The Romance of a Plain Man Read online

  CHAPTER XII

  I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE

  My sleep that night was broken by dreams of roses and pink-shaded lamps.For the first time in my life my brain and body alike refused rest, andthe one was illumined as by the rosy glow of a flame, while the otherwas scorched by a fever which kept me tossing sleeplessly between Mrs.Clay's lavender-scented sheets. At last when the sun rose, I got out ofbed, and hurriedly dressing, went up Franklin Street, and turned intoone of the straight country roads which led through bronzed levels ofbroomsedge. Eastward the sun was ploughing a purple furrow across thesky, and toward the south a single golden cloud hung over some thinstretches of pine. The ghost of a moon, pale and watery, was riding low,after a night of high frolic, and as the young dawn grew stronger, Iwatched her melt gradually away like a face that one sees through smoke.The October wind, blowing with a biting edge over the broomsedge, bentthe blood-red tops of the sumach like pointed flames toward the road.

  For me a new light shone on the landscape--a light that seemed to haveits part in the high wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the risingsun. For the first time since those old days in the churchyard I feltwith every fibre of me, with every beat of my pulses, with every drop ofmy blood, that it was good to be alive--that it was worth while everybit of it. My starved boyhood, the drudgery in the tobacco factory, thebreathless nights in the Old Market, the hours when, leaning overJohnson's Dictionary, I had been obliged to pinch myself to keep wideawake--the squalor out of which I had come, and the future into which Iwas going--all these were a part to-day of this strange new ecstasy thatsang in the wind and moved in the waving broomsedge.

  And through it all ran my thoughts: "How fragrant the white rose was inher hair! How tremulous her mouth! Are her eyes grey or green, and is itonly the heavy shadow of her lashes that makes them appear black attimes, as if they changed colour with her thoughts? Is it possible thatshe could ever love me? If I make a fortune will that bring me anynearer to her? Obscure as I am my cause is hopeless, but even if I wererich and powerful, should I ever dare to ascend the steps of that housewhere I had once delivered marketing at the kitchen door?"

  The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with mybasket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged,barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the greatsycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life thethought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as shehad stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holdingher mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me withher sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes,dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later,as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her housesof moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as awoman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her alittle above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on.

  The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and Iwent over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was shemerely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaningin her divine smile--in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you havewon!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of herbosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modestor humble I had never been. The will to fight--the exaggeratedself-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has madehis way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking therethat morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and theblood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which Ihad carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep.She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was thatbecause she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for hersake?--that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well asto achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered,have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but withno social manner," the voice had said of me, and the words burned now,hot with shame, in my memory. The recollection of my fall in the dance,of the crying lips of the pretty girl in pink tarlatan, while she stoodholding her ruined flounce, became positive agony. What did she think ofmy boorishness? Was I, for her also, merely a magnificent animal? Hadshe noticed how ill at ease I felt in my evening clothes? O young Love,young Love, your sharpest torments are not with arrows, but with pinpricks!

  A trailing blackberry vine, running like a crimson vein close to theearth, caught my foot, and I stooped for a minute. When I looked up shewas standing clear against the reflected light of the sunrise, where alow hill rose above the stretches of broomsedge. Her sorrel mare wasbeside her, licking contentedly at a bright branch of sassafras; and Isaw that she had evidently dismounted but the moment before. As Iapproached, she fastened her riding skirt above her high boots, andkneeling down on the dusty roadside, lifted the mare's foot and examinedit with searching and anxious eyes. Her three-cornered riding hat hadslipped to her shoulders, where it was held by a broad black band ofelastic, and I saw her charming head, with its wreath of plaits, definedagainst the golden cloud that hung above the thin stretch of pines. Atmy back the full sunrise broke, and when she turned toward me, her gazewas dazzled for a moment by the flood of light.

  "Let me have a look," I said, as I reached her, "is the mare hurt?"

  "She went lame a few minutes ago. There's a stone in her foot, but Ican't get it out."

  "Perhaps I can."

  Rising from her knees, she yielded me her place, and then stood lookingdown on me while I removed the stone.

  "She'll still limp, I fear, it was a bad one," I said as I finished.

  Without replying, she turned from me and ran a few steps along the road,calling, "Come, Dolly," in a caressing voice. The mare followed withdifficulty, flinching as she put her sore foot to the ground.

  "See how it hurts her," she said, coming back to me. "I'll have to leadher slowly--there's no other way."

