the old crooked fence beside the road. His little nimble mistress flew up a great tree to its topmost bough and chattered and laughed at her lover as he scrambled swiftly after her. She waited until he was just reaching out his arm to grasp her, and then with another scream of laughter leaped straight out into the air to another tree top, and then another and another until lost in the heart of the forest.

“I wonder if that’s going to be my fate!” he mused as he turned into the gateway.

Again the majestic beauty of that gleaming mass of ivory on the hill with its green background swept his soul with its power. It seemed a different shade of colour now that he saw it with the sun at another angle. Its surface seemed to have the soft sheen of creamy velvet.

He paused and sighed, “Why should I be so poor! If I only had a house like that I’d turn that big banquet hall on the left wing into a library, and I’d ask no higher heaven.”

And he fell to wondering if it would really be worth the having without the face and voice of the girl who was there within waiting for him. No, he was sure of it this morning for the first time in his life. The certainty of this conviction brought to his heart a feeling of loneliness and despair. When he thought of his abject poverty and the long years of struggle before him, and of that beautiful accomplished young woman rich, petted, the belle of the city, the gulf that separated their lives seemed impassable.

“I’m playing with fire!” he said to himself as he looked up at the graceful pillars with their carved and fluted capitals. “Well, let it be so. Let me live life to its deepest depths and its highest reach. It is better to love and lose than never to love at all.” And he walked into the cool hall with the ease and assurance of its master.

Sallie greeted him with the kindliest grace.

“I’m so glad you stayed to-day, Mr. Gaston. I should have been really chagrined to think I made so slight an impression on you that you could walk deliberately away on a pre-arranged schedule. I am not used to being treated so lightly.”

He tried to make some answer to this half serious banter, but was so absorbed in just looking at her he said nothing.

She was dressed in a morning gown of a soft red material, trimmed with old cream lace. The material of a woman’s dress had never interested him before. He knew calico from silk, but beyond that he never ventured an opinion. To colour alone he was responsive. This combination of red and creamy white, with the bodice cut low showing the lines of her beautiful white shoulders and the great mass of dark hair rising in graceful curves from her full round neck heightened her beauty to an extraordinary degree. As she walked, the clinging folds of her dress, outlining her queenly figure, seemed part of her very being and to be imbued with her soul. He was dazzled with the new revelation of her power over him.

“Have you no apology, sir, for pretending that you were going home this morning?” she said seating herself by his side.

“You didn’t ask me to stay with fervour.”

“It ought not to have been necessary.”

“Didn’t you really know I was not going?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

“Yes, you see I’m twenty-one years old, and I’ve seen such things happen before!” she purred this slowly and burst into laughter.

“Now, Miss Sallie, that’s cruel to throw me down in a heap of dead dogs I don’t even know.”

“Don’t you like dogs?”

“Four legged ones, yes. But I like my friends alive.”

“Oh! It didn’t kill any of them. They are all strong and hearty. But if you’re so domestic in your tastes why haven’t you settled in life?”

“Been waiting to find the woman of my dreams.”

“And you haven’t found her?”

“Not up to yesterday.”

“Oh! I forgot,” she said archly, “you’re so timid.”

“Honestly, I was.”

“Up to yesterday!” she murmured. “Well, tell me what your dreams demanded? What kind of a creature must she be?”

“I have forgotten.”

“What! Forgotten the dreams of your ideal woman?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Yesterday.”

“Thanks. We are getting on beautifully, aren’t we? You will get over your timidity in time, I’m sure.”

He smiled, looked down at the pattern of the carpet and did not speak for some minutes. His soul was thrilled and satisfied in her presence. As he lifted his eyes from the floor they rested on the piano.

“Will you play for me, Miss Sallie? Auntie says you play delightfully.”

“Auntie? Who is Auntie?”

“Mrs. Durham, my foster mother, of course. Excuse my unconscious assumption of your familiarity with all my antecedents. I can’t get over the impression that I have known you all my life.”

“And that reminds me that I started to say something to you yesterday that was perfectly ridiculous, but caught myself in time.”

