CHAPTER XVII
Beyond the goal of getting through college in three years, Boone had planned his future but vaguely. He might seek election to the Legislature, when he came of qualifying age, and strive upwards from that beginning toward Congress and the larger rewards of a political life. For such a career the law was a necessary preparation, so while he was still in college he began its reading.
Whenever he went home from the university he saw Happy, and in the tacit fashion of simple souls their neighbourhood fell to speaking of "Boone and Happy," as though the linking of their names was natural and logical, and in local gossip it was almost as though they were betrothed.
Happy had other suitors, more than a few of them indeed, drawn to the Spradling house by her beauty. Along those neighbourhood creeks, from the trickles where they "headed up" to the mouths where they emptied, there were few girls who could hope to compete with her loveliness of sloe-eyes, dusky hair and slender grace of body. But the old wives shook their heads, saying, "Happy Spradling wouldn't hurt a fly – but jest ther same she's breakin' hearts right an' left because she's mortgaged ter Boone Wellver – an' she's jest a'waitin' fer him."
Old Cyrus already looked on him as a son – and Boone spoke as little of Anne Masters as he would have spoken of the things sealed in Masonic secrecy.
Happy's school was one which arranged its terms and vacations in accordance with local exigencies. Crop planting and gathering had the right of way over text-books, and so it happened that when Anne was at Marlin Town, Happy was usually at school – and their ways did not cross.
Yet each summer, too, as a man may go from the provinces to court and yet not delude himself with the hallucination that he is a courtier, Boone went over to Marlin Town. For every summer Anne Masters came for a few weeks to visit the father, who held his position there, remote from the things that, to his thinking, made up the values of life.
During these periods Boone found life a strange and paradoxical pattern, woven of a web of ecstasy and a woof of torture. Since that night when he had dragged suddenly at his bridle curb and had told himself, "I might as well fall in love with a star up there in heaven," he had never departed from his resolute conviction that it would be sheer insanity for him to entertain any thought of Anne, save that of the willing and faithful slave who would joyously have laid his life down for her.
She dominated his world of boyhood dreams, and since he was not deaf to the talk about himself and "Cyrus Spradling's gal," he wondered if he ought not to tell Happy the whole truth. But after long reflection he shook his head.
"It would only hurt Happy, like telling her about dreams that come at night – of some sort of heaven where I don't see her, herself." And so he did not tell her.
One day in the spring of the year when Anne was sixteen, Mrs. Larry Masters dropped into the office of her kinsman, Tom Wallifarro, to talk over some small matter of business. It was one of the regrets of the lady's life – a life somewhat touched and frost-bitten by bitterness – that all of her business was small. It was, however, one of her compensations that this gentleman gave to her petty affairs as much care and consideration as to the major features of his large practice.
"My dear," observed the Colonel irrelevantly as he looked at the weary eyes of the woman who had in her day been an almost famous beauty, "you seem worried. You are altogether too young to let lines creep into your face."
Mrs. Masters laughed mirthlessly.
"I have a daughter growing up. I am ambitious for her. She has charm, grace, breeding – and she's the poor member of a rich family. Such things bring wrinkles around maternal eyes, Cousin Tom."
"Happily she lives in Kentucky," the lawyer reminded his visitor. "We are yet provincial enough to think something of blood, even when it's not gilded with money."
"Yes, thank God – and thanks to you, she has had educational advantages. If Larry had only had business sense – but I can't talk patiently about Larry."
"No – I wish you could bring yourself to think of him more indulgently, but – " Colonel Tom knew the fruitlessness of that line of counsel, so he brushed lightly by to other topics. "But that isn't what I wanted to talk about. I think Morgan ought to travel abroad for several months, don't you?"
Mrs. Masters sighed. There was a thought in her mind which had long been there. If Morgan and Anne could be brought to a fancy for each other, her problem in life would be settled. The girl would no longer be a charity child. But what she said was an amendment to the original thought. "Isn't he a bit inexperienced – and headstrong yet, to be turned loose alone in Europe?"
