PART III

THE AMBROSIAL YOUTH

“His flesh is angel’s flesh, all alive.”

“Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.” EMERSON.

September weather was over the world before I felt able to be carried out-of-doors. I had been very ill, but at my worst I remember having Jennie on my mind, and hanging to her hand while I pleaded over and over the cause of the little child.

Now, though weak, I had reached a state of rapturous convalescence, and reached it quite suddenly. Julian lifted me out to the shaded lawn, where Jennie had wadded a rocking-chair with pillows. The leaves were turning, but none had fallen. Lena’s birds hanging in a row along the eaves of the porch kept it up at a great rate, the canary seeming to recognize me and give me the name he had long since invented for me: turning his head and calling through the bars, “Maë, Maë!”

Lena and Fritz came around the corner of the house and grinned. Lena had saved the biggest pear on the dwarf tree for me, and Fritz brought a nosegay of marigolds, strong enough to stifle many invalids. “It’s quite like a Harvest Home,” said Julian. “We ought to strap a corn-shock on Leander’s back and lead him in the procession.”

Then Jennie went into the house to bring out T’férgore. Jennie was not only my doctor, but she had turned up her sleeves and showed Lena how to cook the dishes I could eat. She had discharged two nurses, one after the other, and relied on herself and Lena’s help, and Julian’s solicitude.

“You never know what a woman is until you try her in a family crisis,” said Julian, sitting down near me. “I wasn’t enamored of your Dr. Purdy before, but I’ll say this of her now: she has the coolest head, the readiest hand, and the largest fund of domestic skill of any woman I ever saw.”

“I always told you that,” said I in a superior tone.

“She’s stayed by us to the neglect of her city practice, I’m afraid,” said Julian.

“She is just getting into practice,” I assured him, “and before coming out here announced her intention of leaving town for a change. It has been a severe change, though.”

“But a man has been here importuning her about something.”

I took hold of the arms of my chair. “What kind of a man, Julian?”

“Oh, an ordinary person. Nothing striking about him. I thought he looked very sulky the last time he went away.”

“Jennie was short with him, was she?”

“She saw him only a few minutes each time, after the first, and I thought she was rather peremptory. There’s Doctor Theophilus again, and he’s footed it from the Avenue station. The Reverend never was so devoted to us as he has been since T’férgore’s arrival,” said Julian, smiling drolly.

I had a nervous dread of Julian’s uncle; he was the most respectable man who ever had the right to add Doctor of Divinity to his name. Large, broad, and ponderous, his mere presence seemed to reprehend the playful antics of life. I was afraid of his long upper lip, which shut as close as a snuff-box lid. His white neckties awed me, and the solidity of his choice words reproached me. Behind his back, and in spite of Julian’s laughing remonstrance, I had rechristened Uncle Doctor Theophilus, whose surname was Marvin, The Old Daguerreotype. It is true he had not his case on, though the snap with which it formerly shut had probably passed into his lips. I could even fancy that when you got a side-light on him he retained the glare of the old daguerreotype, and effaced himself in a sheet of glitter. His expression seemed unalterably made up; and though he looked more ancient than other men of his age, I knew he thought himself well taken, and all his tints neat without being gaudy. He oppressed me so that I frequently wanted to rub him out. I always trod on a stone and turned my foot, or ran against a chair, when the Old Daguerreotype was by. Or he threw me into a nervous trance, and I sat with parted lips, glaring eyes, and aching neck, fancying that my own daguerreotype was being taken. Aunt Doctor Theophilus used to be a worthy companion picture to him, but death years ago effaced her lineaments and snapped her case shut, to be opened no more.

I felt that I could hardly stand the Old Daguerreotype just at this time, but said to Julian it was kind of him, taken in such a precise attitude as he was, to dust himself walking out from the Avenue, on our account.

“Oh, it isn’t the first time he has done it,” said Julian. “Something about our rural domicile has seized upon Uncle Doctor. He didn’t go out of town this year, and he’s taking whiffs of the country between sermons.”

“Between poses,” I suggested softly. “I hope Jennie isn’t bothered by his coming. She takes strong antipathies, and he does make one’s backbone ache.”

“Oh, she stands it,” said Julian laughing, “affably, as if she were the artist who had taken him.”

I turned around towards Jennie as Julian went to the gate to meet his uncle. She was bringing T’férgore across the porch and smoothing down the angel robes. She herself looked like a Madonna picture, pale and somewhat saddened, but most womanly, most touching.

“Jennie,” I said, as she put T’férgore on my lap, standing before me to do so, “you have taken care of me as only a woman can, and pulled me through to paradise.”

“Well,” she replied quickly, “you took care of me first. I think I must have been out of my senses. But having this little monster to handle made things appear very different.”

T’férgore blinked lazily, and struck out with ineffectual fists. The cherub-wings were perhaps hidden in folds of mull, but gazing on this wonderful creature’s allurements, I was seized with a Saturn-like desire to bite and devour every flower-tinted atom. I forgot that the Old Daguerreotype was at the gate, and worried my prey, breaking into a rhapsody of baby Romany.

In the midst of my Bess’ums and S’eetums, and Old Dol’ums, Uncle Doctor appeared before me, and bent himself at T’férgore’s shrine, with an expression nearly as idiotic as my own. He clucked, whistled, and snapped his fingers, and for one moment I thought he was going to dance. But his legs were taken too stiffly for that, and he only limbered his entire length and cracked the glass in a way which damaged him forever as my Old Daguerreotype.

Then he straightened himself up apologetically and shook hands with Jennie, saying in his most ministerial tones, “And how are you to-day, Dr. Jane?”

I must say that everything Uncle Doctor did on this occasion astonished me. It was the first time I had been permitted to see a visitor, and they should have prepared me for the unusual side-lights I should now catch upon the Old Daguerreotype. He held professional women in disdain, and I had heard him utter homilies against wives who tacked all their maiden or acquired names before their husband’s cognomen. Yet here he was parading Dr. Jane’s title, and almost capering before her in his exuberant desire to win favor.

They sat down around me, and I noticed how unembarrassed Jennie was by the Daguerreotype’s white tie and the clip of his lips and fearful respectability.

“A little daughter in the house,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, indicating with pomp the human atom in my lap, “is indeed a well-spring of pleasure.”

“We counted on her brother Trotwood Copperfield, instead of his sister Betsey Trotwood,” said Julian.

“It was a mere fancy,” I insisted, “and girls are just as good as boys any day.”

“Better,” granted Julian.

“I’m quite as glad that T’férgore is a girl.”

“But it disarranges the name,” said Julian. “His name was Fergus Dering, but I think we shall have to call her Ferguson.”

“Not at all,” I dissented indignantly.

“T’férgore!” mused Uncle Doctor Theophilus. “What kind of un-Christian appellation have you stumbled upon there?”

“The name being Fergus,” explained Julian, “we call her--as Lena would put it--T’férgore in short.”

We sat in silences of several minutes at a time, hearing an apple drop in the orchard, the call of the katydids, or the restless stepping of Leander in his stable. Already the smoky light of autumn was mellowing distances.

“How remote this little spot appears to be from the centres of traffic,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, with a pulpit gesture.

“It’s a good place for fever patients,” said Dr. Jane in a tone of authority. “There’s health in the air of the house.”

“Yes, I should apprehend as much,” asserted Uncle Doctor Theophilus.

“You mean the intellectual atmosphere, of course,” said Julian, as a whiff of the sauerkraut Lena did love came around the house. “Oh yes, we are remote, but we have had great company here. Emerson has uttered wisdom from your chair, Uncle Doctor, and near him sat Hawthorne, and against that tree leaned Thoreau. We have even had what some fantastic literary fellow calls the tone poets all around us, and no end of painters and sketchers.”

“It’s nothing but a play of ours,” I explained. “Whenever I wished we had such people for visitors, Julian piled chairs full of their books, or their music, or stood up copies of their pictures. Then we talked to them, and Julian read from them in reply, or I ran over the musical score, or he hung a picture where it could speak for itself. In that way he thinks we enjoyed just as close communion with them as their nearest friends ever had; because their elusive souls would speak to us more directly and coherently than if they were sitting opposite us in the flesh.”

The Old Daguerreotype shook his head indulgently over such pastime. On deliberation, however, he said the next time we had such a gathering he would like to join it.

After supper, and while Uncle Doctor Theophilus and Julian were trailing their feet through the grass, carrying their hands behind them, and all but chewing the bovine cud in their ruminative gazing on the bee-hives, the orchard, the stable, and meadow, Jennie put on her hat and gloves to drive our relative back to the Avenue station. I knew the drive would be good for her.

“You can come home the long way, through the creek--the water is always low--after you have left him at his train,” I hinted.

“I guess I shall go the long way,” said Jennie. “It will be pleasanter having someone to talk with.”

T’férgore and I exchanged a long stare; that is, I exchanged a long stare with T’férgore for a series of self-absorbed blinks.

“I am so glad,” I then remarked to Jennie, “that you aren’t put out by the old Dag--Doctor; when I say old, I mean, of course, reverend; for he isn’t really elderly, you know.”

“He doesn’t put me out a bit,” answered Jennie. “He is very quieting to me. I believe he is a sound man.”

“There is no man sounder,” I declared. “And he was just as good as he could be to his wife. I think she actually died because there was nothing more she could ask of life. I never saw such a self-satisfied expression as she had--outside of a miniature. His position is excellent and influential, too. A woman can’t help looking at that sort of thing when she is once married.”

Jennie turned about to face me, smiling. “Now, don’t, my dear, don’t,” she objected. “Let us not give our talk any such bias.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I exclaimed apprehensively. “I’m not throwing anybody at you at all. I was just going to say that though he is such an excellent man, and near to Julian and all that, he ossifies the working of my joints: I feel in such awe of him.”

“I don’t,” said Jennie.

“Yes; I’ve noticed that.”

“I think his society is wholesome for me.”

“Yes; it seems to be mutual,” I could not help suggesting. “Either you or T’férgore is limbering him up until I do believe in the course of time his presence will become wholesome for _me_.”

Leander, drawing Jennie and the Old Daguerreotype in our red cart, went briskly down the road, and Julian and T’férgore and I sat watching them.

“They will loiter through the woods,” mused I, “and watch the festoons of grapevine, and get a sniff of sycamore leaves and pennyroyal mixed with loam.”

“Yes,” said Julian. “Next week I shall take you and Ferguson off through the woodsiest drive of them all.”

“Julian,” I remonstrated, “her name isn’t and it never will be Ferguson.”

“Oh, well,” said Julian, “the bill is laid on the table then. Another motion will be in order.”

“And they’ll see bunches of goldenrod in a thicket,” I continued, returning to Leander’s load, “and the Old Daguerreotype will jump out to get it for her, footing it lightsomely among the burrs.”

