"No," she answered. "You have not."
His words came freely enough then and with fire. When Rebecca reentered the cabin her large eyes shone in her small, sweet face, and her lips wore a charming curve.
Miss Thorne turned in her chair to look at her and was betrayed into a smile.
"Mr. Lennox has gone, of course," she said.
"Yes."
Then, after a brief silence, in which Rebecca pushed the pine-knots with her foot, the elder lady spoke again.
"Don"t you think you may as well tell me about it, Beck, my child?" she said.
Beck looked down and shook her head with very charming gravity.
"Why should I?" she asked. "When--when you know."
Lennox rode his mildly disposed but violently gaited steed homeward in that reposeful state of bliss known only to accepted lovers. He had plucked his flower at last; he was no longer one of the many; he was ecstatically content. Uncertainty had no charm for him, and he was by no means the first discoverer of the subtle fineness her admirers found so difficult to describe in Miss n.o.ble. Granted that she was not a beauty, judged rigidly, still he had found in her soft, clear eye, in her color, her charming voice, even in her little gestures, something which reached him as an artist and touched him as a man.
"One cannot exactly account for other women"s paling before her," he said to himself; "but they do--and lose significance." And then he laughed tenderly. At this moment, it was true, every other thing on earth paled and lost significance.
That the family of his host had retired made itself evident to him when he dismounted at the house. To the silence of the night was added the silence of slumber. No one was to be seen; a small cow, rendered lean by active climbing in search of sustenance, breathed peacefully near the tumble-down fence; the ubiquitous, long-legged, yellow dog, rendered trustful by long seclusion, aroused himself from his nap to greet the arrival with a series of heavy raps upon the rickety porch-floor with a solid but languid tail. Lennox stepped over him in reaching for the gourd hanging upon the post, and he did not consider it inc.u.mbent upon himself to rise.
In a little hollow at the road-side was the spring from which the household supplies of water were obtained. Finding none in the wooden bucket, Lennox took the gourd with the intention of going down to the hollow to quench his thirst.
"We"ve powerful good water," his host had said in the afternoon, ""n"
it"s nigh the house, too. I built the house yer a-purpose,--on "count of its be-in" nigh."
He was unconsciously dwelling upon this statement as he walked, and trying to recall correctly the mountain drawl and tw.a.n.g.
"She," he said (there was only one "she" for him to-night)--"she will be sure to catch it and reproduce it in all its shades to the life."
He was only a few feet from the spring itself and he stopped with a sharp exclamation of the most uncontrollable amazement,--stopped and stared straight before him. It was a pretty, dell-like place, darkly shadowed on one side but bathed in the flooding moonlight on the other, and it was something he saw in this flood of moonlight which almost caused him to doubt for the moment the evidence of his senses.
How it was possible for him to believe that there really could stand in such a spot a girl attired in black velvet of stagy cut and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, he could not comprehend; but a few feet from him there certainly stood such a girl, who bent her lithe, round shape over the spring, gazing into its depths with all the eagerness of an insatiable vanity.
"I can"t see nothing" he heard her say impatiently. "I can"t see nothin"
nohow."
Despite the beauty, his first glance could not help showing him she was a figure so incongruous and inconsistent as to be almost _bizarre_. When she stood upright revealing fully her tall figure in its shabby finery, he felt something like resentment. He made a restive movement which she heard. The bit of broken looking-gla.s.s she held in her hand fell into the water, she uttered a shamefaced angry cry.
"What d"ye want?" she exclaimed. "What are ye a-doin"? I didn"t know as no one was a-lookin". I"--
Her head was flung backward, her full throat looked like a pillar of marble against the black edge of her dress, her air was fierce. He would not have been an artist if he had not been powerfully struck with a sense of her picturesqueness.
But he did not smile at all as he answered:--
"I board at the house there. I returned home late and was thirsty. I came here for water to drink."
Her temper died down as suddenly as it had flamed, and she seemed given up to a miserable, shamed trepidation.
"Oh," she said, "don"t ye tell "em--don"t--I--I"m Dusk Dunbar."
Then, as was very natural, he became curious and possibly did smile--a very little.
"What in the name of all that is fantastic are you doing?"
She made an effort at being defiant and succeeded pretty well.
"I wasn"t doin" no harm," she said. "I was--dressin" up a bit. It aint n.o.body"s business."
"That"s true," he answered coolly. "At all events it is not mine--though it is rather late for a lady to be alone at such a place. However, if you have no objection, I will get what I came for and go back."
She said nothing when he stepped down and filled the gourd, but she regarded him with a sort of irritable watchfulness as he drank.
"Are ye--are ye a-goin" to tell?" she faltered, when he had finished.
"No," he answered as coolly as before. "Why should I?"
Then he gave her a long look from head to foot The dress was a poor enough velveteen and had a cast-off air, but it clung to her figure finely, and its sleeves were picturesque with puffs at the shoulder and slashings of white,--indeed the moonlight made her all black and white; her eyes, which were tawny brown by day, were black as velvet now under the straight lines of her brows, and her face was pure dead fairness itself.
When, his look ended, his eyes met hers, she drew back with an impatient movement. .
"Ye look as if--as if ye thought I didn"t get it honest," she exclaimed petulantly, "but I did."
That drew his glance toward her dress again, for of course she referred to that, and he could not help asking her a point-blank question.
"Where _did_ you get it?" he said.
There was a slow flippancy about the manner of her reply which annoyed him by its variance with her beauty--but the beauty! How the moonlight and the black and white brought it out as she leaned against the rock, looking at him from under her lashes!
"Are ye goin" to tell the folks up at the house?" she demanded. "They don"t know nothin" and I don"t want "em to know."
He shrugged his shoulder negatively.
She laughed with a hint of cool slyness and triumph.
"I got it at Asheville," she said. "I went with father when they was a show thar, "n" the women stayed at the same tavern we was at, "n" one of "em tuk up with me "n" I done somethin" for her--carried a letter or two," breaking into the sly, triumphant laugh again, ""n" she giv" me the dress fur pay. What d"ye think of it? Is it becomin"?"
The suddenness of the change of manner with which she said these last words was indescribable. She stood upright, her head up, her hands fallen at her sides, her eyes cool and straight--her whole presence confronting him with the power of which she was conscious.
"Is it?" she repeated.
He was a gentleman from instinct and from training, having ordinarily quite a lofty repugnance for all profanity and brusqueness, and yet some how,--account for it as you will,--he had the next instant answered her with positive brutality.
"Yes," he answered, "d.a.m.nably!"
When the words were spoken and he heard their sound fall upon the soft night air, he was as keenly disgusted as he would have been if he had heard them uttered by another man. It was not until afterward when he had had leisure to think the matter over that he comprehended vaguely the force which had moved him.