The Colonel's eyes twinkled. "I mean to have a check-rein on him."
"What fashion of check-rein, Cousin Tom?"
"I thought," said the lawyer off-handedly, since he always surrounded his beneficences with a show of the casual, "that it would be a good thing for Anne too. Now if you and she and Morgan made a European trip together, the responsibility of two ladies on his hands would steady the young scapegrace."
Mrs. Masters almost gasped in her effort to control her delighted astonishment. Morgan had always thought of Anne as a "kid" to be teased and badgered, and of himself as a very finished and mature young gentleman. Now they would see each other in a new guise. Their eyes might be opened. In short, the possibilities were immense.
"Your goodness to us – " she began feelingly, but the Colonel cleared his throat and raised a hand in defence against the embarrassment of verbal gratitude.
A month later the three sat in the salle-a-manger of the Elysée Palace Hotel, by a window that commanded a view of the Arc de Triomphe, and many things had happened. Among them was the surprising discovery by the young man, that while few eyes seemed concerned with him, many turned toward Anne, and having turned, lingered.
Only last night they had been to a dance, and Anne had been so occupied with uniforms that she had found no time to waltz with him – though he was sure that he danced circles about these stiff-kneed gentry with petty titles.
Now over the petit déjeuner he took his young and inconsiderate cousin to task.
"Last night, Anne, I camped on your trail all evening, and you couldn't manage to slip me in one dance. Nothing would do but goggling Britishers and smirking frog-eaters. I'm getting jolly well fed up with these foreigners."
Anne lifted her brows, but her eyes sparkled mischief.
"Oh, Morgan, I can dance with you any time," she assured him. "You're just kin-folks. Is it because you're 'jolly well fed up' with foreigners that you like to ape English slang?"
The young man blushed hotly, but he chose to ignore the question with which she had capped her response. Inasmuch as it was a fair hit, he had need to ignore it, but his eyes snapped with furious indignation. "Anne, I don't understand you," he announced in a carefully schooled voice. "You can play with absurd little dignitaries, or with mountain illiterates – anything abnormal – but for your own blood – " He paused there a moment, searching his abundant and sophomoric vocabulary for the exact combination of withering words; and, while he hesitated, she interrupted in a tone which was both quiet and ominous:
"Let's take up one thing at a time, Morgan. Just who is the illiterate in the mountains?"
"You know as well as I do – Boone Wellver."
"Boone Wellver. I thought so. At all events, he's a man, even if he's not quite twenty-one yet."
"A man: that is to say, a specimen of the genus homo. So is the fellow that brought in the eggs just now. So is the chap that drives the taxi." The young aristocrat shrugged his shoulders and snapped his fingers in excellent imitation of Gallic expressiveness; then as Anne's twinkle reminded him of his being "jolly well fed up with foreigners," the change in his tone became as abrupt as the break in a boy's altering voice, and he added: "The point is that he's hardly a gentleman. I commend his ambition – but there's something in birth as well. Unless you attach some importance to the elegances and nuances of life, you are only a member of the mob."
"The elegances of life – as, for instance" – the dancing sparkle stole mischievously back into the blue eyes and the voice took on a purring softness – "as, for instance, the handling of the small sword – or fencing foil?"
Morgan rose petulantly from the table and pushed back his chair. "If you ladies will excuse me," he announced with superdignity, "I will leave you for a while to your own devices."
Anne's laughter pursued him in exit with an echo of musical mockery.
But that evening Mrs. Larry Masters posted a letter to Colonel Tom Wallifarro.
"Morgan has discovered Anne!" she said in part. "He has been too close to her until now to realize her attractiveness; but she has been noticed by other men, and at last Morgan is awake. They have quarrelled, and next to making love that's the most significant of developments. My dear kinsman and benefactor, you know what our mutual hope has been, and I think its fulfilment is not so far away! Tonight when I sipped my claret at dinner I drank a silent toast, 'To my girl and your boy.'"
While Mrs. Masters was writing that note, her daughter was sitting at another desk in the same room, and her letter was addressed to a post-office back of Cedar Mountain.