“You make quite a beau of our uncle,” said Julian, turning his cigar over.

“Well, I should think anybody could see that’s what he wants to be considered.”

“He has my consent,” said Julian.

“Mine, too,” said I, taking high grounds; “but I’m not so sure about Jennie. She’s a woman who has been hard to suit. Nothing else stood in the way of her marrying long ago.”

I looked keenly at Julian, but he evidently knew naught about the one month divorced man with a wife and five children--the youngest two years old. It was the only secret I had ever kept from him, and it burned guiltily at the roots of my tongue. But the woman who reveals to her lord and master some unlovely weakness of her own sex helps him to a judgment-seat too dangerously lofty.

“She’s what you may really call superior,” admitted Julian, “but far enough into the woods to be afraid of the crooked stick. And Uncle Theoph. isn’t so bad.”

“No,” I granted generously: “he doesn’t make me half as miserable as he used to. And I know he won’t mind getting bugs down his neck and stumbling over old logs for yellow and chocolate colored pawpaw leaves and branches of fire-red maple, if Jennie wants him to.”

“I wonder,” Julian ruminated, “if Aunt Marvin ever made him dance around when they were young together and she had a ribbon headdress on her hair, and he choked himself with a stock.”

“No,” said I, “she was his first wife.”

Julian reached over, at the risk of waking T’férgore, and laid his arm across my shoulder.

“Besides, she never cried,” I added. “And a good husband is just like a growing crop: he needs to be rained on.”

Julian uttered a little grunt of contempt, but it was the kind of contempt which magnified the importance of his own sex and therefore did no real harm to ours.

“Uncle Doctor Theophilus is lonely,” said Julian, “having once lived the life of a family man.”

“And Jennie is lonely, too,” I admitted, “having never lived the life of a family woman. Think how hard it is to stand outside of--say the little farm--and see T’férgore come home, and our comfort and satisfaction.”

“Man: his wife: his child:” ruminated Julian. “The family; the little spot of our own ground. That’s the primitive and true life.”

We heard the creek frogs lifting up their voices.

“Next summer when T’férgore is big enough to be carried across the field,” said I, “I will make a Kate Greenaway dress with a yoke, and flare a hat of muslin for her, or better still, pucker her face into a frilly cap, and set her down in the midst of the clover where there aren’t any bees.”

“And put a crook in her hand,” said Julian. “For now we are her sheep. We can’t stray across blue water until the shepherdess permits.”

ILLINOIS

BEETRUS

TIME, 1881

“Beetrus Jenkins!” called the owner of the name, sending her high clear voice through the boxed space which served as post-office window.

“Yes, ’m,” responded the postmaster, with that joking freedom which adds so much spice to the life of a general-storekeeper at a South Illinois railroad station. “Three letters this time. He’s writing nearly every day.”

“It wears on you to keep track of my correspondence, don’t it?” affirmed the girl, taking her letters and rending them open with impatient forefinger. They were all addressed, in the same mercantile hand, to Miss Beatrice Jenkins, Wabash Station, Illinois. She compared the dates of the postmarks, and opened the earliest, standing by the door to read.

The smoke-dimmed interior of the store was hung with baskets, dry-goods, bacon, ready-made clothing, and boots and shoes. A skeleton flight of steps ascended across a background of wall to the proprietor’s residence, and up this flight of steps went a neighbor’s barefooted child with a coffee-pot to borrow some household necessity, while Beetrus read her mail.

She was a spot of mellow color betwixt brilliant autumn tints outside and the dim inclosure. The slim, long-fingered hands holding her letters were nicely gloved. Her white hat was covered with plumes just owning the salmon-pink tint of her small woolen shawl. Her dress was neutral and unobtrusive. Not so, however, were her black eyes and glowing cheeks, or the dark hair clustering to her ears. She was a very pretty girl, and this the station-master always mentally admitted. He came out of his post-office cubby with the mail-bag in his hand.

“So you’re going to clear out to-day, Bee?”

She glanced up, perceptibly starting and coloring.

“Goin’ by rail or by river?”

“Oh!” said Beetrus. “Yes, we’re going up the river. Our things are packed on the White Dove. We’d have to go so far around and pay so much freight the other way. But I don’t like to go on a freight boat, and neither does ma, though the men are just as kind and clever as they can be. We have to sit upon deck all night, too, among the machinery and grease.”

“Yes, you will. It’s a twelve hours’ run betwixt this and New Harmony against the current. The White Dove starts about three o’clock. Will you be down any during the winter?”

“I guess not. Our man and his wife can tend to everything on the farm. We never do run back and forth any after cold weather sets in.”

“And I suppose you’ll put the time in dancin’ and takin’ music lessons?”

“It isn’t so very lively in Harmony; but I’m going on with my music--That isn’t the train?”

“Yes, it is,” responded the station-master, swinging the mail-bag as he walked forth to keep appointment with the black and hissing locomotive sliding to its brief pause.

Beetrus flew through the store, ran down the back steps, and sheltered herself in woods which stretched away toward the Wabash. Swift as her exit was, she scarcely escaped the eye of a young man who swung himself off the train, sample case in hand. His face twinkled humorously, which it could very well do, being a pleasant mustached face in spite of the marks of dissipation it bore. His trim dress and brisk air bespoke the prosperous commercial traveler.

He went indoors and swept a business-like glance around before the train steamed away; therefore by the time the station-master had put up the mail and served one or two customers, he had a satisfactory order written out, and professed himself ready to mount the next train, for which he would have to wait quite two hours.

“Oh, you know how to put the time in,” said the station-master, “as long as we have any pretty girls left in the neighborhood.”

The drummer smiled out of the back door at a huddle of two or three cabins and board huts, as if the capacity of such a place for producing pretty girls was too contemptible a joke for him to meddle with. He said he guessed he would go down to the landing and see if he couldn’t get a skiff a while.

“Bee Jenkins will be down that way,” suggested the station-master. “She was in here a minute ago.”

“Ran from me,” noted the drummer.

“I’d kind of advise her to, if she hadn’t,” said the station-keeper.

“What’s the objection to me?” laughed the drummer; “I’m only a good gray sinner. They’ll have to dip me several times more before I’m as black as you South Illinois Egyptians.”

“Old lady Jenkins will have a crow to pick with you, though, if she happens to drop onto all these letters and walks.”

“You undertake too much,” said the drummer, shaking his head with gentle persuasiveness. “The store and post-office and station and the neighborhood will accumulate, and be too many for you.”

Beetrus saw him sauntering on her track. The blood was buzzing in her head, and she hid herself upon a pile of steep high rocks, obeying some wild impulse of which she felt ashamed. To follow him with her eyes and be herself invisible was an impersonal rapture in which she could indulge without giving it too great advantage. Yet, when he disappeared near the river, she felt a stinging check in her heart, and a sense of having inflicted loss and robbery upon herself.

To Beetrus he was the walking essence of the world, representing not only its mighty business, but its advantages of culture and travel. She never had been from home except to Evansville and New Harmony; and he never stayed two nights in a place, and spoke with fatigue of his exciting life. What operas he had seen!--for in Beetrus’s chaotic imagination all theatrical performance was opera, and operas were the distinct possessions of the worldly.

She resented with a mixture of awe and daring the greatness of his relatives. He was a nephew of the head of his commercial house, and his grandfather had been a congressman; while her background was the pioneer’s cabin, the pecan woods, and Wabash rocks and hills.

Beetrus was the child of a shrewd though romance-soaked mother, who had dowered her with something more than a mispronounced fine name and biased imagination. It is strange to think how large a human mass, moving this instant in grooves of practical action, is protesting with secret scorn against all its conditions. Beetrus was full of a girl’s unrests and eccentric impulses. She thought she knew exactly what she wanted for her happiness.

She pressed her cheek against the rock lichens, taking a half-inverted view of the autumn tangle, and glad in spite of herself for the pleasant breath of life. It was worth while to be a part of such woods and river vistas, and to smell all the ground’s odors. Some little living thing ran along a log not far from her; and she could hear a squirrel bark, a whish and a whisper of loosened leaves as they were sent adrift, and then the dropping of a nut. Strong as the sunlight was, she shivered upon the rocks, and then felt all her blood burn, beat, and tremble.

The commercial traveler was walking back with a brisk step from the river, and scanning every opening among the trees, as if on an eager search. He saw Beetrus rising and tightening her pink shawl on her shoulders, and halted with a jerk.

“Where have you been?” was his unceremonious exclamation.

“Up here, reading my letters and viewing the country.”

“You saw me go past, then, didn’t you?”

“Was it you?” said she, fitting her foot deftly to the steep descent.

“Let me lift you down. How pretty you look this morning!”

“Oh! don’t talk about pretty, Mr. Poundstone,” said Beetrus, dyed in color, after he had stood her upon the moss, dazed as she always was by his prevailing presence.

“You oughtn’t to have hid; I want to talk up a scheme with you right off. It popped into my head since I got off the train.”

“What scheme?” said Beetrus, hugging her shawl and looking over her shoulder to simulate complete indifference.

“You know well enough, or can guess. We mustn’t be parted, my dear girl; I can’t run up to New Harmony every time I make a trip down this way. Think of the long winter. Don’t you want to see me this winter?”

“Oh--yes,” she admitted, with a gasp.

“I want to see you. I want to have you entirely to myself, to look forward to every time I come in off the road. Let’s get married.”

Beetrus visibly expanded and contracted with a great breath.

“Get on the train and go over to Evansville with me, and we’ll have the minister tie the knot there. Then home. And a nice little private set of rooms, all quiet and to ourselves, and no relations to bother us.”

“But ma’s fixed things to go up to New Harmony for the winter,” whispered Beetrus, struggling with this vision. “And she wouldn’t change her mind so suddenly--’specially as she doesn’t know you real well.”

“It isn’t ma I want to marry,” argued Poundstone, using his winning smile. “I’ll drop my relations, and you can surely do the same.”

“Drop ma!”

The girl was stung by a covert insult.

“Leave her a little while. Let her go up to New Harmony, you know.”

“And what do you mean about dropping your relations?” demanded Beetrus, growing straighter and more self-assured, and burning more vividly in the cheeks. “That they wouldn’t want to be acquainted with ma and me? No, sir; I ain’t going to let her go up to New Harmony alone; and I never would seriously have you unless she knew all about it and was willing. She might have read your letters if she wanted to; she knows about them. I never did anything in my life that ma told me not to do.”

“I thought five minutes’ talk on this subject would bring you to reason,” remonstrated Poundstone.

“Then you didn’t calculate right.”

“So it seems.”

“I’m not the girl you took me for.”

