CHAPTER XLII
When Victor McCalloway came home in June he read in the face of the young man he met there that chapters deeply shadowed had been written into his life, and Boone was prompt enough in his confessions, though when he alluded to Anne's approaching marriage his words became meagre and his utterance flat with a hampering distrust of emotion and self-betrayal.
McCalloway gazed off grave-eyed across the small door-yard and mercifully refrained from any hurtful attempt at verbal solace.
Finally when the hum of bees in the honeysuckle had been the only disturbers of their long silence, the Scotchman spoke – and the younger features relaxed into relief because the words did not, even in kindness, touch upon the soreness of his mood. "The old spruce over there – the one that used to be the tallest thing we saw – it's gone, isn't it?"
Boone nodded. "The sleet took it down last winter."
Victor McCalloway was sage enough in human diagnosis to divine that, however much Boone had suffered through a period of months, the expression of quiet but well nigh unendurable suffering that just now haunted his eyes had not been constant in them. A man subjected long to that soul-cramping stress, with no outlet or abatement, would have become a melancholiac. In one sense it might be a chronic wretchedness, but today some particular incitement had rendered it acute – acute beyond the power of stoic blood to hold in concealment.
Repression only made the gnawing ache more burdensome. McCalloway wished that Boone might have gone, like the less inhibited folk of an elder generation, to some wailing wall and beat his breast with clenched fists – and come away less pent with hard control.
"I'll just go in and have a look over my scant accumulation of mail," he said with the same Anglo-Saxon pretence of armour-plated emotion. "In these days even the hermit doesn't altogether escape letters."
But when, inside the house, he found among the few and dusty envelopes one containing a wedding invitation, and when his eyes went, quick-glancing, to the wall calendar in a comparison of dates, his brain cleared of its mystification.
Tomorrow was the day of Anne's marriage.
If the number twelve on the calendar's June page bore a black penciling, like a mourning band, it was palpably a thing that Boone had not meant other eyes to see or understand.
McCalloway, himself in the shadowed interior, turned his head and could see through the door a sweep of sun-flooded hills and flawless sky. Against a background of blossoming laurel and crystal brightness Boone sat, stiff-postured, with eyes fixed and unseeing. McCalloway carried the card and its covering to the empty fireplace and touched a match to its edge. When it had been consumed, he went out again, and the younger man looked up, slowly, as though bringing himself out of a lethargy, and spoke with a dull intonation.
"You have said nothing, sir, of what I told you of myself. Saul came back and I reverted. That night I was a feud killer pure and simple. If blood didn't flow it was only because – " He broke off and began over, speaking with the rapidity of one rushing at an obstacle which has balked him, "it was only because —she stopped me."
"The point is," responded McCalloway soberly, "that blood didn't flow. You threw your weight into the right pan of the scales."
Boone shrugged his shoulders, disdaining a specious justification. "The rescue came from outside myself. One must he judged by his motive – and by that standard I failed."
"Not at all, sir! Damn it, not at all!"
At the sudden tempestuousness of the soldier's outburst, Boone looked up, surprised. McCalloway, too, had felt and reacted to the tension of their interview, and now he cleared his throat self-consciously and proceeded in a manner of recovered calmness.
"You were in the position of infantry just then, my boy, under the fire of field pieces. You needed artillery support – and, thanks to her, it came. There are times when no infantry can endure without a curtain of fire."
"She looked as if she'd been seeing ghosts," announced Anne's maid-of-honour, with a little shudder of emphasis, as she stood in a chatting group of wedding attendants just outside the door of Christ Church.
"I think she's the loveliest thing I've ever seen," declared another girl. "Anne has a distinction that's positively royal. Don't you think so, Reed?"
The young man addressed, after a half hour's deprivation inside the church, was hastening to avail himself of a cigarette. With a match close to his lips he grunted, and then having inhaled and exhaled, he supplemented the incoherent affirmative. "You're both right. As for myself, I'd rather have my bride's royalty less suggestive of Marie Antoinette riding in a tumbril. I don't like to have it brought home to me that marriage is life's supreme sacrifice."
Anne herself, sitting beside Morgan Wallifarro as they drove home, was rather breathless in her silence. Today it had been the rehearsal, but tomorrow it would be the ceremony itself, and from that there would be no turning back. An intolerable sense of inevitability seemed to close and darken in a stifling oppression that left her faint.
Until now she had been telling herself, as one will tell oneself specious things to prop a tottering resolution, that the ghosts of incertitude and panic would hold dominion only over the days and weeks of waiting. If she could keep her courage steadfast until she had actually become Morgan's wife, the forces that support one in one's duty would rally in closer order to uphold her.