  "Why not ride at a walk?"

  She shook her head. "My feet are better than a lame horse. It's not morethan two miles anyway."

  "And you danced all night?"

  I hung the reins over my arm and we turned together, facing the sunrise.

  "Yes, but the way to rest is to run out-of-doors. Are you often up withthe dawn, too?"

  "No, but I couldn't sleep. The music got into my head."

  "Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour."

  "And this is your road?"

  "Not always. I go different ways. This one I call theroad-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches aglorious view."

  "Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on theroad-to-what-is-to-be."

  She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder whythey say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observedmockingly.

  "I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life Icouldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady inpink tarlatan whose dress I tore."

  "Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with youagain."

  "She's perfectly safe to vow it."

  "Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know,I like you better out-of-doors."

  "Out-of-doors?"

  "Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your naturalbackground somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous."

  "His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't thebest of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge."

  "Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with yourhair--it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too muchroom among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goespoor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets offyour head--and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, withme,
you are in your native element."

  "Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessyfitting into the picture?"

  "To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Hernative element is pink tarlatan."

  "And yours?" I demanded.

  "That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face likean edge of light.

  "The sunrise," I answered.

  "Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," shereplied.

  "You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."

  Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered fromchildhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking andirresistible trick of expression.

  "Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson'sDictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from theGeneral besides those in speculations?"

  I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and thetimidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky."Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was theGeneral. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of SirCharles Grandison."

  "Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it fromthe General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."

  "Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."

  "He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes,I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged tobe married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before thewedding she found out some dreadful things about his life--and shebehaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman ofhonour.' He--he ought to have married another woman, but even after AuntMatoaca gave him up, he refused to do it--and this was what she nevergot over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no manwould have spoken to him, she said--and can you believe it?--shedeclined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately inlove with him all the time. She only began again when he got old andgouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't helpdisliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that hehas never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It'sbecause she's so perfectly honourable, I think--but, of course, it isher terrible experience that has made her so--so extreme in her views."

  "What are her views?"

  "She calls them principles--but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she'sright, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs insilence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that,however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the Generalhas acted."

  "I hope she isn't still in love with him?"

  Her clear rippling laugh--the laugh of a free spirit--fluted over thebroomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love withone's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she'sin love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. Iknow it's her own past that makes her think all the time about thewrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, andhave a voice in the government. Do you?"

  "I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wifeto go to the polls," I answered.

  Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?--that when you ask a mananything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even whenhe hasn't got one?"

  "That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose."

  "Do you want one very badly?" she taunted.

  "Dreadfully--the one I want."

  "A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?"

  "No, a living lady in a riding habit."

  If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hopewas fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlesslyto the dust of the road.

  "An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison,"she retorted.

  "Just now it was the General that I resembled."

  "Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attemptto break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."

  The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,--I who hadstood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare asI might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour ofsex, into her sparkling eyes.

  "And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly.

  "Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics."

  "I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," Isaid.

  With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance,straight and full, like a gallant boy.

  "Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it."

  We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy whichto me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly.

  "You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all mylife," I said.

  "The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" sheasked.

  "Only to the end of the _c_'s. Don't credit me, please, with the wholealphabet."

  "The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn the _a_,_b_, _c_'s of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?"

  "If you wish it I will tell you what it was."

  For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is FranklinStreet, and in a little while we shall be at home."

  "It is not long--it is very short. It is a single word of threeletters."

  "I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?"

  "Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters."

  "What an elastic word!"

  "It is, for it has covered everything at which I looked--both the earthand the sky."

  "And the General and the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad?"

  "Without that word the General and the railroad would have beennothing."

  "How very much obliged to it the poor General must be!"

  "Will you hear it?" I asked, for when I was once started to the goalthere was no turning me by laughter.

  She raised her eyes, which had been lowered, and looked at me long anddeeply--so long and deeply that it seemed as if she were seekingsomething within myself of which even I was unconscious.

  "Will you hear it?" I asked again.

  Her gaze was still on mine. "What is the word?" she asked, almost in awhisper.

  At the instant I felt that I staked my whole future, and yet that it wasno longer in my power to hesitate or to draw back. "The word is--you," Ireplied.

  Her hand dropped from the mare's neck, where it had almost touched mine,and I watched her mouth grow tremulous until the red of it showed in aviolent contrast to the clear pallor of her face. Then she turned herhead away from me toward the sun, and thoughtful and in silence, wepassed down Franklin Street to the old grey house.