“Do you want to break off with me entirely?” he exclaimed, with heat.

“Yes--come to that--I do!” cried Beetrus, flinging his letters at him, two fluttering uncertain, but one moulded by the grip of her hand and darting like a missile. “I believed in you, and see how you’ve treated me!”

“My darling girl!”

“Don’t you come around in my sight any more. And go marry somebody that won’t cause any _dropping_. I can stand it.”

“I believe you can,” he sneered.

“Yes, indeed; I can stand it. So good-by to you.”

Saying which, Beetrus turned and scudded off, through Spanish needles and boggy spots, until his first half-uttered remonstrance had been for some time changed into language of another sort.

It seemed long before Beetrus found a log on which she could draw herself, face downward, with her arms stretched beyond her head.

The White Dove moved off from Wabash Landing two hours behind her appointed time. She was a dirty little boat, carrying a miscellaneous freight, but among the barrels on the after-deck some hard-favored and much-whittled chairs had been placed for Beetrus and her mother.

The young girl herself stood by the rope which served for railing, and saw her own heartache color all those fair distances. Downy swells of remote banks and bold juts of rock were copied in the river, so ruffleless did it seem to lie even when the strong current was moving. A blue heron stood at the water edge meditating, with one foot planted on sand and the other tucked up. It slightly spread its mighty wings, shook them, and folded them again to place, without appearing to break the trance of its downward stare.

While the White Dove churned along, shadows stretched upon the Wabash. Now it was very late afternoon, and now it threatened to be evening, with a hint that by and by it would be night, when you might expect the woods to make deep black borders along the river, and the canopy of stars to look smeared by the little steamer’s smokestack.

When Beetrus was pale and tired, she turned and leaned against her mother--an ample, indulgent woman, who nevertheless had one bristling mole upon the right side of her face. She broke the tacit silence in which they had begun their journey by declaring, “Ma, I love you.”

“You don’t often put a body out telling them that,” responded Mrs. Jenkins, uttering a gratified laugh.

“I keep up a dreadful loving, though,” said Beetrus, casting sidewise at the river black eyes which swam in waters of their own.

“You’re my baby,” cooed her mother, patting the slim hand fondling her neck. “There’s plenty of pretty young men in the world, but there’s only one old mother.”

“I don’t care anything about the young men,” said Beetrus, with strong scorn. “I was thinking a good while in the woods to-day, coming from the post-office, and I’ve made up my mind never to get married.”

“You’ll turn around often enough before the time comes.”

“I never will,” emphasized Beetrus. “We’ll be two nice old ladies together, ma, and neither of us will get married.”

“I won’t, for a sure thing,” laughed her mother. “But you’ll only be middle-aged when I’m ready to totter.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Beetrus sadly. “And then if one would die and leave the other”--

“Now, now, don’t you fret, lovey. I’ve had consider’ble trouble and experience, and if I don’t sigh round, you needn’t. Who’s that nice-looking man that keeps looking back this way?”

Beetrus had been facing down river, with her mind completely closed to any moving figures on deck. She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Why, it’s”--she exclaimed, swallowing her breath with a gasp--“it’s Mr. Poundstone.”

“That correspondent of yours?” said Mrs. Jenkins, nodding her head, and inspecting him sincerely with such thoroughness as intervening barrels permitted.

Beetrus’s ears rang. She had, however, that instinctive western courage which sometimes takes the place of disciplined self-control; so by no other clue than the deepening fire of her cheeks and eyes did she give Mr. Poundstone any knowledge of the disturbance he brought her when he climbed a passage over impediments and placed himself in the party.

His manner was subdued, even becomingly humble and conciliatory.

“Ma, this is Mr. Poundstone,” said Beetrus, secretly triumphant in being free from the subservience which yesterday would have made her say, “Mr. Poundstone, this is my mother.”

She did not add to her unconsidered formula now, but allowed him to lift his hat and bow over her mother’s hand.

“I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Jenkins,” said he. “I want to make friends with you, and get you to convince your daughter I’m not such a bad fellow as I look.”

“You don’t look like a bad fellow,” she responded heartily.

“I didn’t know you were going up on the boat,” said Beetrus, regarding with gentle indifference the brim of his hat, after he replaced it.

“You know I couldn’t go off on the train and leave matters in the shape they are. I never sold a bill of goods in New Harmony in my life, but I’m going to try to make a satisfactory trade for myself now, if the house turns me off for it.”

Beetrus parted her lips smiling, and this time met him in the eyes. Without formulating the fact, she knew there was sterling man under the crust of acquired coarseness. The brutal plan he had formed concerning her, and which he was now scarcely willing to acknowledge to himself, began to withdraw from betwixt them like the mist which already wavered on the hills.

“I believe it will be a clear day to-morrow,” the girl said, falling back upon good commonplace.

“Do you believe it will be a clear day to-morrow, Mrs. Jenkins?” inquired Poundstone.

“Well, it seems like it might be pretty,” responded the widow, turning up her face to see the pinkness reflected from the west.

“Then I believe it will too,” said the commercial traveler, with a devout air, which was unmoved by Beetrus’s laughing out,--

“A great deal prettier and clearer than to-day has been.”

THE BRIDE OF ARNE SANDSTROM

TIME, 1885

“Big Swede wedding over there this evening,” said one passer to another by his side. “Peter Lund’s daughter.”

“Is she marrying a Swede?” inquired the second.

“Yes; fellow by the name of Arne Sandstrom.”

“I should think old Peter, well off as he is, would have looked higher for a son-in-law--you or me, for instance,” observed the second youth, with a laugh.

“The girl’s pretty as a pink, and has had every advantage. It is a pity to see her thrown away; but old Peter has a lot of younger ones coming on.”

“That makes it less an object. I thought she was his only. The Swedes are clannish.”

“Peter Lund’s is headquarters for them, too. Here’s one now, hunting up the wedding. I’ll bet she’s just arrived from the old country.”

So near the truth was this surmise that Elsa had been off the train only twenty minutes, and in that time had repeated the name of Arne Sandstrom interrogatively to every person she met. She was dazed by long riding and partial fasting, and the dumb terror of finding no one to receive her at the end of her great journey. The letter created with much brain-work to announce her coming ought to have been in his hands weeks ago. The innocent and friendless soul did not know she had omitted all dates and exactness in her general care for spelling and inky loops. So stepping off the train into the American town at dusk, she saw stretches of summer prairie to the westward, perky architecture, crossing railroad tracks, hurrying citizens, and lazy loungers--even the new electric light on its spider-work iron tower beginning to make a ghastly powerful star far above her head. She saw baggage and piles of express matter, hotel runners, and other women, starting toward their assured homes, tucked laughing and chatting under their husbands’ arms; but she saw not one face or one kind hand ready to bid her welcome, who had ventured thousands of miles alone--across ocean, across continent--to marry her betrothed lover, Arne Sandstrom.

Hearing his name spoken, she stood still upon the sidewalk, shrinking and timid, but directly in front of the young men, and inquired, using hands and eyes as well as anxious inflection of voice, “Arne Sandstrom?”

“She wants to know where Arne Sandstrom is. Right over there--that big house, which you see lighted up. She doesn’t understand. Arne Sandstrom over there. Getting married! Yes, yes. Arne Sandstrom. Here, Jack, you trot out a little Swedish, can’t you? You’ve been among them more than I have.”

“Arne Sandstrom _derover_,” exclaimed the other, pointing to Peter Lund’s house, with a fine assumption of handling the language well. “Arne Sandstrom _jifta_ to-night, you know.”

“Yifta!” said Elsa, shrinking down in stature.

“She’s got hold of it. That’s all right. You’ll be in time for the wedding.”

“She didn’t understand; she thought we were making fun of her,” said one of the lads as they sauntered on.

“She did understand, and there she goes straight across the street. Brush up in the languages, young man, and make yourself as useful to the public as I am.”

When Elsa had entered the Lund premises, however, she did not ring the bell, but wavered around the house, looking up at lighted windows, and shifting her little bundle from one arm to the other. She had other baggage at the station, but it seemed no longer worth while. There was a western veranda, on the lowest step of which she sat down in quiet stupor to collect herself for some determined movement.

Anguish and disappointment must be the natural lot in this world, only she had not lived enough years to find it out before. Though summer darkness had come, the after-glow was still so bright in the west that it half quarreled with abundant lamplight. Elsa could hear the front gate, the crunch of coming footsteps, and frequent peals of the door-bell, as she sat drawn together, and the eternal minutes traveled on.

Peter Lund’s house was full of joyful stir. China and silver tinkled in the open dining-room, where several women were putting last touches to the tables. Girls flew up and down the back stairway, calling to one another in Swedish.

“One thing is sure, Yennie Yonsen,” called a voice in the home tongue, “there will not be enough married women to take the bride from us girls in the wedding dance; so now what will Arne Sandstrom do?”

Three of them conspired together by the western dining-room door, bobbing their flaxen heads, all laughing and talking at once in their light happiness, far above the unseen stranger on the step.

“Who told me Arne Sandstrom left a betrothed girl in Svadia?” said one, lowering her voice to graver colloquy.

“Oh, well, she married, herself, of course,” replied another; “and any man who could get Lena Lund would take her.”

“Lena’s so pretty.”

“Lena’s rich.”

“Lena can sing and play better than some Amerikanskä.”

“Lena has ten new dresses. Arne will not have to put his hand in his pocket for many a day.”

“She is not spoiled therewith. I always liked her.”

“Ah, my mother said if this wedding was going to be in Svadia this St. John’s Eve, what a night we would make of it!”

They ran away, while Elsa repeated to herself that this was the Eve of St. John--night of arbors and rejoicing at home, night when the sun scarcely went down, and everybody feasted and visited under green-leaf tents. Of what use was St. John’s Eve, or any other portion of time, to a girl put to shame and despair as she was? Why had Arne Sandstrom sent her money to come over with if he meant to jilt her on her arrival? Or had he picked another betrothed for her as well as himself? She would not believe her Arne could be so evil; she would knock and ask for him. He was so kind! he loved her. Yet not only the Amerikanns, but those laughing girls, had said plainly this was Arne Sandstrom’s wedding; any man would take Lena Lund who could get her; Lena was so pretty; Lena was rich; Lena could sing and play better than some Amerikanskä; Lena had ten new dresses, and she was not spoiled.

Elsa bruised her cheek against the edge of the second step above her. She did not know where to go, and her money was all spent except the little she had saved by going without food during part of her railway journey, and she had saved that to buy some little ornament for her new home with Arne. She might try to hire herself out, but how could she ever write back home where such happy news was expected from her, or how could she put unendurable anxiety upon those best friends by not writing at all? Svadia was so pleasant, especially in the long nightless summers. Good and kind they were to strangers there: her mother always baked waffles and carried them with coffee to the morning bedside of a guest. She could see her native meadows stretching away in the blue northern air, and the iron whip, as her mother called the scythe, beating up an appetite in those who wielded it, while she herself, a careless little maid, came bearing the second breakfast to the mowers.

