CHAPTER XVI.

THERE was a flag flying over Chattalla; the “old flag,” thus called in contradistinction to another, that had once flashed across the clouds here and was gone like a meteor. The Square was filled with an eager and intent crowd of recently re-enfranchised and intelligent voters; the grass in the court-house yard was trampled by many jostling feet; a rude platform had risen among the dappling shadows, and the figure there, with its imposing dignity and impressive attitude, might realize to the imagination a Roman senator. His fine voice filled the wide spaces of the sunlit air; the glance of his earnest eyes kindled a responsive enthusiasm; a magnetic thrill quivered through his audience. Only Maurice Brennett, of all the fellow-citizens whom General Vayne harangued, was analytic enough to find him a study, and sufficiently discriminating to perceive how very amusing he was. He hurled back, with infinite gusto, insinuations against his party--his people. He visibly joyed in his elocutionary bitterness. He stormily counselled mildness, calmness, conservatism, above all, consistency. His apostrophe to the flag that waved above them was oddly accented by an unconscious convulsive gesture, as if he would clasp his missing right hand. “It was to Us,” he said, “the symbol of a hard-won Victory, of a generous Peace, and of Freedom in the largest sense known to the universe.” The fervor of his sincerity caught in the crowd, and flamed out in cheers for the old flag for the first time in ten years. Despite the wild incongruities of his patriotism, there was so splendid a display of oratory here and there, that Brennett’s cynical face was more than once smitten with sudden gravity. His faculty for the utilitarian fixed upon this gift. “If that man,” he said to Percy, “had even a modicum of common sense he could do anything--anything.”

But presently his lips were curving again, for General Vayne was vaunting the great Volunteer State, and the language was depleted of adjectives. He alluded to her hosts of “Fighting Tennesseeans,” and called upon the heights of Monterey, upon Old Hickory’s “mile-long line” at New Orleans, upon the “Battle of the Horse-shoe,” upon their blood that deluged Shiloh, the bare hills engirdling Nashville, the wide wastes around Murfreesboro’, to tell of their valor. Then he proceeded to do this himself--in so eloquent, so fiery, so tender a strain that it brought the remnant of his brigade to the front with the old rebel charging yell, which set the great bell in the court-house tower to shivering.

He stated that he was no candidate for any office whatever within the gift of the people, and had no interest save theirs at heart; in short, he represented himself as a sort of self-organized tutelary deity of the party, appearing before them only in support of its principles. “You all know _me_,” he said, with some pardonable pride, as they manifested their appreciation of the purity of his motives. “I stand upon my native heath, and”--effective diminuendo--“my name is Macgregor!”

In the thunder of applause that followed his peroration, a grizzled, elderly wight turned, with grave, breathless interest, to Percy.

“What makes the old Gen’al say he stands on his naked heels an’ his name’s Grigory?” he asked swiftly. “I didn’t know old Frank Vayne’s middle name was Grigory.”

Could there be a more felicitous anti-climax! Brennett fell back against the iron fence, laughing with sardonic delight. He had intended to humor the little-great man’s self-valuation by pressing up with the town and country magnates, to join in shaking severely the orator’s hand, with congratulations on the “powerful effort,” as the phrase went. But he saw, with surprise, that General Vayne was pushing through the crowd toward him, waving off the effusive demonstrations of his friends with a calm self-sufficiency that was curiously independent of vanity. His face was flushed; there was an anxious gleam in his eyes; he fixed them eagerly on Mr. Ridgeway, who chanced to be standing close by, and although he shook hands with Brennett it was evidently the elder gentleman with whom he wished to confer--about no private matter, apparently, for he began without preamble,--

“A great surprise, sir. Lamentable--lamentable! I had heard nothing of it until his messenger met me at the depot. I had promised to speak at once, so I sent you a line from there. We can arrange it now?” He stroked his gray mustache, and looked alertly expectant.

Mr. Ridgeway took a firm stand, metaphorically and literally. He steadied his unwieldy bulk on his two ponderous legs, turned his argumentative spectacles on his friend, and spluttered emphatically,--

“You are not able to lose that money, General, and I’m sure I’m not.”

“Lose money, sir?”

“He’d _bolt_, sir; if that man, Toole, were bailed, he’d bolt.”

Maurice Brennett’s face was suddenly petrified--its cynical laugh upon it. But, with those distended muscles hardened and rigid, his bright eyes narrowed, his teeth gleaming through his parted lips, there was marvellously little joviality suggested. The two important old cocks were hardly as provocative of mirth as he had thought them an instant ago. He retained barely power enough to look, breathlessly, from one to the other.

“Permit me, sir,” said General Vayne loftily, “to differ with you. I will not entertain the suspicion. That man served four years in my brigade.” He looked triumphantly at his interlocutor. The logical inference was too plain. The man couldn’t bolt.