When Boone received that second missive, he turned the envelope over in his hand and gazed at it for a long while. Even then he did not open it until he sat alone in a place where the forests were silent, save for the call of a blue-jay and the diligent rapping of a "cock of the woods" who was sapping and mining for grubs.
The boy held between thumb and forefinger an envelope of a sort he had never seen before, of thin outer paper over a dark coloured lining. In one corner was a stamp of the French Republic, and there in writing that had crossed the sea was his name and address.
"She found time to write to me," he said rapturously to himself, and then dropping intentionally and whimsically into his old, childhood speech he added, nodding his head sagely to a pert squirrel that frisked its tail near by, "She's done writ me a letter cl'ar from t'other world."
It was that same summer, when Anne had gone to Europe, that Boone came back from college, very serious and taciturn, and McCalloway was prompt to guess the reason.
"You went down to Louisville, didn't you?" he inquired, as the two sat by the doorstep on the day of the boy's return, and Boone nodded.
The man did not nag him with questions. His seasoned wisdom contented itself with smoking on in silence, and after a little the lad jerked his head.
"I reckon you know what took me there – sir."
The final word came in afterthought. No mountaineer says "sir," by habit.
A part of that stubborn independence which is at once the virtue and the fault of the race balks at even such small measure of implied deference, but Boone had noticed that "down below," where courtesy flowers into graciousness, the form of address was general.
McCalloway responded slowly.
"Yes, I can guess your errand there. How is he?"
The boy's eyes gazed off across the slopes through contracted lids, and his voice came in deliberate but repressed tenseness.
"I hunted up Colonel Wallifarro's office and he went over there with me… I reckon, except for that, they wouldn't have let me see him."
He paused, and the man thoughtfully observed, "No, I fancy not."
"You go into that jail-house through a stone door, and there's a rough-lookin' feller settin' – I mean sitting – there in front of another door made of iron gratin's as thick as crowbars… The place don't smell good."
"Isn't it well kept?" inquired McCalloway in some surprise, and the boy hastily explained.
"I don't mean that it plum stinks. I reckon it's as clean as a jail can be, but the air is stale – even out on the street that lowland air is flat… It don't taste right in a man's throat… Asa was reared up here in these free hills. He's like a caged hawk down there."
The soldier nodded sympathetically.
"Did he – seem well?"
"He hasn't sickened none … but his face used to be right colourful… Now it's pale … and sort of gray-like… Of course a turnkey went along with us, and we didn't talk with him by himself… I reckon he didn't say none of the things he craved most to say… He was right silent-like."
The boy broke off, and for a while the two sat in silence. When Boone took up the thread of his narrative again, there was something like a catch in his throat.
"They were pretty polite to us there… They showed us all over the place … they even took us to the death row… There was a nigger in there that was goin' ter be hung next morning at daybreak… I reckon he's dead now… A feller kept walkin' back and forth in front of that cell … and an electric light was burnin' there full bright… That nigger, neither night ner day … could ever git away from that light… They were afraid he might seek ter kill hisself… He come ter the bars an' said, 'Howdy, white folks,' … an' then he went back an' sat down on the ledge that he sleeps on."
The recital, painfully punctuated with its frequent pauses, halted there. It was a matter of several minutes before it began again. Now the voice was laboured, as if the speaker were panting for breath, and the careful pronunciation relapsed wildly into the older and ruder forms of solecism.
"They tuck us out an' … showed us the cement yard … whar the gallows stood… It was painted a sort of brownish red… It put me in mind of dried blood. The nigger could hear the hammers whilest they set the thing up… Asa could hear 'em too… Asa hed done seed ther scaffold hisself … through the winder-bars when … he exercised … in the corrider… But when I looked at the nigger thet's dead by now … seemed like it was Asa I saw … with thet lamp glarin' in on him, daylight and night time alike…" The voice leaped into a soblike vehemence. "Thet's what Judas money dogged him to! Seemed like … I couldn't endure it!"
