“Stop here,” she said, as they reached the open gate. He was walking out of it, his head in the air, and Miss Betty on his arm. Apparently, he would have walked straight across the State. It was the happiest moment he had ever known.
He wanted to say something wonderful to her; his speech should be like the music and glory and lire that was in him; therefore he was shocked to hear himself remarking, with an inanity of utterance that sickened him:
“Oh, here’s the gate, isn’t it?”
Her answer was a short laugh. “You mean you wish to persuade me that you had forgotten it was there?”
“I did not see it,” he protested, lamentably.
“No?”
“I wasn’t thinking of it.”
“Indeed! You were ‘lost in thoughts of ‘—”
“Of you!” he said, before he could check himself.
“Yes?” Her tone was as quietly contemptuous as she could make it. “How very frank of you! May I ask: Are you convinced that speeches of that sort are always to a lady’s liking?”
“No,” he answered humbly, and hung his head. Then she threw the question at him abruptly:
“Was it you who came to sing in our garden?”
There was a long pause before a profound sigh came tremulously from the darkness, like a sad and tender confession. “Yes.”
“I thought so!” she exclaimed. “Mrs. Tanberry thought it was someone else; but I knew that it was you.”
“Yes, you are right,” he said, quietly. “It was I. It was my only way to tell you what you know now.”
“Of course!” She set it all aside with those two words and the slightest gesture of her hand. “It was a song made for another girl, I believe?” she asked lightly, and with an icy smile, inquired farther: “For the one — the one before the last, I understand?”
He lifted his head, surprised. “What has that to do with it? The music was made for you — but then, I think all music was made for you.”
“Leave the music out of it, if you please,” she said, impatiently. “Your talents make you modest! No doubt you consider it unmaidenly in me to have referred to the serenade before you spoke of it; but I am not one to cast down my eyes and let it pass. No, nor one too sweet to face the truth, either!” she cried with sudden passion. “To sing that song in the way you did, meant — oh, you thought I would flirt with you! What right had you to come with such a song to me?”
Tom intended only to disclaim the presumption, so far from his thoughts, that his song had moved her, for he could see that her attack was prompted by her inexplicable impression that he had assumed the attitude of a conqueror, but his explanation began unfortunately.
“Forgive me. I think you have completely misunderstood; you thought it meant something I did not intend, at all, and—”
“What!” she said, and her eyes blazed, for now she beheld him as the arrant sneak of the world. He, the lady-killer, with his hypocritical air of strength and melancholy sweetness, the leader of drunken revels, and, by reputation, the town Lothario and Light-o’-Love, under promise of marriage to Fanchon Bareaud, had tried to make love to another girl, and now his cowardice in trying to disclaim what he had done lent him the insolence to say to this other: “My child, you are betrayed by your youth and conceit; you exaggerate my meaning. I had no intention to distinguish you by coquetting with you!” This was her interpretation of him; and her indignation was not lessened by the inevitable conclusion that he, who had been through so many scenes with women, secretly found her simplicity diverting. Miss Betty had a little of her father in her; while it was part of her youth, too, that, of all things she could least endure the shadow of a smile at her own expense.
“Oh, oh!” she cried, her voice shaking with anger. “I suppose your bad heart is half-choked with your laughter at me.”
She turned from him swiftly, and left him.
Almost running, she entered the house, and hurried to a seat by Mrs. Tanberry, nestling to her like a young sapling on a hillside. Instantaneously, several gentlemen, who had hastily acquitted themselves of various obligations in order to seek her, sprang forward with eager greetings, so that when the stricken Tom, dazed and confounded by his evil luck, followed her at about five paces, he found himself confronted by an impenetrable abbatis formed by the spiked tails of the coats of General Trumble, Madrillon, Tappingham Marsh, Cummings and Jefferson Bareaud. Within this fortification rang out laughter and sally from Miss Carewe; her color was high and her eyes sparkled never more brightly.