Mr. Ridgeway nodded his big head and his big Panama hat very much to one side. “I know all that, and I should be his friend now if he had behaved better in this affair.”

“Patent your art, my dear sir, ‘friendship made easy,’” cried General Vayne satirically. “Drop your friends when they don’t ‘behave better!’”

“General,” said Mr. Ridgeway, with excellent temper, “I don’t want you to throw your money like soapsuds into a sinkhole; and I don’t want to throw mine there either.”

“No man--be he gentle or simple--shall ever seek help from me and I withhold this hand,” cried General Vayne impetuously. He raised his only hand and struck it violently against the iron fence. “Do you know, sir,” he continued solemnly, “that man’s wife lies at the point of death, prostrated by the shock of his arrest and smitten with paralysis. There has not been a dollar in that house for weeks--and no flour, no meal, no meat; those children--Lord knows how many--have subsisted by _begging_! Begging from the neighbors! The turnpike company is only awaiting the moment of her dissolution to turn that family out upon the road. The man’s occupation is gone, and he has all those starving children to provide for.”

“A good reason for bolting, if there were no other.” Maurice Brennett had suddenly found his voice, for Mr. Ridgeway’s face was a study of agonized indecision. Perhaps all might yet remain as it was.

General Vayne turned slowly, with a haughty stare in his intent eyes, as he fiercely twirled his mustache.

“Under your favor, sir,” he said, loftily, “a good reason for _not_ bolting, if there were no other.”

Percy pressed Brennett’s shoulder with his own as a warning to forbear, for his friend was naturally associated with himself in General Vayne’s mind, and he took politic care that all such association should be pleasant.

“I beg your pardon,” said Brennett--he was breathing more freely--“I had only heard that the man is a low fellow and abetted in this transaction. A terrible affair, I’m told; shocked the community.”

“It did,--it did,” spluttered Mr. Ridgeway. “The law must be upheld, or the country won’t be fit to live in.”

“I regard the law of the land, gentlemen, as the will of God,” said General Vayne sweepingly. “And--it--allows--this--man--the--privilege--of _bail_.”

There was no answer to this. Even the wordy and intellectual Maurice Brennett had not a syllable of replication. He looked at General Vayne with a wonderful sharpening of those rapacious suggestions in his eyes. Old Mr. Ridgeway, with an air of absence of mind, brought out his handkerchief and harrowed with it the furrows and creases of his fat face.

“I regret to have troubled you, sir,” said General Vayne, turning with elaborate courtesy to Mr. Ridgeway. “I took the liberty of asking your co-operation simply because I knew that the law requires two sureties on a bail-bond.”

He hesitated a moment, then, drawing himself to his full height, he said, with a fierce humility that was strikingly like pride: “In the s-h-shattered condition of my fortune I sometimes hardly know how I stand with the usurers, but I believe my estate will bear a mortgage for two thousand dollars more, and I will borrow the money and give it to the man to deposit in lieu of bail.”

A sudden idea flashed upon Percy. He was so in the habit of putting his own money in a safe place that this method of propitiation had not before occurred to him.

“If you will permit me, General,” he said, with a charming air of deference and modesty, “_I_ should be pleased to go on the bail-bond with you.”

General Vayne cast on him a glance of approval. “I thank you, sir,” he said. “But if there is any money to be lost here, I shall lose it. I bid you good day, gentlemen.” He waved his hand ceremoniously, turned, strode up the pavement, and disappeared within the court-house.

Mr. Ridgeway’s lungs lay far inland in a fat country. A huge sigh laboriously travelled up from them, and he took off his hat and rubbed his handkerchief around and around on his bald, shining, moist pate.

Men who speculate upon contingencies have a fine opportunity for realizing how purblind and finite is the vaunted faculty called foresight, and how infinitely intricate is that mechanism known as the ordering of events.

“That such a man as General Vayne should bestir himself for a cracker like Toole!” Brennett exclaimed aloud, in the abandonment of his despair.

