"He"s suspected of having a love somewhere; some mysterious love whom he meets in the moonlit forest of Arden--when it"s moonlight; and, maybe, when it isn"t."
"What have you to support this?" the old gentleman frowned. He, too, had sometimes wondered what took Brent away so frequently of late. These were uncomfortable thoughts to the Colonel, who allowed suspicions no place in his estimate of people.
"Oh, we just support it for the sake of gossip," she laughed. "Aunt Timmie dreamed it, I believe."
"I thought you were serious," he smiled, yet showing his distaste for the subject, "nor will I permit any gossiping here!"
"But, Heavens, Daddy--"
"My dear," he interrupted her, "I trust you will never learn to gossip.
It is purely a trade, carried on by a breed of fawning Judases--of self-satisfied butchers, to deal in the choicest cuts of their unsuspecting friends" characters. The shelter of my roof must also afford protection to the good name of my guest."
""Good name" in the present instance is hardly a calculable statement,"
she murmured, for Ann could be biting, as well as sweet, when her feelings were touched.
"I quite agree with John," Miss Liz arose to the occasion. "It is strange," she added, turning the lorgnette this time carefully at Jane, "that he does not find a nice young girl to marry."
"Such a cynosure of niceness, too," Ann added her little dig, and Jane suggested:
"He might try advertising!"
"What"s advertising?" Dale asked.
"Oh, Lord," the Colonel exploded into his napkin.
When dinner was over, Jane crossed the porch unnoticed and walked out under the trees. The lorgnette which had said to her "it is strange he does not find some nice girl to marry," left a disquieting effect. Ann had only that day suggested the same idea, and Bob had laughed to her about it the previous evening. Even Aunt Timmie, the ebony font of wisdom, had but recently looked slyly at her, remarking: ""Foh long we"s gwine to have a weddin" in a private cyar!" (Aunt Timmie had never seen a private car, but it typified her idea of grandeur). She now strolled on beneath the trees, beneath giant clinging wild grape and trumpet vines, to a circle of low spreading cedars, wherein lay a carpet of odorous tanbark. It was a favorite spot with her.
Gliding carefully through the meeting branches which hid the path, she dropped into a yielding hammock and gazed for several minutes up at the network of black limbs, watching a star here and there which showed in a few small patches of visible sky. One arm stretched down at full length until her fingers touched the ground, and in this way she was keeping the hammock gently in motion.
She made a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place, and no judge of the human form could have pa.s.sed without a quick breath of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds that her thoughts were wandering.
Having acquired much of the Colonel"s reliance in breeding, and in the fitness of appropriately mated things, she was wondering! Her father and mother had been illiterate mountaineers, but did there not exist a time prior to this when their ancestors were people of refinement? This, she felt, must be surely so, because of her early love of refined things--truly refined, to a degree far beyond the ken of mountain life.
Without substantiating records, she seemed to know that in early Colonial days her family of gentle blood had floated with the migratory tide across the Appalachian range. That was the origin of all mountaineers! What had held some there, instead of sending them on to the rich, unsurveyed plains? A birth enroute? That sometimes happened.
The man of the family died, or was killed, and the woman forced to build a shelter as best she might until the boys grew big enough to help?
That, too, had happened. Whatever the reason, some of the best Anglo-Saxon stock had been stranded in the c.u.mberlands, staying there literally and figuratively while the world advanced.
Perhaps her strain was purer than the Colonel"s! Few mountaineers made alien marriages, for the very sufficient reason that they seldom roamed--even though this had meant stagnation in their own environment.
Still, the strain was pure! If one occasionally escaped these mountain fastnesses, why should he not--why should she not--with a free rein, dash out to regain lost prestige? Why should she not with one stroke blot out five or six generations of ignorance, and bring the stifled line of her honorable ancestry to the place it had been rightfully demanding for a century? But, in the face of uncertainties, would her blood commingled with the blood of established lineage now be fair?
Would she ever feel a rebuke in infant eyes? Would they not burn her soul if she wantonly summoned them to open on a world which might point back with a superior smile? Could she ever kiss the little lips which might some day praise the father and be silent of her?
Thus her sensitive thoughts, bringing a succession of confusions, wandered dreamily on, while the hammock gradually ceased its swinging and hung as a thing asleep.
CHAPTER XII
A LIGHT ABOVE THE MOUNTAIN
During the latter part of Jane"s reflections Brent McElroy was having a few strange minutes. He had left Arden shortly before sundown and, by following two side roads, reached the rear gate of Tom Hewlet"s farm without having to appear on the pike. This was no unusual route for him on evenings when the pike promised hazards such as a chance meeting with the Harts or Jane.
