II.

Cleaver took little note, at this period, of those who came and went in his life; and he took little note of how he came and went in the lives of others. He had no idea of those inexplicable circles of thought and being that touch at a single point, and jar, perhaps. One day, while the Indian summer was still red on the hills,--he had reason to remember this day,--while the purple haze hovered over the landscape and mellowed to artistic delicacy the bold, bright colors of Sunrise Rock, he chanced to drive alone in his friend's rickety buggy along the road that passed on the opposite bank from the painted cliff and encircled the dreary little graveyard of the mountaineers. He became suddenly aware that there was a figure leaning against the palings; he recognized Selina Teake as he lifted his absorbed eyes. She held her sun-bonnet in her hand, and her yellow hair and fair face were unshaded; how little did he or she imagine what that face was to be to him afterward! He drew up his horse and spoke: "Well, this is the last place I should think you would want to come to."

She did not understand his dismal little joke at the graveyard. She silently fixed upon him those eyes, so suggestive of deep, clear waters in which some luminous planet has sunk a starry reflection.

"Did you intend to remain permanently?"

"I war restin' awhile," she softly replied.

He had a vague consciousness that she was the first of these proud mountaineers whom he had ever seen embarrassed or shy. She was indubitably blushing as he looked at her, and as she falteringly looked at him. How bright her eyes were, how red her delicate lips, what a faint fresh wild-rose was suddenly abloom on her cheek!

"Suppose you drive with me the remainder of the way," he suggested.

This was only the courtesy of the road in this region, and with her grave, decorous manner she stepped lightly into the vehicle, and they bowled away together. She was very mute and motionless as she sat beside him, her face eloquent with some untranslated emotion of mingled wonderment and pleasure and pain. Perhaps she drew in with the balsamic sunlit air the sweetest experience of her short life. He was silent too, his thoughts still hanging drearily about his blighted prospects and this fatal false step that had led him to the mountains; wondering whether he could have done better, whether he could have done otherwise at all, when it would end,--when, and how.

Trelawney was lounging against the rail fence in front of Teake's house, looking, in his negligent attire, like a prince in disguise, and talking to the mountaineers about a prospective deer-hunt. There was a surprised resentment on his face when Cleaver drove up, but the return of Selina with him made not a ripple among the Teakes. It would have been impossible to demonstrate to them that they stood on a lower social plane. Their standard of morality and respectability could not be questioned; there had never been a man or a woman of the humble name who had given the others cause for shame; they had lived in this house on their own land for a hundred years; they neither stole nor choused; they paid as they went, and asked no favors; they took no alms,--nay, they gave of their little! As to the artificial distinctions of money and education,--what do the ignorant mountaineers care about money and education!

Selina stood for a moment upon the cabin porch, her yellow hair gleaming like an aureola upon a background of crimson sumach leaves. A pet fawn came to the door and nibbled at her little sun-burned hands. As she turned to go in, Trelawney spoke to her. "Shall I bring you a fawn again? or will you have some venison from the hunt to-morrow?"

She fixed her luminous eyes upon him and laughed a little. There was no shyness in her face and manner now. Was Trelawney so accustomed a presence in her life, Cleaver wondered.

"Ah, I see," said Fred, laughing too. "I'll bring you some venison."

He was grave enough as he and his friend drove homeward together, and Cleaver was roused to the perception that there was a certain unwonted coldness slipping insidiously between them. It was not until they were seated before the fire that Trelawney again spoke. "How did it happen that you and she were together?" Evidently he had thought of nothing else since.

"Who?--the Lady Selina?" said Cleaver, mockingly. Trelawney's eyes warned him to forbear. "Oh, I met her walking, and I asked her to drive with me the rest of the way."

Nothing more was said for a time. Cleaver was thinking of the fawn which Fred had given her, of the patent fact that he was a familiar visitor at the Teake house. His question, and his long dwelling upon the subject before he asked it, seemed almost to indicate jealousy. Jealousy! Cleaver could hardly credit his own suspicion.