CHAPTER XVIII
So if the time ever came when Boone stood face to face with Saul Fulton, it would, for all the amendment of his new life, be a moment of desperate crisis. The pig iron of his half-savage beginning had been made malleable and held promise of tempered and flexible steel – but the metal was still feudist ore. McCalloway comforted himself with the reflection that Saul was not likely to return, but did not delude himself into forgetting that strange perversity which seems to draw the mountaineer inevitably back to his crags and woods, even in the face of innumerable perils. Some day Saul might attempt to slip back, and Boone would almost inevitably hear of his coming. Then for a day or an hour, the lad might relapse into his old self, even to the forgetting of his pledge. Such an inconsidered day or an hour would be enough to wreck his life.
Carefully and adroitly, therefore, McCalloway played upon the softer strings of life, and sometimes, to that end, he opened a hitherto closed door upon the events of his own life, and let his protégé look in on glimpses that were sacredly guarded from other eyes.
One summer night, for example, Boone laid down a book and said suddenly, "It tells here about a fellow winning the Star of India and the Victoria Cross. I'd love to see one of those medals."
Silently McCalloway rose and went over to the folding desk, to come back with his battered dispatch box. He unlocked it and laid out before the boy not one decoration, but several. The ribbons were somewhat faded now, and the metal tarnished; but Boone bent forward, and his face glowed with the exaltation of one admitted to precincts that are sacrosanct. For a long while he studied the maltese cross with its lion-surmounted crown and its supporting bar chased with rose leaves; the cross that bears the Queen's name, for which men brave death. Beside it lay the oval, showing Victoria's profile, and the gilt inscription on a blue enamelled margin: "Heaven's Light Our Guide." A star caught it to its white-edged blue riband – and that was the coveted Star of India.
Here before his eyes – eyes that burned eagerly – were the priceless trifles that he had never hoped to see. The modest gentleman who had, for his sake, relinquished fresh honours in China, had won them, and until now had never spoken of them, but Boone knew that they are not lightly gained – and that in no way can they be bought.
A sudden and unaccountable mistiness blurred his sight.
"I'm obliged to you, sir," he said seriously. "I know you don't often show them."
He had meant to say nothing more than that, but youth's questioning urge mastered his resolution, so that he put an interrogation very slowly, half fearing it might seem an impertinence.
"You told me once, sir, that I might ask whatever questions I liked – and that you would refuse to answer when you felt like it. I'm going to ask one now – but I reckon I oughtn't to." Again there was a diffident pause, but the sincere blue eyes were unwaveringly steady as they met the gray ones.
"Do you reckon, sir, the day will ever come – when I can know the real name – of the man I owe – pretty nigh everything to?"
McCalloway blinked his eyes, which this cub of a boy had a way of tricking into unsoldierly emotion, and resolutely set his features into immobility.
"No, sir; I'm afraid not," he answered with a gruffness that in no way deceived his questioner. "McCalloway is as good a name as any – I'm afraid, at all events, it will have to serve to the end."
Slowly and gravely the lad nodded his head. "All right, sir," he declared. "It was just curiosity, anyhow. The name I know you by is good enough for me."
But McCalloway was disquietingly moved. He rose and replaced the dispatch box on its shelf, and after that paced the room for a few moments with quick, restive strides. Then his voice came with an impulsive suddenness. "There's a paper in that dispatch box … that would answer your question, Boone," he said. "I tell you because I want you to realize how entirely I trust you. It's the secret chamber of my Bluebeard establishment. While I live it must remain locked."
After a moment he added, "If I should die … and you still want to know – then you may open the box … but even then what you learn is for yourself alone, and I want that you shall destroy all those documents and whisper no word whatever of their contents to any living soul."
"I promise, sir," declared the boy, "on my honour."
When August had brought the yellow masses of the golden-rod and the rusty purple of the ironweed; when the thistles were no longer a sting to the touch but down drifting along the lightest breeze, two horses stopped at McCalloway's fence, and a girl's voice called out, "Can we come in?"
