"Certainly, I enjoy it."
"I"m just breaking down the barriers--so to speak," he said, with the laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.
"By all means go on," she said soberly. "I thought at first you were trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest."
"Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I"m at home in--I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the other day that your father meant to carry the civilization of Ma.s.sachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Ma.s.sachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than one thousand dollars were prohibited by law from wearing the garb of a gentleman, gold or silver lace, b.u.t.tons on the knees, or to walk in great boots, or their women to wear silk or scarfs, while the Quakers, Maryland Catholics, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were everywhere in the South the heralds of man"s equality before the law."
"But barring our ancestors, I have some things against the men of this generation."
"Have I, too, sinned and come short?" he asked with mock gravity.
"Our ideals of life are far apart," she firmly declared.
"What ails my ideal?"
"Your egotism, for one thing. The air with which you calmly select what pleases your fancy. Northern men are bad enough--the insolence of a Southerner is beyond words!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: LILLIAN GISH AS ELSIE, AND THE SENTINEL.]
"You don"t say so!" cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. "Isn"t your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?"
"Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman."
"Enlighten me further."
"I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is after all a very inferior animal--nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life--did you?"
"Come to think of it, I never did," acknowledged Ben with comic gravity.
"What else?"
"Isn"t that enough?"
"It"s nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I"m studying law, you know."
"I have a personality of my own. You and your kind a.s.sume the right to absorb all lesser lights."
"Certainly, I"m a man."
"I don"t care to be absorbed by a mere man."
"Don"t wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?"
"I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a home. I have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook and housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another grows, expands, and claims the lordship of the world. I can sing. My voice is to me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual companion who will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel within to its highest reach."
She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben"s brown eyes, about which a smile was constantly playing. He looked away, and again the river echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite of herself.
He laughed with boyish gayety. It danced in his eyes, and gave spring to every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its contagion enfold her.
His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he sang, "If you get there before I do, tell "em I"m comin" too!"
As Elsie listened, her anger grew as she recalled the amazing folly that had induced her to tell the secret feelings of her inmost soul to this man almost a stranger. Whence came this miracle of influence about him, this gift of intimacy? She felt a shock as if she had been immodest. She was in an agony of doubt as to what he was thinking of her, and dreaded to meet his gaze.
And yet, when he turned toward her, his whole being a smiling compound of dark Southern blood and bone and fire, at the sound of his voice all doubt and questioning melted.
"Do you know," he said earnestly, "that you are the funniest, most charming girl I ever met?"
"Thanks. I"ve heard your experience has been large for one of your age."
Ben"s eyes danced.
"Perhaps, yes. You appeal to things in me that I didn"t know were there--to all the senses of body and soul at once. Your strength of mind, with its conceits, and your quick little temper seem so odd and out of place, clothed in the gentleness of your beauty."
"I was never more serious in my life. There are other things more personal about you that I do not like."
"What?"
"Your cavalier habits."
"Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are all Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy loafing dreamers is a myth. I was raised on the catechism."
"You love to fish and hunt and frolic--you flirt with every girl you meet, and you drink sometimes. I often feel that you are cruel and that I do not know you."
Ben"s face grew serious, and the red scar in the edge of his hair suddenly became livid with the rush of blood.
"Perhaps I don"t mean that you shall know all yet," he said slowly. "My ideal of a man is one that leads, charms, dominates, and yet eludes. I confess that I"m close kin to an angel and a devil, and that I await a woman"s hand to lead me into the ways of peace and life."
The spiritual earnestness of the girl was quick to catch the subtle appeal of his last words. His broad, high forehead, straight, masterly nose, with its mobile nostrils, seemed to her very manly at just that moment and very appealing. A soft answer was on her lips.
He saw it, and leaned toward her in impulsive tenderness. A timid look on her face caused him to sink back in silence.
They had now drifted near the city. The sun was slowly sinking in a smother of fiery splendour that mirrored its changing hues in the still water. The hush of the harvest fullness of autumn life was over all nature. They pa.s.sed a camp of soldiers and then a big hospital on the banks above. A gun flashed from the hill, and the flag dropped from its staff.
The girl"s eyes lingered on the flower in his coat a moment and then on the red scar in the edge of his dark hair, and somehow the difference between them seemed to melt into the falling twilight. Only his nearness was real. Again a strange joy held her.
He threw her a look of tenderness, and she began to tremble. A sea gull poised a moment above them and broke into a laugh.
Bending nearer, he gently took her hand, and said:
"I love you!"
A sob caught her breath and she buried her face on her arm.
"I am for you, and you are for me. Why beat your wings against the thing that is and must be? What else matters? With all my sins and faults my land is yours--a land of sunshine, eternal harvests, and everlasting song, old-fashioned and provincial perhaps, but kind and hospitable. Around its humblest cottage song birds live and mate and nest and never leave. The winged ones of your own cold fields have heard their call, and the sky to-night will echo with their chatter as they hurry southward. Elsie, my own, I too have called--come; I love you!"
She lifted her face to him full of tender spiritual charm, her eyes burning their pa.s.sionate answer.
He bent and kissed her.
"Say it! Say it!" he whispered.