“I wish you had said it.”

“Mrs. Durham is a great flatterer of those she loves. She thinks I can play. But I’m the veriest amateur.”

“Let me be the judge.”

She was looking over her music, and he had opened the piano.

“I ’ll play for you with pleasure. Sit there in that big arm chair. I’m sorry I tired you so early in the day with my chatter.”

And before he could protest her fingers were touching the piano with the ease of the born musician.

He sat enraptured as he watched the sinuous grace with which her fingers touched the ivory keys and heard their answering cry which seemed the breath of her own soul in echo.

She had an easy apparently careless touch. To old familiar music she gave a charm that was new, adding something indefinable to the musician’s thought that gave luminous power to its interpretation. He had no knowledge of the technique of music, but now he knew that she was improvising. The piano was the voice of her own beautiful soul, and it was pulsing with a tenderness that melted him to tears.

Suddenly the music ceased, and she turned her face full on his before he could brush away a big tear that rolled down. She flushed, closed the piano, and quietly resumed her place by his side.

“And, now, you haven’t told me how well I played. You’re the first young man so careless.”

“I have told you.”

“How?”

“The way you told me yesterday that you understood me—with a tear.”

“I appreciate it more than words.”

“So did I,” he slowly said. Again there was a long silence.

“But we do love to hear folks say in words what they think sometimes. I confess I was immensely elated over the fine things the paper said about me this morning.”

“It’s a wonder too. Our editor is a cranky sort of fellow. I was afraid he’d say a lot of mean things about you. But Papa says you swallowed him whole.”

“Did you wish him to say kind things about me?”

“Of course,” she said, and then the look of mischief came back in her eye. “Were you not our guest? I should have felt like whipping him if he hadn’t said nice things.”

“Then I ’ll tell you what I think about your playing. You gave those strings a soul for the first time for me, beautiful, living, throbbing, that spoke a message of its own. The piece you improvised, I shall never forget. Such music seems to me the grasping of the infinite by hands that touch the impalpable and bringing it for a moment within the sphere of matter that a kindred soul may hear and see and feel.”

She started to make some reply but her lips quivered and she looked away across the valley at the river and made no answer.

At dinner the General was in his most genial mood, laughing and joking, and drawing out Gaston on politics and cotton-mill developments, and trying with all his might to tease his daughter.

As he took his departure for the mills, he said, “Young man, I’d ask you to go with me and look at the machinery, but I see it’s no use. I heard her twisting you around her fingers with that piano a while ago.”

“Papa, don’t be so silly!’ cried Sallie, slipping her arm around him, putting one hand over his mouth, and kissing him.

“Go on to your work. I ’ll entertain Mr. Gaston.”

“Indeed you will!” he shouted, throwing her another kiss as he left.

“He’s the dearest father any girl ever had in this world. I know you loved yours, didn’t you, Mr. Gaston?”

“Mine was killed in battle, Miss Sallie. I never knew him. But I had the most beautiful mother that ever lived. I lost her when a mere boy. And the world has never been the same since. I envy you.”

“I forgot. Forgive me,” she softly said, looking up into his face with tenderness.

“If I had only had a sister! How my heart used to ache when I’d see other boys playing with a sister! My poor little starved soul was so hungry, I would go off in the woods sometimes and cry for hours.”

“I wish I had known you when you were a little boy,—I can’t conceive of a dignified orator swaying thousands running around as a barefooted boy. But you must have gone barefooted for I think Papa said so, didn’t he?”

“Indeed I did, and sometimes I am afraid for the very good reason I didn’t have any shoes.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have worn them if you had. I always wanted to be a boy just to go barefooted. I think girls lose so much of a child’s life by having to wear shoes.”

“But you never knew what it meant to want shoes and not be able to have them,” he said, looking at the shining tips of her slippers peeping from the edge of her dress.

“No, but I never thought these things made a great difference in our lives after all. I believe it is what we are, not what we have, that gives life meaning.”

He looked at her intently.