Trelawney broke the silence. "Education," he said abruptly, "what does education accomplish for women in our station of life? They learn to write a fashionable hand that nobody can decipher. They take a limited course of reading and remember nothing. Their study of foreign languages goes so far sometimes as to enable them to interject commonplace French phrases into their daily conversation, and render their prattle an affront to good taste as well an insult to the understanding. They have converted the piano into an instrument of torture throughout the length and breadth of the land. Sometimes they are learned; then they are given over to 'making an impression,' and are prone to discuss, with a fatal tendency to misapply terms, what they call 'philosophy.' As to their experience in society, no one will maintain that their flirtations and husband-hunting tend greatly to foster delicacy and refinement. What would that girl," nodding toward the log-cabin near Sunrise Rock, "think of the girls of our world who pursue 'society' as a man pursues a profession, who shove and jostle each other and pull caps for the great matches, and 'put up' with the others when no better may be had? She is my ideal of a modest, delicate young girl,--and she is the only sincere woman I ever saw. Upon my soul, I think the primitive woman holds her own very finely in comparison with the resultant of feminine culture."

Cleaver listened in stunned dismay. Could Trelawney have really fallen in love with the little mountaineer? He had adapted himself so readily to the habits of these people. He was so far from the world; he was dropping its chains. Many men under such circumstances, under far happier circumstances, had fallen into the fatal error of a _mésalliance_. Positively he might marry the girl. Cleaver felt it an imperative duty to make an effort to avert this almost grotesque catastrophe. In its very inception, however, he was hopeless. Trelawney had always been so intolerant of control, so tenacious of impressions and emotions, so careless of results and the opinion of society. These seemed only originalities of character when he was the leader of a clique of men of his own social position. Was Cleaver a snob because they seemed to him, now that his friend was brought low in the world, a bull-headed perversity, a ludicrous eccentricity, an unkempt republicanism, a raw incapacity to appreciate the right relations of things? In the delicately adjusted balance of life is that which is fine when a man is up, folly when a man is down?

"She is a pretty little thing," he said, slightingly, "and no doubt a good little thing. And, Trelawney, if I were in your place I wouldn't hang around her. Your feelings might become involved--she is so pretty--and she might fall in love with you, and"--

"You've said enough!" exclaimed Trelawney, fiercely.

It was monstrous! Trelawney would marry her. And he was as helpless to prevent it as if Fred intended to hang himself.

"Your railing at the women of society in that shallow fashion suggests the idea to me that you are trying to justify yourself in some tremendous folly. Do you contemplate marrying her?"

"That is exactly what I propose to do," said Trelawney.

"And you are mad enough to think you are really in love with her?"

"Why should I not be? If she were differently placed in point of wealth and station would there be any incongruity? I don't want to say anything hard of you, Cleaver, but you would be ready to congratulate me."

"I admit," retorted Cleaver, sharply, "that if she were your equal in station and appropriately educated I should not have a word of objection to say."

"And after all, is it the accident of position and fortune, or the human creature, that a man takes to his heart?"

"But her ignorance, Fred"--

"Great God! does a man fall in love with a society girl for the sake of what she calls her 'education?' Whatever attracts him, it is not that. They are all ignorant; this girl's ignorance is only relative."

"Ah,--you know all that is bosh, Fred."

"In point of manner you yourself must concede that she is in many respects superior to them. She has a certain repose and gravity and dignity difficult to find among young ladies of high degree whose education has not proved an antidote for flippancy. I won't be hard enough on them to compare the loveliness of her face or her fine, unspoiled nature. You don't want her to be learned any more than you want an azalea to be learned. An azalea in a green-house becomes showy and flaunting and has no fragrance, while here in the woods its exquisite sweetness fills the air for miles."

"Trelawney, you are fit for Bedlam."

"I knew you would say so. I thought so too at first. I tried to stamp it out, and put it down, and for a long time I fought all that is best in me."

"Does she know anything about your feelings?"

"Not one word, as yet."

"Then I hope something--anything--may happen to put a stop to it before she does."

This hasty wish seemed cruel to him afterward, and he regretted it.

"It would break my heart," said Trelawney, with an extreme earnestness. "I know you think I am talking wildly, but I tell you it would break my heart."

Cleaver fell to meditating ruefully upon the future in store for his friend in this desolate place. King Cophetua and the beggar-maid are a triumph of ideal contrast, eminently fascinating in an ideal point of view. But real life presents prosaic corollaries,--the Teakes, for example, on the familiar footing of Trelawney's brothers-in-law; the old crone with her pipe, his wife's grandmother; that ignorant girl, his wife--oh, these sublunary considerations are too inexorable. In his sluggish content he would never make another effort; he would always live here; he would sink, year by year, by virtue of his adaptability and uncouth associations nearer to the level of the mountaineers. This culminating folly seemed destined to complete the ruin of every prospect in a fine man's life.

Cleaver did not know what was to come, and he brooded upon these ideas.