Boone had not known that Anne Masters was back on this side of the Atlantic, nor had he ventured to hope that she would find time to come up here into the hills before the summer ended, but the voice had brought him out to the stile, as swiftly as a cry for help could have done. Now he stood, looking up at her as she sat in her saddle, with a blaze of worship in his blue eyes that went far to undo all the self-restraint with which he had so studiously hedged about his speech and manner. Surprise has undone many wary generals. So his eyes made love to her, even while his lips remained guarded of utterance.
"I didn't have any idea that you were on this side of the world," he declared. "It's just plum taken my breath away from me to see you sitting right there on that horse."
Larry Masters had dismounted and was hitching his mule. Now he turned to inquire, "Where's Mr. McCalloway?"
The boy had momentarily forgotten the existence of his patron. He had forgotten all things but one, and now he laughed with guilty realization.
"I reckon I'll have to ask your pardon, sir. I was so astonished that I forgot to tell you he wasn't here. He's gone fishing – and I'm afraid he won't be back before sundown."
"Well, we've ridden across the mountain and we're tired. If you don't mind we'll wait for him."
Anne reached down into her saddle bags and produced a small, neatly wrapped package.
"I brought you a present," she announced with a sudden diffidence, and Boone remembered how once before, as he stood by a fence, she had spoken almost the same words. Then, too, she had been looking down on him from the superior position of one mounted. He wondered if she remembered, and in excellent mimicry of his old boyish awkwardness he said, "Thet war right charitable of ye… Hit's ther fust present I ever got – from acrost ther ocean-sea."
Anne's laugh rippled out, and she followed suit – quoting herself from the memory of other years:
"Oh, no, it isn't that at all. Please don't think it's charity." Then she slid down and watched him as he unwrapped and investigated his gift; a miniature bust of Bonaparte, the Conqueror, in Parian marble. The light August breeze stirred the curls against her cheeks with a delicate play – but they stirred against the boy's heart with the power of lightning and tornado.
Anne was at her father's house for several weeks, and scarcely a day of that time did her vassal fail to ride across the mountain, but those hours squandered together were fleet of wing. McCalloway smiled observantly and held his counsel. The charm and gaiety of Anne's bright personality would do more to dispel the menace of gloom from the dark corners of the boy's nature, where tendencies of melancholy lurked, than all his own efforts and wisdom. Later there would come an aftermath of bitter heartache, for between them lay the fortified frontier which separates red blood and blue; the demarcation of the contrary codes of Jubal and Tubal Cain, but at that thought the soldier shrugged his shoulders with a ripe philosophy. Just now the girl's influence was precisely what the lad needed. Later, when perhaps he needed something else, he would take his punishment with decent courage, and even the punishment would do him good. A blade is not forged and tempered without being pounded between anvil and sledge – and if Boone could not stand it – then Boone could not realize the dreams which McCalloway built for his future.
The wisdom of middle-age can treat, as ephemeral, disasters in which first love can contemplate only incurable scars. Boone himself regarded the golden present as an era for which the whole future must pay with unrelieved levies of black despair.
It was chiefly as he rode home at night that he faced this death's-head future with young lips stiffening and eyes narrowed. In the morning sunlight, or through woods that sobbed with rain, he went buoyant, because then he was going toward her, and whatever the indefinite future held in store, he had that day assured with all its richness.
None-the-less, Boone played the game as he saw it, with the guiding instincts of a gentleman. Because it was all a wonderful dream, doomed to an eventual awakening, he sealed his lips against love-making.
Anne was taking him for granted, he reasoned. He had simply become a local necessity to a bright nature, overflowing with vital and companionable impulses.
As vassal he gladly and proudly offered himself, and as vassal she frankly and without analysis accepted him. Should he let slip the check upon his control, and go to mooning about love, instead of meeting her laughter with his laughter and her jest with his jest, she would send him away into a deserved exile.
On the day before Anne was to leave they were on the great pinnacle rock above Slag-face, and by now Boone had come to regard that as the lofty shrine where he had discovered love. Afterwards it would stand through the years as a spot of hallowed memories.
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 niggardly 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 incertitude.
"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 attitude; an attitude 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… God 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 pronunciamento. "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."