He lingered long in the village that morning, watching in helpless excitement the uncontrollable course of the events which he himself had set in motion. His finesse had only resulted in making Toole the most prominent figure in public view, for General Vayne told on every street-corner the pathetic story of the wife’s untimely death and the homeless children’s destitution. A subscription for their benefit was headed by his own name, and his large ideals and inflated way of looking at things were abundantly manifest when he appealed to the ex-soldiers of Chattalla in behalf of the tow-headed brats out on the turnpike, as the children of a veteran who had stood his ground in a hundred battles; when he spoke of the illiterate lout of a drunken ferry-man as his “brave Companion in Arms.” Other names followed fast; there was something enthusing in a glimpse through that foolish magnifying glass. Toole had never had so much money at once as when he tramped silently out of the town and along the dusty, white turnpike till miles lay behind him, and at last the dark little log-cabin, that was to be no longer his home came in sight. Hardly in sight, for he would not look at it. He had a deep sense of the unnatural solemnity that brooded upon it. He knew what lay within. He turned abruptly from the road to the flower-crowned redoubt. He crossed the ditch, climbed the parapet, and flung himself down in an empty embrasure, through which a great gun had once looked. There he watched the golden afternoon glow and ripen to redness, and drop at last out of the sky. The latest light of the day quivered on the wings of a throng of homeward-bound swallows till they were white, and scintillated like a flying constellation. The cows were coming home; he heard them low. The familiar voice of the river sounded with a new and dreary intonation. He listened to the fitful bleating of the baby, still rising and falling as it had risen and fallen through all the long hours that the child had crept about, neglected, and in forlorn surprise, on the rickety porch. Stars were in the sky, and suddenly a golden gleam sprang into the window of the little log-cabin. He lifted himself on his elbow to look at it, and as he looked he burst into tears. Why should a light ever shine there again!

It was strange to him that, filled as he was with an overwhelming realization of his misfortunes, he could still take note of external objects. He seemed endowed with keener sense. From far up the road he heard the regular hoof-beats of a pair of trotters and the smooth, light roll of wheels. He recognized Percy and Brennett as the buggy whirled by. He saw in the dim light of the closing dusk the face of the man who had testified against him, and whom he had learned to hate. And so, too, the man saw his face.

There was so hard, so fierce, so bitter an expression on its clumsy features that Brennett drove on in renewed perplexity. He had had some wild, reckless idea of taking advantage of Toole’s straits by bribing him heavily to leave the place. But he began to realize that he was regarded as the direct and active cause of these calamities, and although it could not be divined that thus he had sought to subserve a personal interest, still Toole was an unreasoning brute, and this instinctive distrust and enmity could hardly be dissipated even by the most specious arguments. It was sheer madness to place himself in the power of a man who held a grudge like this against him. And so he cast the thought from him forever.

The swift shadows of the horses that had raced with them neck and neck along the sunset road were distanced and lost in the darkness. Only the red sparks of the cigars broke the monotony of the colorless night. The new ferry-man, who, silent and grim, pulled them over the river, was a suggestively lowering figure in the gloom, and the river was as black as Styx. Brennett felt in landing on the other side that he had left all hope and life, and was entering upon judgment. He arraigned himself fiercely. He might have foreseen; surely he might have been sharper!

He said to himself that this was definitive; the game was up. The man concerning whom General Vayne, with his fantastically potent rhetoric, blowing about the town, had raised a cloud of public interest, might now tell his story every day to a genteel audience. Other “companions in arms” would indulgently listen to Toole’s reminiscences, when, in rehearsing his Iliad of woes, he would relate how the old commander held out the left hand spared him, although no one else would move; and so to General Vayne’s qualities as man and soldier, to his feats on the field, to the wide subject of the great battle, to the details of personal experience,--and was it likely that the dramatic story of the burning bridge and the officer who fired it would be forgotten?

So it was all over. Brennett was so loath to realize it that he remained inactive for days in torturing suspense. When the Criminal Court was in session, and the case came on for trial, he watched the proceedings in a lethargy of despair. The fact of self-defence was so incontestably proved, that the jury found a verdict of acquittal without leaving the box, and the two men were free forever. They occupied so much public attention, that Brennett’s mind was forcibly recalled to the dangers with which Toole’s prominence menaced him. The veriest chance word that might come to Percy or Miss St. Pierre would ruin all, and Percy, in his utter idleness, made it a point to interest himself in such subjects as General Vayne took in hand, that he might find opportunities to present himself in an amiable light for that simple-hearted gentleman’s approval. He had not, it is true, done his sensibilities the violence of attending the trial, but he was much exercised about the cheerful verdict, and brought up the subject himself the evening after it was rendered as he sat in the library at General Vayne’s house. The wide windows let in squares of moonlight that lay sharply defined upon the floor despite the yellow lustre of the shaded lamp. The white curtains fluttered in the perfumed breeze. From far away he could hear the melancholy note of the frogs monotonously chanting in the dank ditches of the works. It filled the pause that ensued when Captain Estwicke was ushered in upon the party, and the formal greetings were over.

Percy turned to him agreeably. It was an element of his self-love to include even every casual stranger in the demonstrations of what he mentally designated his “universal fascination system.” Estwicke’s hard metal, and the superficiality of his suavity were very patent when they were thus contrasted with these soft graces.

“You drove over, Captain? Then you haven’t heard the news from our little burgh.”

This was so obviously a note from General Vayne’s bugle that Estwicke could have smitten Percy for it; why did he call the town a “burgh!”

Estwicke, silent, his elbow resting lightly on the table, looked at Percy with a challenging stare.

“You will be glad to know that Toole is acquitted.”

“Toole?” Estwicke repeated, dubiously.