But there in the church, going through the formula of the rehearsal, that fallacious self-bolstering had collapsed, and the misgivings of these days stood revealed as prefatory only to a more permanent and chafing thraldom.
If Boone had been there she felt that there was no law within herself strong enough to have prevented her from fleeing to him – and terror had seized upon her.
Then it was that the something came into her eyes which the maid-of-honour had described as the appearance of one seeing ghosts.
Morgan owed every success in life, or at least attributed every success, to his refusal to admit the possibility of failure. Like the Nervii, "he was strong because he seemed strong." Anne had brought him, at times, close to an acknowledgment of defeat in his paramount resolve – but his perseverance, he believed, had conquered, and his fears were over.
Now he looked into a face from which the colour had ebbed and in which the eyes were far from radiant – but Morgan told himself that it should be his privilege to bring the bloom of happiness back, and his colossal self-confidence was not daunted by any serious misgiving.
It was not until they had entered the house and stood alone in the same room where Boone had listened to his edict of banishment, that she turned slowly and said in a voice both terrified and defiant:
"Morgan – I can't do it… For God's sake release me from my promise!"
She stood facing him and braced for the recoil of that indignant protestation which she had every right to expect from him. She was not only withdrawing the promise upon which she had let him plan the entire edifice of his future, but doing so with a tardiness that made it, for him, inescapably conspicuous and mortifying.
But Morgan was a master of the strategy of surprise. His jaw did not drop in stricken amazement. His left hand, holding the glove just drawn from the right, did not clench in dramatic tensity. His eyes did not even smoulder into that suppressed rage which mischievously she used to tease into them for the pleasure of seeing them snap.
If anything, the prominent out-thrust of the clean-cut jaw was less emphatic than usual, and the girl felt the sinking helplessness of one who, keyed to a hard battle, launches the attack and encounters no opposition.
Morgan had seen the wild, almost irrational, terror of her eyes, and they had silenced argument. For once he recognized a defeat that he could avoid only by an ungenerous victory to which he could not bring himself, and he had no reproach because he could see that, in her effort to perform her promise, she had goaded herself to the breaking point.
His face showed every thoroughbred and manly quality of its blood as he inquired, with as great a deference as though her sudden announcement came with entire reasonableness: "Are you sure – you can't?"
When she had nodded her head miserably, Morgan argued his cause. He talked with a quiet and earnest eagerness but without reproach, as if he were for the first time pleading his love.
But the arguments held nothing new. She herself had lain awake at night repeating them until they were like parrot reiterations. They interposed no answer to the monstrous fact that a marriage which she faced in such unwillingness would be a thing that divorced the heart from the body. That she had so long beguiled herself into believing it possible, filled her now with self-scorn, but to the untimeliness of her decision he offered no protest.
They talked, all things considered, with surprising calmness, and at length Morgan glanced down and, seeing on the table near his hand the plans for the house they had meant to build, picked them up absently, glanced at them and tossed them back. It was the gesture of accepting a finality.
"I suppose, Anne," he said, with a rather more than merely decent assumption of whatever fault existed, "I've refused to see the truth because I was blindly selfish, but I couldn't seek to hold you – if it costs you both happiness and self-respect." He paused and then added. "I ask only one thing, now. Don't make this decision final. Think it over for three months – "
"Morgan dear," she interrupted in a gasping voice, "for more than three months, I've thought of nothing else."
"I know." The gentleness of his speech was the more telling by its contrast with his aggressive habit of self-assertion. "But you were thinking then with a sense of being bound. Complete freedom may make a difference. At least leave me that hope."
"I'm afraid," she faltered, "I'm very certain."
"Anyway," he reminded her, as he forced a rueful smile, "it will be easier to tell your mother in that fashion. She is on my side, you know."
Possibly Morgan had long ago counted this over-ardent advocacy on the part of Mrs. Masters as a hurtful partisanship. He knew that Anne's spirit had been fretted, ragged under the maternal insistence, even when it was tempered with finesse. He knew too that in this final declaration of freedom, the girl could not escape the knowledge that for her mother as well as herself she was wrecking every provident prospect and raising the ghosts of shabby, genteel poverty.
"I think," said Morgan, with a delicacy of tact which one would hardly have expected from him, "you'd better let me tell her – that we've decided to wait until I come back from abroad."
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.
"Damn 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 passed – 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 assured 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 congé, 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 assured 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 butterfly 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 God'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 goddess 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 Bluegrass 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 passing 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.
Boone heard the austere beauty of the service – but he felt more poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with two flags that overlapped their folds – though once a tide of cannon-smother ran between them – the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.
