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The Romance of a Plain Man, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Chapter 12. I Walk Into The Country And Meet With An Adventure |
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_ CHAPTER XII. I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE
For me a new light shone on the landscape--a light that seemed to have its part in the high wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the rising sun. For the first time since those old days in the churchyard I felt with every fibre of me, with every beat of my pulses, with every drop of my blood, that it was good to be alive--that it was worth while every bit of it. My starved boyhood, the drudgery in the tobacco factory, the breathless nights in the Old Market, the hours when, leaning over Johnson's Dictionary, I had been obliged to pinch myself to keep wide awake--the squalor out of which I had come, and the future into which I was going--all these were a part to-day of this strange new ecstasy that sang in the wind and moved in the waving broomsedge. And through it all ran my thoughts: "How fragrant the white rose was in her hair! How tremulous her mouth! Are her eyes grey or green, and is it only the heavy shadow of her lashes that makes them appear black at times, as if they changed colour with her thoughts? Is it possible that she could ever love me? If I make a fortune will that bring me any nearer to her? Obscure as I am my cause is hopeless, but even if I were rich and powerful, should I ever dare to ascend the steps of that house where I had once delivered marketing at the kitchen door?" The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with my basket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged, barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the great sycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life the thought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as she had stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holding her mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me with her sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes, dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later, as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her houses of moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as a woman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her a little above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on. The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and I went over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was she merely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaning in her divine smile--in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you have won!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of her bosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modest or humble I had never been. The will to fight--the exaggerated self-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has made his way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking there that morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and the blood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which I had carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep. She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was that because she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for her sake?--that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well as to achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered, have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but with no social manner," the voice had said of me, and the words burned now, hot with shame, in my memory. The recollection of my fall in the dance, of the crying lips of the pretty girl in pink tarlatan, while she stood holding her ruined flounce, became positive agony. What did she think of my boorishness? Was I, for her also, merely a magnificent animal? Had she noticed how ill at ease I felt in my evening clothes? O young Love, young Love, your sharpest torments are not with arrows, but with pin pricks! A trailing blackberry vine, running like a crimson vein close to the earth, caught my foot, and I stooped for a minute. When I looked up she was standing clear against the reflected light of the sunrise, where a low hill rose above the stretches of broomsedge. Her sorrel mare was beside her, licking contentedly at a bright branch of sassafras; and I saw that she had evidently dismounted but the moment before. As I approached, she fastened her riding skirt above her high boots, and kneeling down on the dusty roadside, lifted the mare's foot and examined it with searching and anxious eyes. Her three-cornered riding hat had slipped to her shoulders, where it was held by a broad black band of elastic, and I saw her charming head, with its wreath of plaits, defined against the golden cloud that hung above the thin stretch of pines. At my back the full sunrise broke, and when she turned toward me, her gaze was dazzled for a moment by the flood of light. "Let me have a look," I said, as I reached her, "is the mare hurt?" "She went lame a few minutes ago. There's a stone in her foot, but I can't get it out." "Perhaps I can." Rising from her knees, she yielded me her place, and then stood looking down on me while I removed the stone. "She'll still limp, I fear, it was a bad one," I said as I finished. Without replying, she turned from me and ran a few steps along the road, calling, "Come, Dolly," in a caressing voice. The mare followed with difficulty, flinching as she put her sore foot to the ground. "See how it hurts her," she said, coming back to me. "I'll have to lead her slowly--there's no other way." "Why not ride at a walk?" She shook her head. "My feet are better than a lame horse. It's not more than two miles anyway." "And you danced all night?" I hung the reins over my arm and we turned together, facing the sunrise. "Yes, but the way to rest is to run out-of-doors. Are you often up with the dawn, too?" "No, but I couldn't sleep. The music got into my head." "Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour." "And this is your road?" "Not always. I go different ways. This one I call the road-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches a glorious view." "Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on the road-to-what-is-to-be." She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder why they say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observed mockingly. "I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life I couldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady in pink tarlatan whose dress I tore." "Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with you again." "She's perfectly safe to vow it." "Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know, I like you better out-of-doors." "Out-of-doors?" "Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous." "His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge." "Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair--it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head--and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, you are in your native element." "Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy fitting into the picture?" "To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her native element is pink tarlatan." "And yours?" I demanded. "That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light. "The sunrise," I answered. "Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied. "You are always. The sunrise never leaves you." Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression. "Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?" I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky. "Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison." "Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know." "Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time." "He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life--and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He--he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it--and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said--and can you believe it?--she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think--but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so--so extreme in her views." "What are her views?" "She calls them principles--but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that, however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General has acted." "I hope she isn't still in love with him?" Her clear rippling laugh--the laugh of a free spirit--fluted over the broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and have a voice in the government. Do you?" "I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wife to go to the polls," I answered. Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?--that when you ask a man anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when he hasn't got one?" "That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose." "Do you want one very badly?" she taunted. "Dreadfully--the one I want." "A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?" "No, a living lady in a riding habit." If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hope was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly to the dust of the road. "An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison," she retorted. "Just now it was the General that I resembled." "Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting." The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,--I who had stood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of sex, into her sparkling eyes. "And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly. "Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics." "I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," I said. With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance, straight and full, like a gallant boy. "Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it." We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy which to me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly. "You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all my life," I said. "The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" she asked. "Only to the end of the _c_'s. Don't credit me, please, with the whole alphabet." "The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn the _a_, _b_, _c_'s of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" "If you wish it I will tell you what it was." For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is Franklin Street, and in a little while we shall be at home." "It is not long--it is very short. It is a single word of three letters." "I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?" "Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters." "What an elastic word!" "It is, for it has covered everything at which I looked--both the earth and the sky." "And the General and the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad?" "Without that word the General and the railroad would have been nothing." "How very much obliged to it the poor General must be!" "Will you hear it?" I asked, for when I was once started to the goal there was no turning me by laughter. She raised her eyes, which had been lowered, and looked at me long and deeply--so long and deeply that it seemed as if she were seeking something within myself of which even I was unconscious. "Will you hear it?" I asked again. Her gaze was still on mine. "What is the word?" she asked, almost in a whisper. At the instant I felt that I staked my whole future, and yet that it was no longer in my power to hesitate or to draw back. "The word is--you," I replied. Her hand dropped from the mare's neck, where it had almost touched mine, and I watched her mouth grow tremulous until the red of it showed in a violent contrast to the clear pallor of her face. Then she turned her head away from me toward the sun, and thoughtful and in silence, we passed down Franklin Street to the old grey house. _ |
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