“The ferryman, or rather the ex-ferryman,” Percy politely explained.

Estwicke’s face was blankly unresponsive. He had not known that the ferryman was accused of anything; if he had noticed, he had forgotten that the office was filled by a stranger. He was a trifle confused to be boned on a point like this, as if he were expected, at such a distance, to keep up with the excitements of the village. His attention too was divided. He had never before seen Marcia wear a white dress. The material and make were of the simplest, but the snowy diaphanous draperies gave an added lustre to that fresh young loveliness. The sleeve fell away from her delicate wrist, displaying her rounded dimpled arm, and all the soft folds illustrated the grace of her lithe, slender figure. Her throat rose from a many-petalled ruche. Her hair sparkled with golden glimmers; with all this whiteness about her, she seemed trebly fair. Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked at him with a smile deep in her gracious young eyes. He felt that she was conscious of this sudden bloom into a beauty infinitely exquisite. He recognized her frank vanity.

And how came those other men here!

Thus his jealousy shut from him the suspicion that by the intuition of an awakened heart she had divined _his_ coming. And so it was, he never knew that even after the lamps were lighted, she was still sewing, that the dress might be finished in time, and he should find her lovely.

He looked at Percy, not at her. And he said nothing of Toole, the humble fellow who had served his coming and going for a matter of six months, and who had lived a tragedy lately. General Vayne pulled hard at his mustache. But he had always thought that this man was peculiarly callous.

“Oh, poor fellow!” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby, shaking her curls compassionately, “so destitute--homeless--without employment--and so many children--so many.”

She turned and bent the beaming blandishments of her smile upon Brennett. “Poverty in the country is more painful to contemplate than poverty in town, I think, Mr. Brennett. Deprivation in the midst of the abundance of nature; yes, very bad indeed, very bad. In towns, potatoes are measured by the bushel, and signify dimes. In the country they are meted out by the sunshine, and the rain, and the generous earth, and they signify the blessing of God on the rich season--yes. And these are the inalienable rights of the poor as well as the wealthy--the just and the unjust.”

Brennett smiled vaguely, with a semblance of endorsing this romantic communistic proposition.

“It seems to me that potatoes belong to the man who plants them,” said Marcia prosaically, from out the poetic shimmer of her white dress.

The slightest vibration of her voice thrilled through Estwicke, but he sat looking straight forward, and did not turn his head.

“Do you know, General Vayne, what Toole intends to do?” asked Brennett with some eagerness.

“What _can_ he do?” said General Vayne with a deprecatory wave of the hand. “He is not a skilled workman; his only chance is to find an odd job now and then.”

“Ah, the poor man! So precarious!” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby. “He quits his little house next Thursday. But his aunt, old Mrs. Prindle, at the toll-gate, good old soul, will take one of the children, the youngest, yes, the baby. F-fat little thing!” she cried, with a cheery, grandmotherly smile illuminating the general desolation. “And no doubt he can find homes with some of the small farmers for the boys--boys, yes--so useful, you know--pick up chips.”

“You have talked with him then,” said Brennett, pursuing the subject.

“Yes; Marcia piloted me over there--long walk, dear me! and very warm to-day. Takes his wife’s death hard, very hard. Seems really to feel it, you know. She was dead before he was released, before he reached there. The shock of his arrest killed her, and it was all for naught, since he was acquitted. And nothing consoles that poor baby. But it is all over dimples! It is a terrible reflection that that mother’s life was sacrificed, and those children bereaved--all for nothing!”

“Oh, I beg of you!” exclaimed Percy, with a gesture of entreaty.

“Yes, very serious, I don’t wonder it jars your nerves,” said the old lady with solemnity.

“Why, that’s a calamity--to jar _his_ nerves!” exclaimed Marcia, with a light laugh. Light as it was, it had in it so tense a thrill of satire that the others looked at her in surprise.

She sat at her ease in the stiff old arm-chair, her hand toying with a full-blown white rose. She was very charming to look upon, and all the gentlemen were gazing at her. Nevertheless, Mrs. Kirby sighed. Surely it was not politic to show temper before so many unwived men. And temper for what--pray?

“A calamity!” Marcia reiterated, “but we must try to bear up against it!”

Certainly it is anomalous that a lover should grudge his rival the lady’s displeasure. But the fact that she spoke thus freely to Percy reminded Estwicke unpleasantly of the friendship which had subsisted between them long, long before he ever saw her.

Percy was so accustomed to be regarded as an exemplar of all that is gallant, and generous, and high-spirited in youth, that now he was suddenly confused, self-depreciatory, and wounded.

“You mean my sympathy is so shallow that it is worthless?” he said, looking at her with a gentle deprecation, that the bewildered Mrs. Kirby thought must surely disarm her. Her aspect, however, was so impassive that the old lady, who believed herself the tactician of the world, and joyed in her little management, could not trust the conversation in other guidance, and seized upon the helm herself.