A quavering but hearty voice, which might have come from the mouth of her own grandmother if it had not belonged to Peter Lund’s mother, sung out a Lapp-Finn nurse song by an upper window, and Elsa knew just what syllables the dancing baby was made to emphasize.

“Donsa lupon, Hopsom tup an, Lanti lira, Hopsom stira: Sprönti lupon, lupon, Hopsom tup an, tup an, Lanti lira, lira, Hopsom stira, stira.”

Dance and jump, Hop like a rooster, Hop like the skatan.

Perhaps this very instant--for Elsa made no calculations in longitude and time--vader’s mütter danced the baby under her home roof; and none of her people knew how faint, how outcast, how bewildered the eldest child felt sitting on steps in a strange Amerikanski town.

In Elsa’s box of clothing was the finest sheepskin blanket her mother ever made, so white in fleece, and cured by buttering and scraping until the skin yielded soft like chamois leather. It was lined with scarlet flannel. She could see the storeroom of her father’s farmhouse hung thickly with such fleeces, and hear her mother say she wished Elsa could take more, since they had so little money to send with her. But Arne Sandstrom had sent the money to pay her way, because he loved her so. They were children together, and he was held as dear as a son in her own family. Elsa’s mother never distrusted him. How could it therefore be possible that Arne Sandstrom, after sending for his betrothed, could be marrying a Swede Amerikanskä fleka the very evening of her arrival?

In her intensely quiet fashion the poor girl was wiping away tears as fast as they dripped down her cheeks, and now she lifted her head from the step, coming to a decision.

She walked up on the veranda, her feet sounding heavy and uncertain, and stood at the door ready to knock. Her piteous great eyes moved from wall to wall of the ample dining-room, recognizing Svensk wooden spoons and beautifully painted and polished Russian bowls in various sizes on the side-board. Hard-baked Svensk bread, so loved by the white and firm Scandinavian teeth, and all known home luxuries, with unheard-of Amerikanski things, smiled at her from the glittering tables. This Lena Lund would be called a mamzelle in Svadia; she was very much above a poor yungfrau like Elsa. Any man might be glad to marry her. Still Elsa would not believe Arne Sandstrom had forgotten his betrothed.

She could see him from where she stood, in an inner room with a background of fine furniture. How beautiful he looked, all in Amerikann clothes, and with soft dark gloves on his hands, like a very rich man! His cheek was ruddy, his forehead white, and the very round of his ear--how well Elsa remembered it! Arne Sandstrom was happy, and laughing aloud with other people. She heard his voice while she stood just without, so wretched her whole soul seemed numb.

In perfect silence she waited, and still saw him laugh and extend his hand to have it shaken by one and another, until a figure came out of the room where he was, to pass through the dining-room, and she knew in an instant Otto Jutberg, who came to America with Arne. Elsa put her foot across the threshold and said, to call his attention, “Otto.”

Otto approached the door and looked curiously at her. One rope of her flaxen hair hung down on her breast, and she looked travel-worn.

“Otto Jutberg, I want to see Arne Sandstrom.”

“Arne is going to be married in a few minutes,” said Otto.

“I know he is. But I want to see Arne Sandstrom. Tell him to come here.”

“Who is it?” pressed Otto, coming nearer to her, and knitting his brows inquiringly.

“Don’t you know me, Otto, when you have been to my father’s nearly every St. John’s Eve of our lives?”

Elsa felt that she needed only one more drop to her cup, and that for some voice to raise the derisive song with which her countrymen mocked Scowneys, or inhabitants of a region the butt of all Svadia.

“A Scowen, a Scowen”--

one bar was enough to rouse sudden rage in any Svensk.

But instead of “A Scowen, a Scowen,” rising around Elsa’s ears this enchanted night, such a din of outcries was made by Otto Jutberg that people ran to look into the dining-room, and then to swarm around her.

Arne Sandstrom leaped two chairs and seriously jarred one table, to receive Elsa in his arms, when he kissed her openly.

“Bring me one of the chairs I kicked over,” he exclaimed, “and let me set the tired darling in it. I have been looking for the letter which would tell me when you intended to start. Yes, this is my Elsa,” he announced, displaying her; “and how did she find her way in here alone? Mrs. Lund, Elsa has come!”

“Yes, and she has been crying,” said the plump wife of Peter Lund, pressing her hand. “It was enough to break any child’s heart to reach such a journey’s end homesick and unwelcomed.”

At this Elsa leaned against the matron’s side, and shook with sudden sobs, feeling her forehead and hair petted by a good mother’s palms.

Elsa was taken upstairs by both Mrs. Lund and Arne, who talked rapidly across her. She was put into a beautiful room, and young girls came to get acquainted with her. Arne asked her for that piece of metal which would redeem her baggage, and he handed it over to Otto at the door. Before she understood her position, or was quite able to lift her eyes and look at all who wanted to talk to her, the box which had borne her company from Svadia was brought in, and Arne told her the other wedding would be put off half an hour while she got ready. Then he drove the merry company out of the room, and stood with his back to the door to keep at bay that moment all volunteering bride attendants.

“Can you be ready in half an hour, after your long journey, my darling?” said he.

“I can soon wash off the dust and change my dress,” said Elsa. “But, Arne, I do not know anything. Who is going to marry Lena Lund?”

“Arne Sandstrom. And you will be married at the same time.”

“I thought that was what you and Mrs. Lund said. But who is going to marry me?”

“_Who!_ I am--Arne Sandstrom.”

“I will not do it,” said Elsa. “They never have two wives in Svadia.”

Arne Sandstrom gazed silently at her, puffed and exploded his cheeks, and bent over, striking his knees with those delicately gloved hands Elsa had first noted with such awe. He roared in the fervor of his laughter. This American country had in no way abated Arne Sandstrom as a Norseman.

“Oh, Elsa, my snowbird, if I should tell this on thee they would laugh at thee from one end of town to the other. Lena Lund’s bridegroom is my cousin Arne, that came over with Otto Jutberg and me.”

“That was Arne Peterssen,” affirmed Elsa.

“But there are so many Peterssens and Yonsens who take their names from their fathers’ Christian names that Arne changed his to Sandstrom. It is a very common thing to do here.”

Elsa laughed also. It was so simple and clear and Swedish she wondered that news of Arne Sandstrom’s wedding had caused her even a misgiving. She left her chair to swing Arne’s hands while they both finished laughing.

“But you ought to be ready,” he cried, “and not keep the others waiting. I got the papers for the wedding when Arne got his papers, so there would be no mistake of names on the record, and so I could marry you as soon as you came.”

Within the hour, therefore, Elsa was the bride of Arne Sandstrom, arrayed in her dark blue wedding dress of wool, and not shaming by her statue-like proportions and fairness the lighter prettiness and silken raiment of Arne Sandstrom’s American Swedish bride. Happiness and love were, after all, the natural lot in this world, thought Elsa, sitting by her husband in her place of honor at the wedding supper, and tasting the first course of such a feast--the Swedish soup of rice, prunes, raisins, and molasses.

THE BABE JEROME

TIME, 1892

The civil engineer sat at breakfast with his sister. Their table was a stationary one, on stakes driven into the ground, and they drank their coffee from tin camp cups with hooked handles. But the cook served them with broiled fish and game stew, brown pancakes and honey.

The tree overhead was still wet with dew. Lilian had a scarlet shawl around her. She was a girl whose dark eyes and distinct eyebrows you noticed at once, adding afterwards to her personality hair inclined to cluster about the face, and a general elegance of figure which her camp dress suggested instead of outlined.

“As I was bringing my birds in,” said the civil engineer, “I saw Jerome and his gander sitting on the top rail of a fence, side by side. Jerome had his neck stretched up, whispering to the sky, and the gander had its neck stretched up, hissing its meditations. They were a divine pair!”

“As divine as Minerva and her owl, I should think,” said Miss Brooks. “He seems to me a tragic figure. How can you laugh at him?”

“How can you help laughing at him? But I do pity the old father.”

“And the blind aunt. Eric, I’m going across the river to see her. I told Mr. Marsh I would, the next time he came to camp.”

“He’s coming now. There’s his boat on the river.”

Lilian watched the boat and the Wabash. The expanse of limpid water was so shallow in places that its pebbles glittered in the sun, or a sand-bar showed under the surface, while the current in its channel ran deep and strong. Woods clothed its banks, and a gauze of blue hung over its southern bend. Northward a bridge stood on mighty legs of masonry, screening the work of the engineer among rapids beyond. A flat-boat ferry was being poled diagonally across from the east shore to the west, having for passengers a farmer and his horse.

The approaching skiff grounded also, and Jerome’s father stepped slowly out and came across a stretch of gravel and sward to the camp. Quantities of gray hair and beard, a stoop in his shoulders, and a staff in his hand made him venerable, yet his arms were strong and his eyes black and piercing. He was the richest man in his county, and the man most indifferent to externals. Over his jeans garments he wore a blue woolen cape edged with ancient gimp, evidently taken at random from women’s clothing.

He saw with approval the camp appointments: the civil engineer’s men breakfasting at their long table; the cook moving in and out of a canvas kitchen; and the young lady’s tent, revealing a pink net-screened bed, rugs, and stout book-shelves.

“You’re right well fixed over here,” he called out before the campers could wish him good-morning.

The engineer said he always tried to make his camp comfortable.

“And this is as pretty a stretch,” continued the visitor, drawing nearer, “as you’ll find between New Harmony and the Ohio. But ain’t it lonesome for sis here by herself all day when you and the men’s out?”

“Our cook stays in camp,” said Lilian. “He has lived in our family since I was a child. So I feel secure. The friend who was to have been my companion here was detained at the last minute. But I made my brother bring me, anyhow. Will you have some breakfast, Mr. Marsh?”

“No, I’m obliged: I’ve e’t. I come across to look after the Babe. He forgits to have his breakfast sometimes. Seen him on this side--the Babe Jerome?”

“He’s in the woods with his white gander,” said the engineer.

Mr. Marsh rested against the tree and braced himself with his staff.

“Billy’s never far off from Jerome. The Babe gets lonesome on the river, like sis here, and that gander’s great company for him. But the Babe likes to be lonesome. We still call him the Babe,” apologized the old man, “though he’s twenty-five year old; scarlet fever done it. He was the smartest boy on the river. I ’lowed to settle in Shawnytown, and send him to college. His mother was a scholar. Now there’s nothing to do but let him play his music. He’s a good babe. He never gives me no uneasiness except forgittin’ his breakfast.”