On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave.
Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and butternut, clasping in his tight hands the coon-skin cap that his boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant of passing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for he had been born a pioneer!
The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Constitution of the United States stands."
It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in the keeping of ravens – for back of the ravens was the Promise.
From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were, several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went out."
For that was the phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes.
When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the pines of Marlin County.
In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint "song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."
Because no dollar could go out from the school's closely guarded treasury without assurance that it would bring other dollars back, the experiment of increasing the traveling expenses by including this girl in the journey to New York had been discussed back of Cedar Mountain with prayerful earnestness, and the girl herself had greeted the final decision as one of the great moments of her life.
Now that girl stood beside the piano a little tremulous with stage fright as she looked out over an audience more sophisticated than any to which she had ever sung before. It was in one of the women's university clubs in the Forties and to her uninitiated eye the light fell on a confusing display of evening dress and worldly-wise faces full of self-containment.
They would listen with politeness but how could her offering interest these men and women to whom great voices were familiar? Hers was untrained and the songs were crude vehicles for folk-lore compositions, plaintive with uncultivated minors.
That elderly gentleman, sitting far back near the door, had been identified to her in a whisper. He was a music critic whose word carried the force of authority – and she wondered if he sat near the exit with thought of escape from her inflictions. Just now he was writing a series of magazine articles on folk-lore music in America, and the girl felt herself the subject of a cold experiment in mental vivisection.
The lady with the white pompadour was one whose name she had known with awe on the school's list of patronesses and even here in New York it was a great name.
The mountain singer's knees trembled a little as the accompanist struck the keys, and her first note stole out, sweetly clear and naturally fresh.
She finished her first song and retreated to her chair on the platform, wishing that there had been a trap-door through which she might have escaped that barrage of human sight.
Then her glance caught the elderly man with the great reputation in the music world. He had not yet fled. He was making notes on a scrap of paper and his keenly alert, finely chiselled face wore the expression of unmistakable interest. The singer glanced at the white-haired lady – the great Mrs. Ariton – and she read "well-done, my child," in a smile of moist eyes.
She could not know that there was a direct simplicity of pathos and artless humour in her ballads, borne on a bird-like sweetness of voice, to the hearts of these people. She could not know that she was bringing to the touch of their sympathy phrases and forms that had seemed as remote and unreal as lines from Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Yet, because it was all so new and strange, the air seemed heavy to her with a terrifying formality, as the incense laden atmosphere of a cathedral might have been. So she looked, as she rose to sing again, for the comforting presence of some face that might reassure her with a kin-ship of human simplicity.
Then she saw slip quietly through the entrance door, and drop into a seat near the critic, a young woman who was unaccompanied and who, at first glance, seemed to carry in her fine eyes the burthen of habitual weariness.
These eyes were deeply violet and though sadness haunted them and bespoke ghosts that stirred uneasily and often back in their depths they still held the hint of fires that had flashed, once, into gay and spontaneous whimseys. The singer had a momentary sense of looking at a face made for gracious and merry expressions, but drawn into the short and desperate outlook of one who has fallen into deep and angry waters, and who can see nothing ahead beyond the struggle to keep afloat.
The newcomer was tall and slender, even thin, but there was still an intrinsic gallantry about the swing of her shoulders that made one think of invincible qualities, though the plain severity of her clothing brought into that contrasting company the undeniable assertion of poverty.
The singer finished her ballad and once again went back to her chair. This time with a diminished diffidence. She was thinking about the other young woman at the back who looked poor and sick and who, in spite of these things, gave her an indescribable impression of distinction. The two of them, thought the mountain girl, had a bond of sympathy in that they were each set quite apart from all these others unified by the stamp of affluence.
Miss Shorte was talking now; telling the story of the school and its work; flashing before her hearers as if her words were pictures imbued with colour and form, the patriarchal conditions with which this work was surrounded. Laughter interrupted her lighter recitals, and when she spoke of graver phases there was that light clearing of throats that carries from an audience to a stage the proclamation of stirred emotion, and of tears not far from the surface.
The speaker gave a few illustrations of the sort of manhood and womanhood that is sometimes wrought out of that crude ore when the tempering of help and education is available to refine it.
Lincoln had sprung from such stock. Even now the member in Congress from that district was a man born in a log shack of illiterate parents. He had fought feudal animosities and gone upward by a rugged ascent. Now he was recognized by his colleagues as a man of ability and breadth. So far had he outgrown the strictures of provincialism, that he was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But better than that his own people swore by him because they knew "their lives and deaths were his to him" – because in a land where men had been afraid to serve on juries and to enforce the law, they were no longer afraid.