“Sympathy!” she cried. “Why Toole is held as a public martyr!”

“And that is very bad for him, and for the community,” said the severe Marcia. “He _thought_ he was breaking the law--that was his _intention_.”

Oh, if a young lady only knew how unlovely she appears when she sets herself to discourse of affairs of public policy, she would forbear--she would refrain. Mrs. Kirby could have wrung her hands. So many gentlemen! And the moonlight was touching the girl’s grave face with a spiritual glamour, and shifting over her beautiful dress, and the melodious nocturnal sounds pulsed along the perfumed air, and all the night was full of starlight, and poetry, and the bursting of buds, and the bloom of flowers--and she to be talking about the community!

Maurice Brennett’s eyes were fixed upon Marcia with questioning intensity. What did she mean? What was she driving at?

“Help me to reconstruct my sympathy,” said Percy, still grave and gentle.

“You give him money,” said Marcia reprovingly, “because you have plenty of it and won’t miss it.”

Everybody winced at this frank mention of the young gentleman’s wealth.

“You give him money, and it slips away immediately, and it is bad for him--he drinks it up--and when it is all gone--what then? You give him money because you are sorry for him--for a little while--and to give it makes _you_ feel better. But you can’t _think_ for him--you won’t give him so much as a thought.”

General Vayne was nervously pulling his mustache, and staring at his daughter’s soft young face, with its unwontedly severe expression, as if on the whole he did not recognize her. Mrs. Kirby could not even fan. Miss St. Pierre smiled from one to another, as if to make believe that this was a mere society conversation, and had no especial significance, no incongruities. Estwicke, with a heavy frown on his face, was watching Percy, who leaned eagerly forward, his elbow on his knee, and his hat in his hand, his temper unruffled, and his pride pocketed.

“I confess all that,” he said hastily. “Tell me how I must think for him.”

“You make him a beggar,” Marcia continued, still indignantly accusing, “when you might give him a chance to work for his living, and support his children, and keep them together, instead of distributing them about the country to anybody who will take them.”

“I shall make it my business to get him into something,” declared Percy.

“Mind,” said Marcia, lifting the white rose with a didactic gesture, “it must be something in which he honestly earns every dollar of his wages--it must be no pretence--charity in disguise. That, you know, can’t last. What do you think of trying?”

“I had no definite idea,” Percy admitted, a trifle confused. “I don’t know of anything about here--in this town or neighborhood that would answer.”

“_Here_--why it is not necessary, surely, that the man should remain _here_!” she rejoined impatiently.

Maurice Brennett scarcely dared to breathe. The anguish of his hope was hardly less poignant than the anguish of his fear. Great drops started on his forehead. He could not, he would not speak. What incongruity of fate was this? That this girl, this saint on earth, should unconsciously lend her hand to his schemes--that she should help Toole out of the country!

“Can’t you find work for him elsewhere?” she demanded imperiously. “You have interests away from this little treadmill of a town.” (Young America is not always respectful to the good old “burgh” of its fathers.) “Don’t you own an interest in some sort of factory--a furniture factory, or something or other, at Marston,” she continued vaguely--“enough to make them employ a workman you choose to send them?”

“I reckon so,” said Percy; he brightened at the suggestion, and rose with a triumphant laugh. In fact, he had no doubt, for he was a half owner in the flourishing concern; but he was modest in regard to his possessions, and affected a modicum of uncertainty. “If you will let me have pen and paper, I will write to them now, and give the letter to Toole as I go past his house on my way home.”

“Yes--dear--yes. Get the inkstand for Horace,” said Mrs. Kirby, having recovered the use of her palm-leaf fan. “Take your little key-basket off the table--yes--out of Horace’s way,” she added blandly. She was in truth anxious to make the girl wait upon him, and in trivial acts of consideration and deference afford a small compensation for the soul-trying experience to which she had subjected him.

But Percy, as he sat at the table, looked up with a bright protest in his dark eyes.

“No, it doesn’t disturb me, I assure you; don’t trouble yourself.” As he touched with an insistent gesture the stout little wicker basket, with its jingling contents of housekeeping keys, his hand met hers for a moment. Estwicke saw this; he divined the wild, vague suggestion of close domestic association which made the ugly, housewifely little key-basket a precious thing in the young man’s eyes, and its proximity a pleasure. He recognized the adroit tact by which she was kept hovering about the table, and knew that it seemed to Percy a foretaste, too, of the blissful unrestraint of a common home, that he should informally remain seated while she stood beside him and bent over to look at the paper and pen, when he called her attention to them.

Estwicke’s heart waxed hot within him; was it for this that he had come so far to see her? With a sharpened sense he heard every word that passed between them, despite the animated chatter of the rest of the group. He saw and translated as full of meaning every gesture.