Flourish and alarums sounded for a quadrille. Each of the semi-circle, firmly elbowing his neighbor, begged the dance of Miss Betty; but Tom was himself again, and laid a long, strong hand on Madrillon’s shoulder, pressed him gently aside, and said:
“Forgive me; Miss Carewe has honored me by the promise of this quadrille.”
He bowed, offering his arm, and none of them was too vain to envy that bow and gesture.
For a moment he remained waiting. Miss Carewe rose slowly, and, directly facing him, said in composed and even voice: “You force me to beg you never to address me again.”
She placed her hand on the General’s arm, turning her back squarely upon Tom.
In addition to those who heard, many persons in that part of the room saw the affront and paused in arrested attitudes; others, observing these, turned inquiringly, so that sudden silence fell, broken only by the voice of Miss Betty as she moved away, talking cheerily to the General. Tom was left standing alone in the broken semicircle.
All the eyes swept from her to him and back; then everyone began to talk hastily about nothing. The young man’s humiliation was public.
He went to the door under cover of the movement of the various couples to find places in the quadrille, yet every sidelong glance in the room still rested upon him, and he knew it. He remained in the ball, alone, through that dance, and at its conclusion, walked slowly through the rooms, speaking to people, here and there, as though nothing had happened, but when the music sounded again, he went to the dressing-room, found his hat and cloak, and left the house. For a while he stood on the opposite side of the street, watching the lighted windows, and twice he caught sight of the lilac and white brocade, the dark hair, and the wreath of marguerites. Then, with a hot pain in his breast, and the step of a Grenadier, he marched down the street.
In the carriage Mrs. Tanberry took Betty’s hand in hers. “I’ll do as you wish, child,” she said, “and never speak to you of him again as long as I live, except this once. I think it was best for his own sake as well as yours, but—”
“He needed a lesson,” interrupted Miss Betty, wearily. She had danced long and hard, and she was very tired.
Mrs. Tanberry’s staccato laugh came out irrepressibly. “All the vagabonds do, Princess!” she cried. “And I think they are getting it.”
“No, no, I don’t mean—”
“We’ve turned their heads, my dear, between us, you and I; and we’ll have to turn ’em again, or they’ll break their necks looking over their shoulders at us, the owls!” She pressed the girl’s hand affectionately. “But you’ll let me say something just once, and forgive me because we’re the same foolish age, you know. It’s only this: The next young man you suppress, take him off in a corner! Lead him away from the crowd where he won’t have to stand and let them look at him afterward. That’s all, my dear, and you mustn’t mind.”
“I’m not sorry!” said Miss Betty hotly. “I’m not sorry!”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Tanberry, soothingly. “It was better this time to do just what you did. I’d have done it myself, to make quite sure he would keep away — because I like him.”
“I’m not sorry!” said Miss Betty again.
“I’m not sorry!” she repeated and reiterated to herself after Mrs. Tanberry had gone to bed. She had sunk into a chair in the library with a book, and “I’m not sorry!” she whispered as the open unread page blurred before her, “I’m not sorry!” He had needed his lesson
; but she had to bear the recollection of how white his face went when he received it. Her affront had put about him a strange loneliness: the one figure with the stilled crowd staring; it had made a picture from which her mind’s eye had been unable to escape, danced she never so hard and late. Unconsciously, Robert Carewe’s daughter had avenged the other figure which had stood in lonely humiliation before the staring eyes.
“I’m not sorry!” Ah, did they think it was in her to hurt any living thing in the world? The book dropped from her lap, and she bowed her head upon her hands. “I’m not sorry! “ — and tears upon the small lace gauntlets!
She saw them, and with an incoherent exclamation, half self-pitying, half impatient, ran out to the stars above her garden.
She was there for perhaps half an hour, and just before she returned to the house she did a singular thing.
Standing where all was clear to the sky, where she had stood after her talk with the Incroyable, when he had bid her look to the stars, she raised her arms to them again, her face, pale with a great tenderness, uplifted.
“You, you, you!” she whispered. “I love you!”
And yet it was to nothing definite, to no man, nor outline of a man, to no phantom nor dream-lover, that she spoke; neither to him she had affronted, nor to him who had bidden her look to the stars. Nor was it to the stars themselves.
She returned slowly and thoughtfully to the house, wondering what she had meant.
CHAPTER XI. A Voice in a Garden
CRAILEY CAME HOME the next day with a new poem, but no fish. He lounged up the stairs, late in the afternoon, humming cheerfully to himself, and, dropping his rod in a corner of Tom’s office, laid the poem on the desk before his partner, produced a large, newly-replenished flask, opened it, stretched himself comfortably upon a capacious horse-hair sofa, drank a deep draught, chuckled softly, and requested Mr. Vanrevel to set the rhymes to music immediately.
“Try it on your instrument,” he said. “It’s a simple verse about nothing but stars, and you can work it out in twenty minutes with the guitar.”
“It is broken,” said Tom, not looking up from his work.
“Broken! When?”
“Last night.”
“Who broke it?”
“It fell from the table in my room.”
“How? Easily mended, isn’t it?”
“I think I shall not play it soon again.”
Crailey swung his long legs off the sofa and abruptly sat upright. “What’s this?” he asked gravely.
Tom pushed his papers away from him, rose and went to the dusty window that looked to the west, where, at the end of the long street, the sun was setting behind the ruin of charred timbers on the bank of the shining river.
“It seems that I played once too often,” he said.
Crailey was thoroughly astonished. He took a long, affectionate pull at the flask and offered it to his partner.
“No,” said Tom, turning to him with a troubled face, “and if I were you, I wouldn’t either. These fishing trips of yours—”
“Fishing!” Crailey laughed. “Trips of a poetaster! It’s then I write best, and write I will! There’s a poem, and a damned good one, too, old preacher, in every gill of whiskey, and I’m the lad that can extract it! Lord! what’s better than to be out in the open, all by yourself in the woods, or on the river? Think of the long nights alone with the glory of heaven and a good demijohn. Why, a man’s thoughts are like actors performing in the air and all the crowding stars for audience! You know in your soul you’d rather have me out there, going it all by myself, than raising thunder over town. And you know, too, it doesn’t tell on me; it doesn’t show! You couldn’t guess, to save your life, how much I’ve had to-day, now, could you?”
“Yes,” returned the other, “I could.”
“Well, well,” said Crailey, good-naturedly, “we weren’t talking of me.” He set down the flask, went to his friend and dropped a hand lightly on his shoulder. “What made you break the guitar? Tell me.”
“What makes you think I broke it?” asked his partner sharply.
“Tell me why you did it,” said Crailey.
And Tom, pacing the room, told him, while Crailey stood in silence, looking him eagerly in the eye whenever Tom turned his way. The listener interrupted seldom; once it was to exclaim: “But you haven’t said why you broke the guitar?”
“‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!’ I ought to have cut off the hands that played to her.”
“And cut your throat for singing to her?”
“She was right!” the other answered, striding up and down the room. “Right — a thousand times! in everything she did. That I should even ap-proach her, was an unspeakable insolence. I had forgotten, and so, possibly, had she, but I had not even been properly introduced to her.”
“No, you hadn’t, that’s true,” observed Crailey, reflectively. “You don’t seem to have much to reproach her with, Tom.”
“Reproach her!” cried the other. “That I should dream she would speak to me or have anything to do with me, was to cast a doubt upon her loyalty as a daughter. She was right, I say! And she did the only thing she could do: rebuked me before them all. No one ever merited what he got more roundly than I deserved that. Who was I, in her eyes, that I should besiege her with my importunities, who but her father’s worst enemy?”
Deep anxiety knitted Crailey’s brow. “I understood she knew of the quarrel,” he said, thoughtfully. “I saw that, the other evening when I helped her out of the crowd. She spoke of it on the way home, I remember; but how did she know that you were Vanrevel? No one in town would be apt to mention you to her.”
“No, but she did know, you see.”
“Yes,” returned Mr. Gray slowly. “So it seems! Probably her father told her to avoid you, and described you so that she recognized you as the man who caught the kitten.”
He paused, picked up the flask, and again applied himself to its contents, his eyes peering over the up-tilted vessel at Tom, who continued to pace up and down the length of the office. After a time, Crailey, fumbling in his coat, found a long cheroot, and, as he lit it, inquired casually:
“Do you remember if she addressed you by name?”
“I think not,” Tom answered, halting. “What does it matter?”
Crailey drew a deep breath.
“It doesn’t,” he returned.
“She knew me well enough,” said Tom, sadly, as he resumed his sentry-go.
“Yes,” repeated Crailey, deliberately. “So it seems; so it seems!” He blew a long stream of smoke out into the air before him, and softly mur-mured again: “So it seems, so it seems.”
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of Tom’s footsteps, until, presently, some one informally shouted his name from the street below. It was only Will Cummings, passing the time of day, but when Tom turned from the window after answering him, Crailey, his poem, and his flask were gone.
That evening Vanrevel sat in the dusty office, driving himself to his work with a sharp goad, for there was a face that came between him and all else in the world, and a voice that sounded always in his ears. But the work was done before he rose from his chair, though he showed a haggard visage as he bent above his candles to blow them out.
It was eleven o’clock; Crailey had not come back, and Tom knew that his light-hearted friend would not return for many hours; and so, having no mind to read, and no belief that he could if he tried, he went out to walk the streets. He went down to the river first, and stood for a little while gazing at the ruins of the two warehouses, and that was like a man with a headache beating his skull against a wall. As he stood on the blackened wharf, he saw how the charred beams rose above him against the sky like a gallows, and it seemed to him that nothing could have been a better symbol, for here he had hanged his self-respect. “Reproach her!” He, who had so displayed his imbecility before her! Had he been her father’s best friend, he should have had too great a sense of shame to dare to speak to
her after that night when her quiet intelligence had exhibited him to himself, and to all the world, as nought else than a fool — and a noisy one at that!
Suddenly a shudder convulsed him; he struck his open palm across his forehead and spoke aloud, while, from horizon to horizon, the night air grew thick with the whispered laughter of observing hobgoblins:
“And even if there had been no stairway, we could have slid down the hose-line!”
He retraced his steps, a tall, gray figure moving slowly through the blue darkness, and his lips formed the heart-sick shadow of a smile when he found that he had unconsciously turned into Carewe Street. Presently he came to a gap in a hedge, through which he had sometimes stolen to hear the sound of a harp and a girl’s voice singing; but he did not enter there tonight, though he paused a moment, his head bowed on his breast.
There came a sound of voices; they seemed to be moving toward the hedge, toward the gap where he stood; one a man’s eager, quick, but very musical; the other, a girl’s, a rich and clear contralto that passed into Tom’s soul like a psalm of rejoicing and like a scimitar of flame. He shivered, and moved away quickly, but not before the man’s voice, somewhat louder for the moment, came distinctly from the other side of the hedge:
“After all,” said the voice, with a ripple of laughter, “after all, weren’t you a little hard on that poor Mr. Gray?”
Tom did not understand, but he knew the voice. It was that of Crailey Gray.
He heard the same voice again that night, and again stood unseen. Long after midnight he was still tramping the streets on his lonely rounds, when he chanced to pass the Rouen House, which hostelry bore, to the uninitiated eye, the appearance of having closed its doors upon all hospitalities for the night, in strict compliance with the law of the city fathers, yet a slender wand of bright light might be discovered underneath the street door of the bar-room.
From within the merry retreat issued an uproar of shouting, raucous laughter and the pounding of glasses on tables, heralding all too plainly the hypocrisy of the landlord, and possibly that of the city fathers also. Tom knew what company was gathered there: gamblers, truckmen, drunken farmers, men from the river steamers making riot while their boats lay at the wharf, with a motley gathering of good-for-nothings of the back-alleys, and tippling clerks from the Main Street stores. There came loud cries for a song, and, in answer, the voice of Crailey rose over the general din, somewhat hoarse, and never so musical when he sang as when he spoke, yet so touching in its dramatic tenderness that soon the noise fell away, and the roisterers sat quietly to listen. It was not the first time Ben Jonson’s song had stilled a disreputable company.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 54