“I must get ready now for our drive. The horse will be here in ten minutes. Enjoy the view on the porch until I am ready,” and she bounded up the stairs to her room.

In a few minutes she was by his side again dressed in spotless white as he had seen her first. She lifted the lines over the sleek horse, and he dashed swiftly down the drive.

Oh! the peace and bliss of that drive along the lonely river road by its cool green banks!

How he poured out to her his inmost thoughts—things he had not dared to whisper alone with himself and God! And then he wondered why he had thus laid bare his secret dreams to this girl he had known but twenty-four hours. Nonsense, down in his soul he knew he had known her forever. Before the world was made, ages and ages ago in eternity he had known her. He turned to her now drawn by a resistless force as a plant turns toward the sunlight for its life. How he could talk that day! All he had ever known of art and beauty, all he knew of the deep truths of life, were on his lips leaping forth in simple but impassioned words. For hours he lay at her feet where she sat on a rock, high up on the cliffs overlooking the river and poured out his heart like a child. And she listened with a dreamy look as though to the music of a master.

At last she sprang to her feet and looked at her watch.

“Oh! Mama will be furious. It will be after sundown before we can get home. We must hurry.”

“I ’ll make it all right with your Mama,” he replied as though he were skilled in meeting such emergencies.

“Don’t you speak to her. It ’ll be all I can do to manage her.”

The twilight was gathering when they reached the house, and an angry anxious mother was waiting high up on the stoop.

“Watch me smooth every wrinkle out of her brow now!” she whispered as she flew up the steps.

Before her mother could say a word, a white hand was on her mouth and pretty lips were whispering something in her ears she had never heard before. There was the sound of a kiss and he heard Sallie say, “Not a word!” And the mother greeted him with a smile and a curiously searching look. She chatted pleasantly until her daughter returned from her room, and then left her. Again it was nearly twelve o’clock before he reached the hotel.

The next morning Bob St. Clare broke in on him before he was out of bed.

“Look here, you sly dog, what are you doing slipping and sliding around here yet?”

“Bob, you’re the man I want to see. Tell me all you know about the Worths.”

“The Worths? Which one?”

“There’s only one so far as I can see.”

“Well, you may find out there’s two if you should happen to collide with the General.”

“Does he cut up at times?”

“He’s all right till he turns on you, and then you want to find shelter.”

“Did you ever run up against him?”

“No, I never got that far. He’s hail-fellow-well-met with every youngster in town. He will laugh and joke about his daughter until he thinks she is in earnest about a fellow, and then he swoops down on him like a hawk. I ’ll bet a hundred dollars he’s playing you now for all you’re worth against the latest favourite. But Miss Sallie—she’s an angel!”

“Look here, Bob, you’re not in love with her?”

“Well, I’m convalescing at present my boy. Every boy in the town has been there, but I don’t believe she cares a snap for a man of us unless it’s that big redheaded McLeod. I can’t make his position out exactly.”

“Did she jolt you hard when you hit the ground?”

“Easiest thing you ever saw. She has a supreme genius for painless cruelty. When the time comes she can pull your eye-tooth out in such a delicate friendly way you will have to swear she hasn’t hurt you.”

“You still go?”

“Lord yes, we all do,—sort of a congress of the lost meet down there. They all hang on. She keeps the friendship of every poor devil she kills.”

“You know you make the cold chills run down my back when you talk like that.”

“Are you in love with her, Gaston?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“Then what in the thunder have you been doing out there two days and nights, if you haven’t made love to her?”

“Just basking in the sun.”

“Well, you are a fool. Eleven hours the first day, and fifteen hours yesterday. Confound you, don’t you know a dozen fellows in town are cursing you for all they can think of?”

“What about?”

“Why for trying to hog the whole time, day and night. She won’t let a mother’s son of them come near till you’re gone.”

“Well, that’s immense!” exclaimed Gaston slapping his friend on the back.
233

“Don’t be too sure. She’s just sizing you up. She’s done the same thing a dozen times before.”

“I don’t believe it.”

And he didn’t go home until the end of the week when the last cent of his money was gone.