“Is this your pen?” asked Percy, examining it. “The General’s? Well, there’s a heavy stroke for you! Why doesn’t he write with a fence-rail at once!”

She laughed blithely as she bent down to look at the writing; her face was sweetly flushed; her eyes were so gentle now; her floating, diaphanous sleeve lightly brushed his shoulder; his eyes followed its sweep. He was so gay, so handsome, so alertly confident, and she was so pleased with him.

As she turned away, he glanced up once more. “Do you write the date on the top line or the next one? And how must I date it?--advise me. From Chattalla? Oh, how you shock me. Is this what you call candor? I’m not in Chattalla, thank heaven!”

As he began to write she went away and sat down, still flushed, and excited, and absorbed.

“Mr. Percy is very prompt in keeping his promises,” said Brennett; his lips were dry; he enunciated with difficulty the commonplace.

“Oh, I’m a very promising young man,” Percy declared without raising his head.

But it was only a moment before he again appealed to her.

“Can’t you help me word this?” he said speciously. “I’m getting mixed up here in some fearfully awkward phraseology.”

In the simplicity of her heart she rose instantly and went to help him. To Estwicke it hardly seemed simplicity. He could not understand how she should fail to know that a man like Percy was wont to write in whatever hasty and dishevelled style that pleased him to the stewards of his wealth, and had of necessity far more epistolary experience than she. The two together made a long, grave, and careful job of it. Percy was hypercritical; once or twice he objected to her suggestions on the score of tautology, and as she placed her dimpled, rounded elbows on the table, and rested her cheek on her clasped hands, and cast her eyes absently out on the moonlight in a cogitating search for a felicitous synonym, he, with his pen idly poised, looked with a satisfied proprietary admiration at the pretty picture she made. And Estwicke looked at him.

It was all over at last, and he had written his name half across the page.

She laughed as she glanced at this pompous signature.

“That is a very great man!” she said.

“_I_ believe in him--for one,” said Percy--which was the truest word he had spoken for a week.

“And so do I,” protested Mrs. Kirby blandly.

And this, too, was true in a certain sense. Estwicke had felt more than once that they all liked Percy for himself--apart from his prominence and wealth, which to the eyes of a poor and jealous rival were formidable advantages. The handsome young fellow, with his subtle arts of propitiation, always contrived to appear here in an exceptionally genial and fascinating guise. With a disposition to make amends for all that he must have suffered in the crucial interview with Marcia, the kindly feeling of the elders was especially marked to-night. Estwicke was of course unaware of this motive. He was angry, sore, dismayed--he seemed to have dreamed that blissful termination of all his vacillations of hope and fear. But for the glitter of his own ring on the girl’s hand he could not have realized that she had so lately given him a promise which he had fancied was dear to them both--which had made his future bloom like a rose.

Only when he spoke to her at last--he had risen to take leave--did his heart, grown so strangely heavy, beat with a quick, tumultuous throb once more. The group was breaking up, for it was late, and these two were standing quite apart from the others for a moment.

She lifted her eyes to his with so candid a disappointment expressed in them, that he was in a measure consoled.

“We have had a dull time, haven’t we? But--but”--her eyelashes drooped a little,--“you know you’ll be coming back again soon.”

“To-morrow,” he said hastily. “In the morning,” he added, frowning darkly over an intention of thus out-marching Percy. But she was so evidently unconscious of having given him reason for jealousy, that he began to be a trifle ashamed of it.

Percy glanced at them askance as he stood at a little distance, a victim of Mrs. Kirby’s messages and remembrances to his mother. He had experienced upon first meeting Estwicke a vague uneasiness to find any personable man in her society, but it had been dissipated by the fact that the officer seemed a dull, heavy fellow, and there was no sign of a sentimental interest. Now, however, he detected something in Estwicke’s manner that roused him from the soft delights of his self-satisfaction to the keenest anxiety. He had not time to make sure; he would have waited till Estwicke was gone, but Brennett seemed feverishly anxious to be off, and he must go with his guest. As they walked down the long pavement he strove to reassure himself with the recollection of the man’s serious, intent, even frowning face. Surely this was not the self-gratulatory mien of a favored lover. And he had no reason to suppose that the officer frequented the house; General Vayne’s political feeling would hardly warrant that supposition, and he had never before met Estwicke here.

Their host had accompanied them to the buggy; he was gesticulating with his left hand as he described to Brennett how the features of the country were utilized in a certain midnight assault on Fort Despair--an incident of the great battle. As Percy looked back at the door he saw, in the yellow flare of the swinging lamp in the hall, Mrs. Kirby and Miss St. Pierre standing there, exclaiming over the iniquity of Dick, who had robbed a nest among the roses on the pillars of the portico, and was bringing the young mocking-birds into the house. The conviction was forced upon Percy. Estwicke had lingered in the library that he might have a few moments alone with Marcia. And had she not lingered as well?

Percy drove away in moody silence, and very slowly. At every turn of the road he glanced back, expecting to see a shadow moving in the moonlight, and to hear the whir of wheels. Evidently Estwicke had not yet left the house, for he saw only the myriads of fire-flies, pulsing points of light, among the heavy foliage on the redoubts, and he heard nothing but the shrill, quavering wail of a screech-owl, jarring ever and anon the sombre stillness of the haunted thickets.

He experienced a thrill of dismay that he should suspect all this so late. Hitherto he had considered himself reasonably sure of her, although he had as yet given her no intimation of the state of his feelings. He had thought he might safely wait. They were both very young--there was plenty of time before them--and he felt, too, that his freedom was dear and that he would like to see a little more of the world before settling down to quiet home-life and conjugal felicity. He had been entirely at ease as to the completion of his romance, when it should suit him to recur to it. Now, however, his inertia, when the field had been clear, seemed to him inexplicable, and it required some agile mental processes to reason himself out of his despondency. But he remembered once more Estwicke’s grave, intent, frowning face--he remembered, too, that she had scarcely spoken to any one but himself throughout the evening. He resolved that he would take heart of grace--if he had been too dilatory heretofore, he would compensate himself now.

His whip touched the off horse. They bowled along swiftly through the gloom. The wind seemed to freshen with the quickening motion. He felt its influence.

“It’s a good thing I forgot that letter!” he exclaimed hopefully.

The sudden sharpness of Maurice Brennett’s voice struck his attention even amidst his pre-occupation.

“Did you leave it there?”

“I left it lying on the table--and that’s a good excuse to go back to-morrow,” said Percy, laughing.

Brennett breathed hard--he remembered the broad open windows and the position of the table near them. He felt on his cheek the fresh wind--what more natural than that the letter on which so much depended should be blown upon the floor to lie there overlooked, until some careless housemaid should sweep it out in the morning. It was as likely that Percy would forget the “good excuse” when once there again, and the young lady, having carried her point, would probably recur to it no more. Thus Toole, narrowly missing the good fortune intended for him, would still remain here.

It was hard to say upon what pretext Brennett could interfere--how he could busy himself in matters apparently so alien to his interests without exciting surprise, anger, even suspicion of his motives. The fact that Miss Vayne had concerned herself in the incongruous affair added elements of difficulty--the jealous sensitiveness of her lover, and the delicacy requisite in speaking of a young lady. But he could not--he would not submit his recently rescued project to a contingency like this--so slight in itself, so portentously important in its effects. He had only a moment for thought, but he was wont to think quickly.

Percy saw his face in the flicker of a match which he had struck and applied to his cigar. He was laughing cynically, despite the weed held fast between his teeth.

The young fellow turned scarlet; he felt a fiery rush of indignation.

“I am glad to afford you so much amusement,” he said, as stiffly as a punctilious host may allow himself to speak to his guest.

Brennett pulled silently at the cigar until it was fairly a-light, then he flung the match aside in the road, and leaned back luxuriously.

“My dear fellow,” he said--and Percy knew from the sound of his voice that he was still laughing in the darkness--“I beg your pardon most humbly, I assure you. _You_ do not amuse me--as Horace Percy. I only laugh at certain common human vagaries, which are very humorously expressed in you at this period of your career.”

Percy’s wounded pride was hardly assuaged. “I can’t see the application,” he said tartly.

Brennett laid a friendly hand upon his knee. “Don’t ask me to translate your characteristics, and then quarrel with me for my version. It seems to me that a charming degree of youthful self-importance and self-love is suggested in leaving that letter as a good excuse to call on Miss Vayne to-morrow. Do you think she has no self-love? Will she be flattered that you forget a matter which she intrusted to you?”

“Oh--I thank you--she will guess why I forgot it,” said Percy hardily. “If she can’t, I will help her when I call to-morrow.”

Brennett made no answer. That the success of such a scheme should be jeopardized by such puerilities!

Percy felt that this silence was almost impertinent. But their mutual position forbade any notice of it. Still he chafed under this sense of wordless ridicule.

“Oh, talk it out, Brennett, talk it out!” he exclaimed impatiently, at last.

“Why, it’s no great matter, after all,” said Brennett, laughing agreeably. “A disappointment will do you good. Life has been too easy for you. Lucky fellow!”

“A disappointment!” said Percy sharply.

“No grave disappointment, of course,” said Brennett. “I was only alluding to the letter. In my opinion you will never see it again.”

“Why?” Percy demanded shortly.

“Oh, confound it, boy,” said Brennett, with a blunt, good-natured intonation, “why, she will give it to Captain Estwicke to hand to Toole as he drives by; and you may bet your immortal soul that _he_ doesn’t forget it.”

Percy drew the horses suddenly into a walk.

“What makes you say that?” he asked eagerly. “Did you notice anything?”

“Vaguely, very vaguely. But, however that may be, I can understand how she might think him a man whom she could intrust with a little matter like this; a man accustomed to responsibility, detail, duty. What do you mean? Where are you going?”

Percy was wheeling the vehicle round in the narrow road. “Going back for that letter, that’s all.”

“It’s too late,” Brennett remonstrated. He drew out his watch, and leaned forward, striving to see the time by the glow of his cigar. He heard the triumph in his own voice, he felt it in the relaxing muscles of his face.

Percy made no rejoinder. He lashed the horses savagely and they were dashing back at a great rate. The old house loomed close upon them, dim in the midnight, before he saw, slipping through the gloom, the moving shadow for which he had angrily watched.

It became suddenly stationary. A stentorian “Hello, there!” prevailed on him to check his horses, and the next moment Estwicke was standing in the road, with one foot on the hub of the wheel, as he leaned into the vehicle, and held out to Percy the envelope, with his own superscription.

“I am instructed,” he said gayly, “to overtake you, and give you that, and charge you, very severely, not to forget again.”

Both men in the buggy were looking keenly at him as he stood in the full moonlight. He was elated; he had been laughing; his eyes were bright; there was a flush on his cheek; he spoke with an ease and a hearty comradeship that changed him out of recognition; he seemed utterly unlike the saturnine stranger they had left. He was disposed to hang upon the wheel and talk companionably.

“May I trouble you for a light, Mr. Brennett?” he said, reaching up for the other’s cigar. “I might have gotten a match at the house, but”--glancing back at the lights which were disappearing, one by one, from the windows--“can’t rouse it after ‘taps.’”

Percy said nothing, and Brennett made amends for his silence.

“Do you drive far to-night, Captain?”

“Only a little matter of seven miles--first-rate road. It’s a fine country, Mr. Percy, that you have about here,” Estwicke added, as he turned away. “Good night.”

They lost sight of him before they drew up at Toole’s log-cabin, where they called lustily, to rouse its occupant.

Somehow, as they stood there motionless, and looked on the vast, dark stretch of country about them, and the lonely vastness of the sky above, with no sound but the quavering wail of the owl from out the recesses of Fort Despair, and the ceaseless monotone of the chanting frogs, and the vibratory clamor of the cricket and the katydid, and the weird echoes of their own outcry striking back from the parapets, it was so drear, so solitary, so infinitely forlorn, that some untried chord of Maurice Brennett’s nature was smitten strongly for an instant and set jarring with an unwonted throb. He remembered the woman with yellow hair whom he had seen here walking up and down and striking her hands together in mute despair. She had walked thus all night. And thus she had been found in the morning. It was a mute despair, for she had spoken no more. She was brought to this pass by the shock of the arrest, the ignorant people said,--and they said it because they were ignorant. The shock had only evoked and given direction to some deep-seated disease of heart or brain, which would have come at last. But he had set it all in motion; and now he was sorry--he was very sorry. It was a great price to have paid; but, he argued, a very vague responsibility. Still, if he could have known, it should never have happened. And perhaps he did not deceive himself.

He was glad when Toole came slouching out at last; he was even glad to see the look of settled hate, as the man once more recognized the witness who had testified against him. It gave Brennett back to mundane associations, for this was a more familiar emotion than remorse.

He watched Toole’s face change gradually from an expression of stunned astonishment to one of infinite relief, as he listened to Percy’s explanation about the work, the wages, and the route.

“Oh, I’ll light out right away!” cried Toole passionately. “God knows I don’t want to stay hyar.”

Brennett looked forward into the surly glooms hovering about the river, a smile relaxing his thin lips.

Percy was about to drive on. He hesitated, and glanced around doubtfully. He had enjoyed doing a real benefaction when once at it. The humble gratitude of its recipient agreeably titillated his self-esteem. But his mirror-like nature was reflecting the influences cast upon it this evening, and with a frankness, and justice, and modesty that were uncharacteristic, he had an impulse to disclaim the credit of the kindness. Still, Toole was a rough fellow, to whom he hardly liked to mention a lady’s name.

As he gathered up the reins, however, he said, a trifle dubiously,--

“You don’t owe me any thanks; all this was suggested to me. You are indebted to--to--the General’s daughter.”

The man raised his shaggy, tawny head and looked back over his shoulder with a light of comprehension on his face. “I might hev knowed that,” he exclaimed naïvely; “’t ain’t the fust time that us pore folks round hyar hev hed ter thank her.”

Percy drove on, laughing a little; and Brennett was laughing, too, triumphantly. He was alert, revivified. He also had to thank her.

And in the days that came and went the hawk’s bright eyes were cruelly vigilant, for the strong prescience of success was upon him.