“Do you think he would breakfast with us?” inquired Lilian.

“Call him,” suggested her brother. “As for me, I must be excused. There’s a big day’s work to be done on that bar--time the men were in the boats.”

Captain Eric caught up his broad hat, and flourished it in adieu. The cook ran after him with a list of needed supplies. Lilian watched him sitting with folded arms on his camp-chair in the stern of his boat, until the rise and fall of oars and the song of the men drew off to remoteness. She turned to speak to her visitor, and found Jerome standing with him.

“Want to go back over?” his father inquired tenderly.

Jerome shook his head. His visible flesh had a porcelain quality, like the unstained clearness of infancy. His hair glittered in the sun, and he had a long golden mustache, parting in the centre and trailing down his mouth corners below his chin. So strong and manly an ornament sorted strangely with perplexed blue eyes, that, in spite of a puzzling world, laughed with the delicious joy of life. Jerome’s head stood upon a column of slender body. His clothes, to which a few burrs were sticking, would have seemed too fine for his environment if they had not so exactly suited him.

“Lost his hat again!” bantered the father. “That’s the fifth straw hat I’ve bought him this summer.”

“If you will have some breakfast with me, Jerome,” said Lilian, “I will go to your house and eat dinner with you.”

“That’s a bargain, ain’t it, Babe?”

The Babe Jerome looked from one to the other, and smiled, and sat down. His gander, lifting and shaking both wings, quavered a remark and waddled to his feet.

“How white Billy is!” said the young lady, after the cook had brought fresh food and she had helped her guest.

“The’ ain’t a gray quill on Billy,” observed Mr. Marsh, his bearded lips relaxing with contentment.

“And his eyes are blue--blue as the sky! His bill, with such funny nostrils in it, is the purest coral. I didn’t know geese could be so beautiful. You pretty fellow! Will he hiss me?”

“No!” spoke Jerome forcibly, startling her as she stretched a timorous hand to brush Billy’s plumage. It had satin firmness. The gander squatted on his webs and observed in his own language that the caress was agreeable.

Jerome left off eating and leaned on his folded arms to smile. He was a sylvan creature, strayed out of pastoral days into the hazy regions of the Wabash.

He rowed the boat back, his father sitting in idle comfort on the other bench, and Lilian facing the oarsman. She enjoyed the grace of his torso, the veins swelling on his hands, the steady innocence of his gaze, with the same kind of satisfaction given by a scent of sycamore leaves, or the exquisite outline of an island. Billy swam after the boat, the water curling away from his breast; and before it could be beached he had left his web marks on the home sands.

The Marsh double cabin, with central chimney hospitable enough to engulf thousands of swallows, stood on a low bluff. Another and more imposing house was rising near it. The workmen’s noise mingled with stable-yard cackle.

“How I love to hear chickens!” exclaimed Lilian. “They remind me of some wonderfully good time I had when I was a child, though I can’t recall it. You have all the cheerful racket on your side of the river. And how sweet the building wood smells!”

“Some of that’s sweet pine,” explained Mr. Marsh. “The Babe, he carries them chips, and sassafras bark, and spice-wood, and all kinds of woods things, in his pockets.”

The Babe looked at Lilian, repeating slowly what he had told himself many a lonely day, in forest or on river,--

“I--haven’t got--right sense.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” she begged.

The father’s mouth corners fell into leather grooves.

“But Babe’s got idees,” he maintained. “He takes to nice things. So did his mother. I’d have built the new house long ago if she’d lived. And I wouldn’t build it now if it wasn’t for the Babe. Betsey and me like the cabin. We’ll miss the big fireplace, and them hooks in the jice beams. I took Jerome and Betsey down to Shawnytown to stay one winter, and I’d ’a’ died if I hadn’t come back here every two weeks.”

“This is a lovely spot,” said Lilian. “When you are really settled in your new house, you will enjoy it more than ever.”

“I don’t know. It’s just as the Babe turns out to like it. The cabin’s been his cradle. If the new one goes against him I’ll lock it up and bring him back home. Come in,” invited the old man, climbing his doorstep. “Here’s Betsey will be glad to see you.”

From the smoked and chinked interior groped a large woman so delicately and completely white that the blanching appeared to extend through her eyes, for the lids revealed them colorless. She wore a black net cap and a dress and a cape of faded lawn. Her heelless soles made no sound on the bare boards. The palms which she spread before her had the texture of shriveled dogwood petals. The stirring of the lawn clothes set free scarcely detected perfumes,--of apples, and mint, and the old-fashioned roses which grow nowhere now except in remote and dewy country gardens.

“It’s the young lady from the camp, Betsey, come to visit us to-day.”

“That sounds heartsome,” the blind sister responded. Lilian took one of her fluttering hands; the other half unconsciously, with the swiftness of custom, moved up the girl’s shoulder and passed over cheek and head. Lilian noticed in what masses of wrinkles this handsome old face hung, and wondered at the miracle of age; at the childish sweetness that comes back to toothless talk. “I love to have the young around. It’s been missly in the house since Babe’s mother died.”

“Well, take a cheer,” said Mr. Marsh, “and I’ll look into the kitchen and tell Marthy Dempsey who’s for dinner. Marthy she keeps house for us, and she’s a good cook; she used to work in a tavern down at Shawnytown.”

Jerome lingered on the log step while his father performed the sacred rite of seating a guest. Aunt Betsey groped toward him.

“But where’s the Babe?”

“The Babe’s as far in as he likes to come,” said his father. “The Babe’s great for outdoors in summer time.”

“The dew’s off the garden,” spoke Jerome.

“He never disremembers my walk,” chuckled the blind woman. “As soon as the jew is dry he fetches my bonnet.”

Miss Brooks herself tipped the sunbonnet at a satisfactory angle over the black net cap, so that its crown sighted the heavens. Jerome helped his aunt to the ground, and guided her around the house, his arm on her waist. He glanced backward often, to draw Lilian along, and she sauntered close, glad to be a part of all this innocent life.

Woods stood at the rear of the garden, and abrupt Indian mounds ruffled their tufts of fern almost overhead. It was growing warm; scarcely a trace of the humid morning remained, even under burdock leaves, which Martha Dempsey prized for her butter. There was a rank hot smell of marigolds in the sun, with a peppery addition of bouncing betties. The sweet-williams were fragrant as honey and long spikes of red or white hollyhocks swayed in the faintest of breezes. Aunt Betsey scented the camomile bed and picked bits of sweet-mary and basil for Miss Brooks. The sound of the workmen’s hammers on the house, the rippling of the river, and the summer call of insects and birds filled the air, until it seemed to tremble over green distances with this weight of pleasant life.

There was a cherry-tree full of ripe black fruit. Martha Dempsey came out bare-armed, but with a sunbonnet pinned shut below her nose, and, with the unconscious arrogance of the country maid, ordered Jerome to pick her some fruit for pies. He pulled down the lowest branches and filled her tin pail. Then his aunt and Miss Brooks sat under the tree and had their laps weighted with ruby globes on platters of burdock leaves.

“I like cherries best of any fruit,” said Lilian, “and these rich red ones most of all. They get a wicked clip on your tongue that is delightful.”

Jerome considered her, and said with conviction, “You look like a cherry.”

“Then these tart fire-drops ought to be my natural food.”

“This is Babe’s tree,” said Aunt Betsey. “He planted it, and it has growed with his growth.”

It was quite dusk when Jerome landed Miss Brooks at the camp. Her brother met her, and she exclaimed to him:--

“I have had a lovely day! And I persuaded Jerome to bring his violin and play for us a while. His playing is wonderful, Eric.”

“So is Long John’s singing,” observed the captain with contempt.

From the men’s quarters came an unmelodious shout of--“Injun puddin’ and a punkin pie! O, Je-ru-sa-lam!” But this wavered and ceased when Jerome took up his violin. His fingers floated along the strings, and the score he played was never set down in any brain but his own.

The moon came up, and he played straight on, tilting his head back and smiling at floating films in the sky. The cook drew near from his tent, and the men, smoking, crept as near as they felt discipline would allow to the captain’s quarters. Jerome, in the full beatitude of his one unspoiled talent, knew no audience. With a final triumphant cry of the strings, he got up and walked off without saying good-night.

“He can sling a bow!” commented one of the listeners. “They say around here he plays the birds off the bushes.”

“He is like a girl,” said Miss Brooks to her brother. “I enjoy having him about almost as unreservedly as if he were a girl.”

“Glad of it,” replied the captain. “He can pilot you through the woods. It’s a pity the poor harmless fellow is daft. He might have been something.”

Jerome came to camp every day, Billy attending him. Miss Brooks in her bathing dress floated on the river, holding to his boat; and he kept a maternal eye on her while she disported herself. He brought her Indian hatchets, and arrow-heads, and a piece or two of pottery left by the Shawnee tribe. The two explored creeks and islands to such extent that Billy frequently left them in disgust. He snipped grass, and quavered to himself, while Miss Brooks read or talked to Jerome.

She talked to Jerome as if he were a rational being. His delight in the woods was even keener than hers, and his knowledge of wild creatures much greater. He taught her skill in fishing. His joyful father brought offerings of eggs and cream and Martha Dempsey’s peach preserves.

“The Babe pretty nigh lives on this side of the river now. I ’low I ought to help victual the camp.”

“We can’t do without him,” said the girl. “He makes all our good times.”

“The Babe seems to be growin’ older-like this summer,” mused his father. “He ain’t to say manlier, but he’s different.”

“Do you think so?” said Miss Brooks, startled. Her color faded to ivory. She was sitting in a hammock, and occasionally stretched out a sandaled foot to propel it. The old man felt her beauty with a dumb jealousy of all bright young creatures who had not been robbed, like his boy, of their birthright.

Jerome came later in the afternoon, and found his daily companion still in her hammock, but changed toward him.

He had just finished an æolian harp for her. It had required days to properly season the wood, and other days to assort the colors and dry the glue which held different layers together. The instrument was a thing of beauty, with even little keys to wind the strings. He had worked over it with all his faculties excited; and now when he stood before her, holding it very tenderly on his arm, she scarcely looked at it.

But Jerome knew what to do. He moved off with his harp and fixed it in the low fork of a tree. Then he raised its bridges, and turned to watch her face. The harp sighed, and began on a high key “The Last Rose of Summer,” but after two or three bars, lost its score in a flood of delicious organ harmonies. Now it rose to a cry in the zenith, and now it returned to the “Last Rose,” and died to a whisper of melody. It was the passionate revelation of a human heart.

Jerome smiled and nodded his head; for the girl’s chin and lips trembled. She let her book slip down the hammock.

“Talks,” insisted Jerome, claiming her attention for the harp. “I made it to talk to you.”

“But it’s so sorrowful,” said Lilian.

“It--isn’t--quite right,” explained Jerome. “Can’t carry its tune.”

“And you made it for me?”

“Yes. I been a month.”

“You do too much for me. I have been very selfish to take so much of your time.”

Jerome put up his lip like a grieved child.

“Don’t do that!” said Miss Brooks sharply, blanching white.

“What must I do?”

“Sit down here, and let me read to you.”

He sat on the grass and she read austerely, the weird heart-cry of the wind harp curving around her voice or whipping it with ravelings of sweetness. She read while the sun slipped lower and lower, and dared not look at the rapt face watching her. Then she shut the book and said with careful modulation:--

“Thank you very much for the wind harp. I shall take it home with me, and whenever it plays I shall think of you.”

His grieved lip instantly smiled. “If you fasten it in your window it will play all the time!”

“There is one other thing I would love to have, and that is a feather from Billy.”

Jerome stretched out an arm and drew his familiar toward him. Billy twitched his short tail and curved a suspicious neck while his master stretched one glistening pinion.

“Do you want his whole wing?” inquired Jerome, groping for a knife.

“Not for the world!” exclaimed Miss Brooks. “Only one of dear Billy’s tiniest feathers, to put away and look at.”

Jerome plucked a quill and handed it to her.

“You may have him all, if you want him.”

“But what would you do without Billy?”

He repeated, “Do without?” several times, turning the suggestion in his mind, and gazing at her.

A couple of hours later Miss Brooks said to her brother:--

“Eric, I believe I will go home at once.”

“Guess not,” responded the captain. “We shift camp next week. I want you to stay until then. Aren’t you having a good time?”

“I’ve been bathing too much in the river, perhaps. Mr. Marsh says it’s aguish. I shall have ague if I stay.”

“The doctor is coming,” said her brother.

“I must go home, Eric; indeed, I must!”

“You can’t wait until Jack arrives, I suppose?”

“Jack! Is Jack coming?”

“We were going to surprise you; one of the men rowed to the station for him this afternoon.”

Miss Brooks’s face expressed lively anticipation.

“Jack is coming! Then I may run back with him to-morrow, without waiting longer for Marie.”

“Don’t you want to give the poor fellow any taste of the camp?” demanded her indignant brother.

The wind harp, rousing from silence, burst out again with the bars it would never finish, and meandered into saddening minors.

“What machine is making that doleful sound?”

Lilian turned her tragic face away. Before Jack arrived she had taken down Jerome’s offering, wrapped it carefully, and hid it in the heart of her luggage. The spirit of the Wabash gave this large and engaging young arrival its cold shoulder. Not a drop of rain had tarnished the sunshine in a month; but he reached camp in a chill drizzle. The wind became so sharp that evening fires were built. The river hissed against its banks; and the cook reported a broken trot-line, and consequent failure in the catch of fish.

“This is fine!” commented Jack, turning up his collar as he smoked with the captain, and Lilian huddled to the fire. “Every letter has been full of the pleasures of camp life; and now I experience them myself!”

“Give the camp a chance,” remonstrated Eric. “You couldn’t drag me back to town! Six months in a year, thank heaven! I am a man! I live outdoors, free from the trammels of a soft civilization!”

“We don’t mind the trammels of a soft civilization, do we, Jack?” said the girl, snugly slipping her hand into her lover’s.

Jerome appeared at the other side of the campfire, looking through thin smoke at her. He had his violin bag on his shoulder.

“Hello!” the civil engineer hailed him. “Pull up a chunk, and sit down, Jerome.”

Lilian ran to her own tent for another camp-chair. But Jerome stood still, outside the wilderness hearth, and looked at the stranger whose every imposing line was illuminated by the fire, and who acknowledged his presence with a nod.

“One of our neighbors from the Illinois side,” explained the captain.

“Isn’t the river rough to-night?” inquired Miss Brooks.

Jerome heard the tremor in her voice. He answered “Yes.”

“It was so good of you to come. I wanted to hear you play once more. We may go home to-morrow.”

“Sit down, boy,” urged the captain; while Jack smoked peacefully.

“No,” said Jerome. “I’ll play out there.”

“Out where?”

“Out there; on the moving water.”

“But I want to talk to you!” exclaimed Lilian, following him a step, relaxing under the eye of the man she was to marry. “I want to send messages to your father and aunt--I may not see them again.”

“Singular chap,” observed Jack as Jerome walked on into darkness.

“Half witted,” explained Eric.

“He’s not half witted!” vehemently denied Lilian.

“Quarter witted, then,” amended her brother.

“He’s an unfortunate child, lost out of paradise, at the mercy of careless, cruel wretches like us below. I never saw a woman with a nature so spotless.”

“It occurs to me you’re partial to your Wabash angel,” observed Jack.

Jerome began to play. He was evidently in his boat plunging with the current. One could imagine him pressing against his neck the instrument which holds the saddest possibilities of sound. It wailed down river, and ceased. After an interval it began again up river. Jerome had rowed back against the current, and he went floating past the camp once more, pouring through the violin the vagaries of a mind in double darkness.

“If the trot-line wasn’t already broken, he’d break it,” remarked Captain Eric, “raking back and forth.”

“Fine cheerful banshee for a night like this,” said Jack.

Lilian huddled by the end of a log, where she could hear the oozing sap complain. Again the music died on the river, and again it began farther up, with an orchestral support of lashing water and gathering weather.

“I can’t stand it!” she cried out, rising from her place. “I’m going to my tent.”

“Why did you set Jerome on?” inquired her brother in surprise. “He never knows when to quit. I’ll put a stop to it.”

So going close to the shore he shouted such a peremptory request as virile man offers to weaklings. He patronized Jerome also, representing that the water was too rough for a boy, and recommending the boy to go home.

Yet hours afterwards when the campfire smouldered, and the trees were wrestling, Lilian, sobbing and smothering her face with her pillow, heard the violin once more, playing softly in imitation of the wind harp.

Next morning the river was a valley of black and sulphurous vapors, like a smoking volcanic fissure. The ague season had undoubtedly set in. Captain Eric and a squad of his men rowed their departing guests and the young lady’s luggage up river to the steamboat landing, and from this the party walked to a station in the woods.

There was a bustle about tickets and checking. The station-master hurried out of his small general store with the mail-bag on his arm, for the train was already in sight.

Miss Brooks’s hair clung in damp rings to her face. She turned to impress woods and water stretches upon her mind in one last glance, and her lips went white. Behind her stood Jerome, the porcelain quality of his face increased tenfold, the blueness of his eyes pierced by the keen anguish of a man. She crossed the platform to him, took his head between her hands, and rising on tiptoe kissed his forehead.

Immediately afterwards she was handed up the railway carriage steps, and Jack was making a place for her and her traveling bag. The little station slid away. She had forgotten to wave to Eric one of the hands which trembled as she adjusted her belongings over and over.

“Don’t say a word to me,” she commanded, meeting her lover’s eyes. “I didn’t know I was going to do it. I intend to marry you, Jack, because I would rather have you for a husband than any other man in the world. But he was my playmate. He brought back my childhood to me, and in return I gave him a wound!”

Quite a year passed before she had further news of the Babe Jerome. Her brother moved his camp two days after her departure, and stayed out until November. The following summer Lilian and her husband came face to face with Mr. Marsh in that magic White City which stood a brief season beside Lake Michigan. The blue cape was not around his shoulders, but some other incongruous garment marked him. Lilian grasped his hand. He greeted the young pair. His hairy cheeks were sunken, and the keenness of his eye appeared dulled.

“Are Jerome and his Aunt Betsey with you?”

“The Babe has gone off with the quick consumption that took his mother,” said the old man, and Lilian became aware that her nails must be cutting his hand. She gasped, but could not say a word.

“Yes; Betsey and me’s alone now,” he pursued. “I brung her up to the World’s Fair to turn her mind off it.... He never done well in the new house. I locked it up and carried him back to his log cradle. But the Babe had to go. I took him to Floridy, and I took him to Colorado.... I hadn’t orto repine at affliction. He was a good Babe.... He made a wind harp, like, and put it in the winder, in the teeth of the air; and that was all his interest, to listen while it played.”

Lilian found her husband supporting her, while water and sky and white palaces and hurrying people swam giddily in a far-off circle. She said “Thank you,” and clutched his arm.

“Sis here, she liked the Babe,” continued the old father, forced to wipe his eyes on the corner of a red handkerchief which he drew half way out of his side pocket. “And the Babe he liked her. I reelly thought he was pinin’ sometimes for young folks; for he done well while you was there.... Billy--you recollect Billy the gander? He takes it to heart like a dog.... I’m glad I seen you. I was goin’ along feelin’ too bitter in my thoughts about the Babe.”

Silently parting company, the old man walked on amidst wonders which he scarcely noticed, and the young pair turned aside from the crowds.

“Oh Jack!” said Lilian, when she could control her weeping, “I have killed the Babe Jerome!”

THE CALHOUN FIDDLER

TIME, 1890

November frost lay on the ferns and mosses along the Calhoun bluffs, and on that castellated mass of rock with round turrets which hangs over the cove known as French Hollow. From a divide in wooded hills a small stream came down unfrozen, quivering over pebbles and clean sand. Crossing an alluvial plat of ground, it turned beside a cabin to meet the broad and whispering Illinois.

In all Calhoun County, that long narrow ridge isolated between two great rivers, there was not on height or in cove such another cabin. It was fifty-two feet square and two stories high, with a Norman projection of the eaves. The house, with its back to a road winding at the foot of the bluffs, sat facing the historic Illinois--a river now yellow and wrathful with floods, now spreading in blue or seashell tints away to the opposite forest.

In the days of old Antoine Dejarnet, the builder of this log-house and the first Frenchman who ever set foot in Calhoun County, hospitality had overflowed the now silent place. Then there was dancing every Sunday after mass, in the undivided lower story like a feudal hall; and the family violin was coaxed to heavenly tunes by Antoine Dejarnet himself.

But long before this November afternoon the French colony in Calhoun County had dwindled to a remnant; the forty goats which used to climb those heights or stand captive to half old Antoine’s many daughters while the rest milked them, had not a single descendant; and the last Dejarnet carried his name locally disfigured into De Zhirley.

Jeanne Sattory, following a road beside the stream, was coming down the hollow. The mail-carrier cantered below her toward Kampsville, riding a nervous pony, and having the letter pouch strapped behind him. Twice a week he thus carried news through Calhoun County, where there are neither railroads nor telegraph lines, neither banks nor thieves. But such a courier feels his freedom and importance; he impudently kissed his merry finger-tips to the pretty girl up the slope. She hid behind a rock until he was out of sight. The mail-carrier had seen this girl before, and desired to have a closer look at her. The usual type in Calhoun County was the broad Dutch maid, whose stock had superseded the French. But Jeanne Sattory felt a dread rising to terror of all men. Her first recollection was of a stepfather who had made her take to trees like a cat, every time he approached the dwelling. Her next was of his son, who finished the small rites of her mother’s funeral by taking the orphan’s ear in his grip, leading her to the limit of the garden patch, and dismissing her, with the threat of a kick if she ever came back there again. He kept her mother’s own household goods and the few belongings left by her father, and nobody took it in hand to interfere with him. She came back across the Illinois River to her native county, but even yet shrank from old Henry Roundcounter, whose family afforded her a home.

The Rencontres had held land under the first Dejarnet. As Roundcounters, and farmers of their own small holding, they now kept up hereditary interest in that last De Zhirley who, since his mother’s death, had lived solitary in the great square cabin. Mrs. Roundcounter baked bread for him; and once a week she went down the bluff to tidy his bachelor hall, except when rheumatism detained her. This afternoon Jeanne Sattory was sent reluctantly to the task.

The last De Zhirley was a ferryman; and it must be owned that voices calling him from the other side of the river were often drowned in the music of his fiddle. In clear summer nights he walked a sandy strip in front of his cabin, hugging the fiddle beneath his chin and playing tunes which had come down from his forefathers.

The ferryboat could now be seen at the farther bank of the Illinois. Jeanne knew she might do her work before it could again cross the current. The cabin door is always left unfastened in that primitive county. She noticed a fresh coon skin nailed on the logs beside the door, as with shrinking she entered this haunt of man.

The imposing old dancing-hall of the De Zhirleys gave her a welcome from its ruddy fireplace hooded with a penthouse. Jeanne’s first care was to push the embers together, heap on more of the wood which lay ready, and clean the stone hearth. She then hung a pot on the crane, and filled it with spring water. Before the water was scalding hot there was time to sweep the floor and beat up a feather-bed which had grown as hard as a mat on its corner bedstead.

An unrailed stairway mounted beside the front wall. Jeanne had heard Mrs. Roundcounter tell how many little rooms were overhead, and what stores of family goods were piled there, disregarded by a young man who cared for no wife but his fiddle.

No attention could be given to the upper rooms. Amid all her services, the girl was full of starts and panics, turning her head and widening her eyes at any stir without. She mopped the broad boards worn by foot-marks of dead dancers; she washed log imbedded windows and an accumulation of yellow bowls and pewter; and drew the only easy chair to the hearth. Something in a green bag hung on the wall farthest from the fire, which Jeanne knew to be the De Zhirley fiddle. She touched it carefully with a turkey-wing duster, recoiling from its faint ting as if some charm had been ignorantly worked.

Dried meat and scarlet peppers, a gun and powderhorn hung on the richly smoked hewn joists. She felt keen, quiet delight in the place, and reluctance to leave it. The jollity of former times, perhaps, lingered, making a fit atmosphere for girlhood.

But she was standing with her shawl over her head, casting back a last look, when some hand blundered at the latch outside. She sprang upstairs and put the first door between her and the intruder on the lightning of impulse. Some person entered and seemed to pause and listen suspiciously. Her heart labored like the beating of a steamer, and she expected to hear feet following her up the stairs. But after uncertain shuffling the comer dragged a chair, and, with a suggestion of effort, sat down.

Jeanne knew it could not be young De Zhirley, whom she had just seen through a window fighting the current in midriver. He had a loaded wagon and a pair of restless mules on board; and he ran back and forth outside the railing of his boat, now poling, now steering, and now pulling with a wing-like oar. Jeanne could have been at the top of the bluff before his return. And here she was, trapped in an upper room, vaguely ashamed; unable to come down and face eyes which might insult her, yet terrified by the prospect of indefinite hiding.

Daylight’s gradual fading out was of more interest to her than the accumulation of De Zhirley things around her. She listened for the crunch of the ferryboat prow on gravel; and voices and departing wheels at last moved by the cabin, and the proper owner entered. She stealthily unlatched her door and set it ajar, so the crack intersected the hearth. There in the seat she had taken thought to set ready sagged the drunken person of her stepbrother.

“You here, Billy Aarons?” said young De Zhirley, as he approached the fire; and his voice had no joy in it. His blind eye was toward the stair door, for the Calhoun fiddler was a one-eyed man. This defacement scarcely marred the beauty of the athletic man thrown out by firelight. Jeanne Sattory had, indeed, never seen him without pitying people who were two-eyed. His misused skin yet held the milk and wine flush of childhood, and his fleece of red-gold rings was a gift not to be spoiled.

“Yes, I’m here, Theodore,” said the man in the chair thickly.

“Mother Roundcounter has been here too,” added De Zhirley, as he looked about. “It makes a feller feel good to see his house clean and smell new bread.”

He hung a teakettle on the crane, and thrust a fork through some bacon to toast on the polished hearthstone. Then he drew his table toward the fireplace, and Jeanne could see his appreciative touch on the yellow ware she had washed.

“What do you want, Billy? Did you come in to take a bite with me?”

“No.” Aarons stirred from his doze. “I’m buyin’ cattle, Theodore.”

“No cattle to sell here.”

“I know it, Theodore. You’re a poor man by the side of me.”

Indifferent to this fact, De Zhirley turned his bacon and proceeded to make coffee.

“You’re a poor man, Theodore,” repeated the heavy guest, “and I’ve got all my father had.”

“And all his second wife had,” added young De Zhirley, with a one-eyed glance of contempt, at which Aarons made a fist. “You go upstairs and sleep off what’s the matter with you, after I give you some coffee.”

“That’s not what I come for. You’re a poor man, Theodore.”

“Well, don’t let that keep you awake; it don’t me.”

“You hain’t got no cattle, nor much land, nor even two eyes.”

“And what do _you_ want on my blind side, Billy?”

“But you’ve got a fiddle. Yes; you’ve got a fiddle.”

De Zhirley moved back and took his violin off the wall with a jealous motion. It was his custom to play while his supper cooked; but as he felt the bow with his thumb, and fitted the instrument to his neck, he looked distrustfully at Aarons.

The first sweet long cry filled the cabin. The fiddler gradually approached the hearth, playing as he came, and Aarons’s head, hands, and feet responded to the magic.

De Zhirley’s back was toward Jeanne, but she saw joy in his whole bearing, and herself felt the piercing rapture of sound.

“Let me see that fiddle,” demanded Aarons, when the young man finished and put down his bow, and brought the coffee-pot to set on the coals.

De Zhirley turned a distrustful eye, but no precious violin toward his guest.

“Let me see that fiddle, I say,” repeated Aarons, rising up.

“Behave yourself,” said the young man, standing a head above him, and humoring him as a child might be humored by half granting his request.

The fellow handled its ancient body, and looked at Stradivari’s inscription.

“What’s that there, Theodore?”

“That’s the maker’s name.”

“Seventeen hunderd and--what’s them figgers?”

“That’s the year it was made.”

“Then it’s a mighty poor old thing, ain’t it?”

The fiddler said nothing, but tried to recover his violin, to which the tormentor hung with both hands.

“I can sell it for you, Theodore. It’s worth fifty dollars.”

De Zhirley’s face expressed impatience to regain his instrument.

“Yes, it’s worth a hunderd dollars. I’ve been talkin’ with a man, Theodore; that’s why I come in. You give this fiddle to me, and I’ll make some money for you. You’re a poor man, Theodore.”

“Let go of it,” exclaimed De Zhirley. “I don’t want to sell my fiddle.”

“It’s worth five hunderd dollars.”

“Let go of it! You don’t know what you’re doing. You ain’t fit to do anything now. Let go,” cried De Zhirley, as he felt the greedy, drunken hands crushing his treasure. “If you don’t let go, I’ll kill you!”

The two men struggled, and there was a crackling, twanging sound, followed by Aarons’s curses. Then De Zhirley caught him by the neck, dragged him to the cabin door, and kicked him far out into the dusk.

Jeanne hid her face. She heard her stepbrother battering at the fastened door, and finally a stone dashed through the window, to fall with splintered glass upon the floor. A storm of drunken curses surrounded the house and died away in mutterings along the bluff road. Through this clamor an awful silence made its void in the cabin.

De Zhirley had set his foot upon a chair, and was nursing the mangled instrument on his knee, examining every part. His tense face denied despair; but the broken neck hung down by its strings, the chest was crushed, the back split, the bridge lay beside his foot. Jeanne watched him, forgetting the darkness of the bluffs and her dreadful ambush.

When De Zhirley first came in she had decided to let herself down from an upper window rather than face him. When he recommended her stepbrother to a sleeping-room upstairs, she looked about in panic for something which could be made an immediate rope or ladder. But when she saw the violin’s destruction, it was to hang outside that tragedy in a passion of sympathy. She had been the most solitary creature in Calhoun County, but this supreme sharing of the young fiddler’s anguish broke the shell of her dumbness; she felt her soul spreading out its crumpled wings like a new butterfly.

He laid the violin on the chair, and with a sudden abandonment of all restraint shook his fists above his head, wailing and sobbing:--

“Oh, my Lord, my Lord! What will I do now?”

It was the agony of an artist, of a lonely soul, of unspeakable bereavement.

Jeanne wept in her shawl. She had thought her hunger for the unknown best thing in the world a singular experience. She waited until his tears and hers could be wiped off, and then opened the door and came lightly downstairs.

De Zhirley huddled his violin again in his arms, as if dreading the descent of more drunken men, and, in the embarrassment and anguish of a man whose weakness has been spied upon, turned his face to the hearth. Jeanne stopped at the foot of the stairs and drew her shawl over her head. They continued in silence while the coffee bubbled up and firelight flickered on the wall.

De Zhirley understood her errand into his cabin with the simplicity of primitive manhood. He knew she always took to flight when her stepbrother appeared. When he could speak without a sob, he said, acknowledging all she had done for his comfort that afternoon:--

“I’m much obleeged.”

Jeanne, on her part, ignored the services.

“Is it bad hurt?” she murmured, with unconscious maternal pathos.

He offered to yield the wreck to her hands, and, drawn from her place, she went and stooped on one knee to the firelight. De Zhirley dropped on one knee beside her, and they tried to fit the mangled parts in place again.

“It’s such a spite,” said Jeanne, and her trembling voice comforted him as a mother comforts her child. He had instant anxiety to make the calamity appear less to her than it really was.

“Mebby by patchin’ and glue I can put it together again--though I don’t know whether it’ll sound the same. I’ve always thought so much of it,” he apologized.

“I wish he had broke my neck instead of this fiddle’s,” said the girl with passion.

“I’d like to see him try such a thing as that,” responded the fiddler sternly. “I’d killed him as ’twas, if I hadn’t been bigger than him.”

“I must go back,” exclaimed Jeanne, stirring to rise from this post-mortem. “They’ll think I’ve fell in the river.”

“I’ll go with you,” said De Zhirley. “It’s dark now, and that fellow ain’t gone far.”

“No,” objected Jeanne, with sudden terror of what her neighborhood called a beau. “I don’t want no one with me.”

De Zhirley took up his cap with gentle insistence like the courtliness of a great seignior. He smiled at Jeanne, and she gave him back a look of which she was unconscious.

“Your supper’s all ready,” she reminded him.

“I ain’t hungry like I was when I come in from the ferry. Won’t you set down and take supper with me?” invited the young man sincerely.

The mere suggestion sent Jeanne Sattory to the door. Their hands mingled upon the latch, and she slid hers away, loath to part from a touch which she yet eluded.

De Zhirley made the door pause while he looked down at her and said, with a shaking voice:--

“If it hadn’t been for you--there ain’t no tellin’.”

Jeanne had no reply to this acknowledgment of sympathy, but drew her shawl together under her chin. Chin and mouth corners were tempting even to a one-eyed man, but he continued with gentle courtesy:

“Spite of my fiddle’s gettin’ broke, I b’lieve this is the best day this cabin ever seen.”

“What makes you say that?”

“’Cause it’s the first time you ever come to the house.”

“I’m obleeged for your politeness,” trembled Jeanne, turning scarlet; and she lifted a laughing dark glance. “If you’ll be a little politer and let me out, I won’t come no more.”

“Then I’ll go where you are,” declared the Calhoun fiddler. “I’ll foller you from this time on.”

“You’ll have to walk on the other side of the road if you do,” said Jeanne Sattory; and they stepped out and took the way up the bluff, two figures indistinct in darkness, with a width of wagon-track between them.

A MAN FROM THE SPANISH WAR

_A conversation in Egypt, which is an undefined region of Southern Illinois_

TIME, 1898

Miss Lucy Mills waited with three early arrivals in her sitting-room. The rest of the people would not gather for half an hour. Her wide house, venerable for the region in which it stood, hugged by vines and mossy roofed, was in perfect order; and sheaves of flowers exhaled fragrance around an object placed in the centre of her parlor. Neighbors no longer trod about on tiptoe, for everything was ready, and the minister might arrive at any moment.

Miss Lucy sat a dignified spinster, whose sympathies ramified through the entire human race. She was so homely that strangers turned to look at her as at a beauty. Mr. Sammy Blade was in his thirties, but she considered him a youth, having helped his mother to nurse him through measles and whooping-cough. Mr. Sammy had a protruding pointed beard and rolled his silly bald head on his shoulders when he talked. He had studied medicine but, failing of practice, was turning his attention to the peddling of fruit-trees. Coming home and hearing the news, he hastened to appear at Miss Lucy’s house.

Mr. and Mrs. Plankson had returned to the neighborhood to visit. The husband was a frisky gray little man, and his wife was a jimp woman in stiff black silk with large lips and shifty eyes.

All three of Miss Lucy’s callers coughed and made the unconscious grimaces of plain people who have not learned the art of expression. They sat with their hands piled on their stomachs. Yet while they longed to get at facts which only Miss Lucy knew, they approached these facts roundabout, bringing newsy bits of their own, and avoiding by common instinct the subject of war with Spain.

“Have you heard that Emeline Smith’s oldest girl has experienced religion?” inquired Mr. Sammy solemnly, breaking the silence of the down-sitting after greetings.

“No, I hadn’t heard it,” responded Miss Lucy, in the soft slow drawl which her candid speech made its vehicle.

“Law me!” exclaimed Mrs. Plankson, “Emeline Smith was always a great hand for revivals. If she had went less to meetings and had saw more to do in her own house, her children would be better brung up.”

“Seem-me-like there is some spite-work against Emeline Smith amongst the women,” observed Mr. Plankson. “I was a beau of Emeline’s onct. I went to see her the other day, and she laughed, and waved the broom, and acted so glad Jane can’t get over it.”

“You orto married her,” said Mrs. Plankson crisply. “You’d be richer than you are. Her mother was the savin’est person I ever heard of. She give a tea-party one time, and the milk floated in lumps on top the cups. She said she didn’t see how it could be sour, when she had put saleratus in it and boiled it twice! Them Smiths got their money from a rich old aunt, that used to cut up squares of tissue paper to make handkerchiefs. I seen her one time myself, when she was a-visiting the Smiths, come to meeting with a wreath of live geranium leaves around her bonnet, in winter, and them leaves all bit black with the cold! We’ve heard she would set before the parlor fire in city hotels where she boarded, with her dress turned up on her knees, showing her little sticks of legs in narrow pantalets and white stockings, just to save fire in her room--and young ladies obliged to receive young men, with her a-setting there!”

Mr. Sammy coughed gently, for Mrs. Plankson had overlooked his presence in her wrath against Emeline Smith’s relations.

To cover the situation her husband directly inquired, “What’s become of them Ellison girls, seven sisters, that all dressed alike and carried umberellas the same color? They used to walk into church in Indian file. I never in my life seen them go two or three abreast.”

“They all live where they used to and look like they always did. For they was born old-like. Carline,” said Miss Lucy, “took to herb doctorin’. Along about the time that President Garfield was shot, Carline got very dissatisfied. ‘I know just what would fetch that bullet out,’ she used to say, ‘and the only thing that would fetch it out.’”

“And what was that?” inquired Mr. Sammy, rounding his lips and stretching his short neck forward.

“Spearmint tea!”

Mrs. Plankson beat her right palm softly on her left forearm and leaned over, shaking. It would not have been decorous to cackle out loud. The American flag and its Cuban little sister, draped together around the wide doorway of the parlor, swayed in the air. She glanced through the open portal, her oblique eyes slanting up to Miss Lucy’s hanging lamp decorated with feathery asparagus.

“Carline told my niece,” Mrs. Plankson added to the Ellison subject, “why she never got married.”

“Did she have a disappointment?” inquired Mr. Sammy, as one of the younger generation, who fully sensed a woman’s loss in not obtaining a companion like himself.

“No. ‘Do you know,’ says she to my niece, ‘why I never got married?’ ‘No,’ says my niece, ‘I don’t.’--‘Tew skittish!’ says Carline.”

“I never seen such a neighborhood as this is for old maids!” exclaimed Mr. Plankson.

Miss Lucy regarded him with a virgin’s pitying tolerance. Homely as she was, she thought it would have been impossible for her to have taken up with the likes of William Plankson in his best days.

“There has been too much marryin’ and givin’ in marriage in this neighborhood,” she declared with her soft drawl.

“Seem-me-like you ain’t no good judge of that, Lucy,” bantered Mr. Plankson.

“It’s Emeline Smith that’s the judge,” thrust in his wife.

Miss Lucy contemplated silently.

“I was thinkin’ of Jaw-awn and Sue Emma,” she said; and the other three composed themselves to hear the facts concerning the man from the Spanish war. With a rustle like that of a congregation settling to the sermon after preliminaries, they moved their feet and hands and waited on Miss Lucy.

“I was against the match, for Sue Emma had been married, and was through with it. Her man died and left her with a farm and two children; and a widow well fixed is a sight better off than a married woman.”

Mrs. Plankson gave involuntary assent and then glanced with oblique apprehension at her husband, whose will was made in her favor.

“But Sue Emma wasn’t of Yankee stock like the Ellison girls. She felt pestered to get along by herself.”

“Seem-me-like a man always is needed on a farm,” put in Mr. Plankson.

“Sue Emma thought that-a-way. But I talked reel plain to her when she took up with Jaw-awn. I hadn’t nothing against Jaw-awn, except he was a man. He was without property, but he was mighty good to Sue Emma and the children. Seem-like he thought as much of the children as he did of her. And when they had been married a couple of years and the new baby come, Jaw-awn would have been tickled to death if it hadn’t been for losin’ it and Sue Emma. Now that woman might have been livin’ to-day if she had let men alone. But Jaw-awn was a great hand for his folks. I thought he would go crazy. Seem-like he could neither lay nor set when he come home from buryin’ Sue Emma and the baby; but just wandered around, Lolly Loo and the little boy holdin’ one onto each of his hands.”

“Lolly Loo?” challenged Mrs. Plankson. “What-for name is that?”

“Laura Louise; but they called her Lolly Loo. Jaw-awn nacherly had to have folks to do for. I believe he would have got along reel well with the children, if he had been let alone; for he was a good manager.

“But Sue Emma’s father and mother moved right onto the place after the funeral, and the first thing they done was to turn Jaw-awn out. I suppose he had rights in law, but he didn’t make no stand for rights; what he seemed to want was folks. He’d been an orphan-like, without father or mother, and knocked around the world and got kind of homesick clean through. Gettin’ Sue Emma and her children was the same to him as comin’ into a fortune, and when he was throwed out of them he give up.

“The children, they felt terrible, for they thought so much of Jaw-awn; and cried and begged.

“‘Jaw-awn won’t be no trouble, grammaw,’ says Lolly Loo. ‘I can cook enough for Jaw-awn to eat, if you let him stay.’

“But the old couple, they up and throwed him out. And when he stopped here on his way to Springfield I could see the man was clean broke down.

“The very next thing, along come this excitement about war with Spain, and I seen Jaw-awn’s name among the volunteers. I knowed he wouldn’t ever get through the war. Sure enough, word come--. I telegraphed to have him sent here. I knowed the children’s grandpaw and grandmaw wouldn’t do it. And I sent them word, but they don’t want to excite the children, so none of that family will come.

“I don’t say nothing about the expense: I have some means. But when I think of them children that he was a father to--him being so wrapped up in his folks--and them slippin’ to the bars like they do to see if Jaw-awn is comin’ back and not even knowin’ that he lays a soldier in his coffin in that parlor--without any folks to drop a tear on him--I feel like as if things was wrong!”

Miss Lucy arose and entered the parlor. She rearranged the American and Cuban flags which draped the plain casket, and touched the flowers and a huge wreath bearing the initials G. A. R.

Her three guests followed her in silent awe. She had wiped her eyes and was ready to add,--

“The minister has took for his text, ‘He setteth the solitary in families.’ I hope everybody will turn out. The weather is nice. Some will come because he is the first soldier buried here from the Spanish war, and the Grand Army Post has took it up and will march and fire a salute over his grave. I don’t know as the dead care anything about it, but I’d kind of like to see Jaw-awn have as nice a funeral as if he had folks.”

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO. ======================== The Riverside Press ======================== CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.