Whenever Nancy, on the lookout, saw a cloud of dust rising above these rambling, tree-lined lanes instead of from the white, direct way, a deep flush of mortification tinged her face. She understood his circ.u.mspection, but wisely refrained from showing it.
Tying his horse, he followed a path up to the gnarled orchard where he knew she would be waiting. And there he spied her, idly plaiting dry stems of last year"s bluegra.s.s, beneath the distorted old tree which he had named Nirvana. A glow of extreme pleasure warmed him, for this Rosalind with her rustic prettiness made an agreeable diversion from the somewhat monotonous evenings at Arden, and he vastly enjoyed angling about the edges of her rural pool. But he was unaware that she had never left its limpid depths. He did not suspect--because he did not think it possible--that, like a goldfish, she had only swum about in the limited sphere of her transparent bowl, looking out at the universe with large eyes which seemed, but were not, wise; and ready, if danger came, to scurry back into the little frosted castle that const.i.tuted the center of her constricted existence.
No kind words or deeds had reached that frosted little castle during the years she most required them. It had remained cold and uninviting, except as a place of shelter, and her soul had shrunk into a sort of knot--until Brent came. Only at his coming did her hungry nature begin to uncurl;--only at the coming of this polished gentleman from the great world, who knew everything, who was the epitome of kindness, who fed her with confidences and compliments, who inspired her with a sudden sense of meaningness, of importance--only since then had she begun to realize that for a long time her heart had craved affection.
He now remained another moment behind the trees to draw a half filled flask from his pocket. Had he not had more than enough to drink that day, he might have possessed the prudence to put this back untouched.
Instead, he drained it; then carelessly sent it flying across the fence into an adjoining field rank with old weeds.
He came on after this, and Nancy sprang up, holding lightly to one of the low hanging boughs. Before they spoke, and to her wild dismay, he kissed her; and, as much to her dismay, she yielded, clinging to him in a strange, sweet agony. For if two hearts are hungry, if two natures have been strangled, there is a time when the touch of lips to lips lets loose a sweep of human pa.s.sion before which the hosts of heaven and the laws of man draw back in awe.
But suddenly, with a piercing shriek, she sprang away; then, clutching his arm, whirled him about.
"Look!" she whispered, pointing a trembling finger to a pale, mysterious glow which seemed to be arising from the peaks of the distant c.u.mberlands.
"The moon is coming up," he said, unsteadily.
This was the first time either had spoken, either had moved; but now she commenced to sob in little gasps, backing farther from him as though he were something she dared not touch again--reaching blindly behind her for their old tree, whose strength in having resisted the fury of many storms might be imparted to her now.
"What"s the matter?" he asked, still stupidly.
"Oh, Brent," she whispered, "I thought it was that blind girl lookin"
down here an" tellin" me she"d rather see me dead! Go home, quick, for the love of Christ!"
He would not ask her to explain. Non-understandable as her words had been, they had given him time to look about and see upon what a perilous brink their feet were standing.
Brent was not a G.o.dly man; he had not cultivated Nancy with a grain of G.o.dly intention. But he was a manly man; and now as he suddenly realized, with that certainty which has no law, no rule, no answer, that she was good, he would not trust himself to speak. Shutting his teeth hard, he turned abruptly and almost ran toward the horse.
Then it was that she threw herself upon the gra.s.s and sobbed great sobs of thankfulness; and tried to laugh, and tried to pray; holding out her clasped hands to that halo of light above a humble cabin somewhere in the mountains, in whose door a blind face had seemed to look down at her entreating: "I"d ruther see ye die!"
It was in a perturbed but thoroughly sober mind that Brent dragged back the broken gate, whose openings and closings had worn a deep rut in the ground. He was about to untie his horse when the figure of a man appeared walking clumsily along the orchard fence.
"Wait there," the fellow called. "I want to see you!"
The heavy frame of Tom Hewlet came on, and no other word was spoken until he stopped three feet away. Swaying slightly, and looking into Brent"s face with a simpering leer, in an undertone he said:
"Come over some evenin" next week."
"What for?"
"I might say it"s "cause you"re so purty to look at," he guffawed at this bit of humor. "But, fact is, it"s on fam"ly matters."
"You"re coming apart, Tom. Go in and get some sleep!"
"I was sleepin", till a empty whiskey bottle come sailin" through the air an" hit me on my hand."
A cold shiver crawled up the engineer"s spine, but he turned to unhitch the horse, saying casually: