“if you’ll come home to luncheon with us.”
“I’m mighty sorry–awfully sorry,” returned Tryon, with evident regret, “but I have another engagement, which I can scarcely break, even by the command of royalty. At what time shall I call for Miss Warwick this evening? I believe that privilege is mine, along with the other honors and rewards of victory,–unless she is bound to some one else.”
“She is entirely free,” replied Warwick. “Come as early as you like, and I’ll talk to you until she’s ready.”
Tryon bowed himself away, and after a number of gentlemen and a few ladies had paid their respects to the Queen of Love and Beauty, and received an introduction to her, Warwick signaled to the servant who had his carriage in charge, and was soon driving homeward with his sister. No one of the party noticed a young negro, with a handkerchief bound around his head, who followed them until the carriage turned into the gate and swept up the wide drive that led to Warwick’s doorstep.
“Well, Rena,” said Warwick, when they found themselves alone, “you have arrived. Your debut into society is a little more spectacular than I should have wished, but we must rise to the occasion and make the most of it. You are winning the first fruits of your opportunity. You are the most envied woman in Clarence at this particular moment, and, unless I am mistaken, will be the most admired at the ball to-night.”
VI
THE QUEEN OF LOVE AND BEAUTY
Shortly after luncheon, Rena had a visitor in the person of Mrs. Newberry, a vivacious young widow of the town, who proffered her services to instruct Rena in the etiquette of the annual ball.
“Now, my dear,” said Mrs. Newberry, “the first thing to do is to get your coronation robe ready. It simply means a gown with a long train. You have a lovely white waist. Get right into my buggy, and we’ll go down town to get the cloth, take it over to Mrs. Marshall’s, and have her run you up a skirt this afternoon.”
Rena placed herself unreservedly in the hands of Mrs. Newberry, who introduced her to the best dressmaker of the town, a woman of much experience in such affairs, who improvised during the afternoon a gown suited to the occasion. Mrs. Marshall had made more than a dozen ball dresses during the preceding month; being a wise woman and understanding her business thoroughly, she had made each one of them so that with a few additional touches it might serve for the Queen of Love and Beauty. This was her first direct order for the specific garment.
Tryon escorted Rena to the ball, which was held in the principal public hall of the town, and attended by all the best people. The champion still wore the costume of the morning, in place of evening dress, save that long stockings and dancing-pumps had taken the place of riding-boots. Rena went through the ordeal very creditably. Her shyness was palpable, but it was saved from awkwardness by her native grace and good sense. She made up in modesty what she lacked in aplomb. Her months in school had not eradicated a certain self-consciousness born of her secret. The brain-cells never lose the impressions of youth, and Rena’s Patesville life was not far enough removed to have lost its distinctness of outline. Of the two, the present was more of a dream, the past was the more vivid reality. At school she had learned something from books and not a little from observation. She had been able to compare herself with other girls, and to see wherein she excelled or fell short of them. With a sincere desire for improvement, and a wish to please her brother and do him credit, she had sought to make the most of her opportunities. Building upon a foundation of innate taste and intelligence, she had acquired much of the self-possession which comes from a knowledge of correct standards of deportment. She had moreover learned without difficulty, for it suited her disposition, to keep silence when she could not speak to advantage. A certain necessary reticence about the past added strength to a natural reserve. Thus equipped, she held her own very well in the somewhat trying ordeal of the ball, at which the fiction of queenship and the attendant ceremonies, which were pretty and graceful, made her the most conspicuous figure. Few of those who watched her move with easy grace through the measures of the dance could have guessed how nearly her heart was in her mouth during much of the time.
“You’re doing splendidly, my dear,” said Mrs. Newberry, who had constituted herself Rena’s chaperone.
“I trust your Gracious Majesty is pleased with the homage of your devoted subjects,” said Tryon, who spent much of his time by her side and kept up the character of knight in his speech and manner.
“Very much,” replied the Queen of Love and Beauty, with a somewhat tired smile. It was pleasant, but she would be glad, she thought, when it was all over.
“Keep up your courage,” whispered her brother. “You are not only queen, but the belle of the ball. I am proud of you. A dozen women here would give a year off the latter end of life to be in your shoes to-night.”
Rena felt immensely relieved when the hour arrived at which she could take her departure, which was to be the signal for the breaking-up of the ball. She was driven home in Tryon’s carriage, her brother accompanying them. The night was warm, and the drive homeward under the starlight, in the open carriage, had a soothing effect upon Rena’s excited nerves. The calm restfulness of the night, the cool blue depths of the unclouded sky, the solemn croaking of the frogs in a distant swamp, were much more in harmony with her nature than the crowded brilliancy of the ball-room. She closed her eyes, and, leaning back in the carriage, thought of her mother, who she wished might have seen her daughter this night. A momentary pang of homesickness pierced her tender heart, and she furtively wiped away the tears that came into her eyes.
“Good-night, fair Queen!” exclaimed Tryon, breaking into her reverie as the carriage rolled up to the doorstep, “and let your loyal subject kiss your hand in token of his fealty. May your Majesty never abdicate her throne, and may she ever count me her humble servant and devoted knight.”
“And now, sister,” said Warwick, when Tryon had been driven away, “now that the masquerade is over, let us to sleep, and to-morrow take up the serious business of life. Your day has been a glorious success!”
He put his arm around her and gave her a kiss and a brotherly hug.
“It is a dream,” she murmured sleepily, “only a dream. I am Cinderella before the clock has struck. Good-night, dear John.”
“Good-night, Rowena.”
VII
‘MID NEW SURROUNDINGS
Warwick’s residence was situated in the outskirts of the town. It was a fine old plantation house, built in colonial times, with a stately colonnade, wide verandas, and long windows with Venetian blinds. It was painted white, and stood
back several rods from the street, in a charming setting of palmettoes, magnolias, and flowering shrubs. Rena had always thought her mother’s house large, but now it seemed cramped and narrow, in comparison with this roomy mansion. The furniture was old-fashioned and massive. The great brass andirons on the wide hearth stood like sentinels proclaiming and guarding the dignity of the family. The spreading antlers on the wall testified to a mighty hunter in some past generation. The portraits of Warwick’s wife’s ancestors– high featured, proud men and women, dressed in the fashions of a bygone age–looked down from tarnished gilt frames. It was all very novel to her, and very impressive. When she ate off china, with silver knives and forks that had come down as heirlooms, escaping somehow the ravages and exigencies of the war time,–Warwick told her afterwards how he had buried them out of reach of friend or foe,–she thought that her brother must be wealthy, and she felt very proud of him and of her opportunity. The servants, of whom there were several in the house, treated her with a deference to which her eight months in school had only partly accustomed her. At school she had been one of many to be served, and had herself been held to obedience. Here, for the first time in her life, she was mistress, and tasted the sweets of power.
The household consisted of her brother and herself, a cook, a coachman, a nurse, and her brother’s little son Albert. The child, with a fine instinct, had put out his puny arms to Rena at first sight, and she had clasped the little man to her bosom with a motherly caress. She had always loved weak creatures. Kittens and puppies had ever found a welcome and a meal at Rena’s hands, only to be chased away by Mis’ Molly, who had had a wider experience. No shiftless poor white, no half-witted or hungry negro, had ever gone unfed from Mis’ Molly’s kitchen door if Rena were there to hear his plaint. Little Albert was pale and sickly when she came, but soon bloomed again in the sunshine of her care, and was happy only in her presence. Warwick found pleasure in their growing love for each other, and was glad to perceive that the child formed a living link to connect her with his home.
“Dat chile sutt’nly do lub Miss Rena, an’ dat’s a fac’, sho ‘s you bawn,” remarked ‘Lissa the cook to Mimy the nurse one day. “You’ll get yo’ nose put out er j’int, ef you don’t min’.”
“I ain’t frettin’, honey,” laughed the nurse good-naturedly. She was not at all jealous. She had the same wages as before, and her labors were materially lightened by the aunt’s attention to the child. This gave Mimy much more time to flirt with Tom the coachman.
It was a source of much gratification to Warwick that his sister seemed to adapt herself so easily to the new conditions. Her graceful movements, the quiet elegance with which she wore even the simplest gown, the easy authoritativeness with which she directed the servants, were to him proofs of superior quality, and he felt correspondingly proud of her. His feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,–he was quite
conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars. There had come to him from some source, down the stream of time, a rill of the Greek sense of proportion, of fitness, of beauty, which is indeed but proportion embodied, the perfect adaptation of means to ends. He had perceived, more clearly than she could have appreciated it at that time, the undeveloped elements of discord between Rena and her former life. He had imagined her lending grace and charm to his own household. Still another motive, a purely psychological one, had more or less consciously influenced him. He had no fear that the family secret would ever be discovered,– he had taken his precautions too thoroughly, he thought, for that; and yet he could not but feel, at times, that if peradventure–it was a conceivable hypothesis–it should become known, his
fine social position would collapse like a house of cards. Because of this knowledge, which the world around him did not possess, he had felt now and then a certain sense of loneliness; and there was a measure of relief in having about him one who knew his past, and yet whose knowledge, because of their common interest, would not interfere with his present or jeopardize his future. For he had always been, in a figurative sense, a naturalized foreigner in the world of wide opportunity, and Rena was one of his old compatriots, whom he was glad to welcome into the populous loneliness of his adopted country.
VIII
THE COURTSHIP
In a few weeks the echoes of the tournament died away, and Rena’s life settled down into a pleasant routine, which she found much more comfortable than her recent spectacular prominence. Her queenship, while not entirely forgiven by the ladies of the town, had gained for her a temporary social prominence. Among her own sex, Mrs. Newberry proved a warm and enthusiastic friend. Rumor whispered that the lively young widow would not be unwilling to console Warwick in the loneliness of the old colonial mansion, to which his sister was a most excellent medium of approach. Whether this was true or not it is unnecessary to inquire, for it is no part of this story, except as perhaps indicating why Mrs. Newberry played the part of the female friend, without whom no woman is ever launched successfully in a small and conservative society. Her brother’s standing gave her the right of social entry; the tournament opened wide the door, and Mrs. Newberry performed the ceremony of introduction. Rena had many visitors
during the month following the tournament, and might have made her choice from among a dozen suitors; but among them all, her knight of the handkerchief found most favor.
George Tryon had come to Clarence a few months before upon business connected with the settlement of his grandfather’s estate. A rather complicated litigation had grown up around the affair, various phases of which had kept Tryon almost constantly in the town. He had placed matters in Warwick’s hands, and had formed a decided friendship for his attorney, for whom he felt a frank admiration. Tryon was only twenty-three, and his friend’s additional five years, supplemented by a certain professional gravity, commanded a great deal of respect from the younger man. When Tryon had known Warwick for a week, he had been ready to swear by him. Indeed, Warwick was a man for whom
most people formed a liking at first sight. To this power of attraction he owed most of his success–first with Judge Straight, of Patesville, then with the lawyer whose office he had entered at Clarence, with the woman who became his wife, and with the clients for whom he transacted business. Tryon would have maintained
against all comers that Warwick was the finest fellow in the world. When he met Warwick’s sister, the foundation for admiration had already been laid. If Rena had proved to be a maiden lady of uncertain age and doubtful personal attractiveness, Tryon would probably have found in her a most excellent lady, worthy of all respect and esteem, and would have treated her with profound deference and sedulous courtesy. When she proved to be a young and handsome woman, of the type that he admired most, he was capable of any degree of infatuation. His mother had for a long time wanted him to marry the orphan daughter of an old friend, a vivacious blonde, who worshiped him. He had felt friendly towards her, but had shrunk from matrimony. He did not want her badly enough to give up his freedom. The war had interfered with his education, and though fairly well instructed, he had never attended college. In his own opinion, he ought to see something of the world, and have his youthful fling. Later on, when he got ready to settle down, if Blanche were still in the humor, they might marry, and sink to the humdrum level of other old married people. The fact that Blanche Leary was visiting his mother during his unexpectedly long absence had not operated at all to hasten his return to North Carolina. He had been having a very good time at Clarence, and, at the distance of several hundred miles, was safe for the time being from any immediate danger of marriage.
With Rena’s advent, however, he had seen life through different glasses. His heart had thrilled at first sight of this tall girl, with the ivory complexion, the rippling brown hair, and the inscrutable eyes. When he became better acquainted with her, he liked to think that her thoughts centred mainly in himself; and in this he was not far wrong. He discovered that she had a short upper lip, and what seemed to him an eminently kissable mouth. After he had dined twice at Warwick’s, subsequently to the tournament,–his lucky choice of Rena had put him at once upon a household footing with the family,–his views of marriage changed entirely. It now seemed to him the duty, as well as the high and holy privilege of a young man, to marry and manfully to pay his debt to society. When in Rena’s presence, he could not imagine how he had ever contemplated the possibility of marriage with Blanche Leary,–she was utterly, entirely, and hopelessly unsuited to him. For a fair man of vivacious temperament, this stately dark girl was the ideal mate. Even his mother would admit this, if she could only see Rena. To win this beautiful girl for his wife would be a worthy task. He had crowned her Queen of Love and Beauty; since then she had ascended the throne of his heart. He would make her queen of his home and mistress of his life.
To Rena this brief month’s courtship came as a new education. Not only had this fair young man crowned her queen, and honored her above all the ladies in town; but since then he had waited assiduously upon her, had spoken softly to her, had looked at her with shining eyes, and had sought to be alone with her. The time soon came when to touch his hand in greeting sent a thrill through her frame,–a time when she listened for his footstep and was happy in his presence. He had been bold enough at the tournament; he had since become somewhat bashful and constrained. He must be in love, she thought, and wondered how soon he would speak. If it were so sweet to walk with him in the garden, or along the shaded streets, to sit with him, to feel the touch of his hand, what happiness would it not be to hear him say that he loved her–to bear his name, to live with him always. To be thus loved and honored by this handsome young man, –she could hardly believe it possible. He would never speak–he would discover her secret and withdraw. She turned pale at the thought,–ah, God! something would happen,–it was too good to be true. The Prince would never try on the glass slipper.
Tryon first told his love for Rena one summer evening on their way home from church. They were walking in the moonlight along the quiet street, which, but for their presence, seemed quite deserted.
“Miss Warwick–Rowena,” he said, clasping with his right hand the hand that rested on his left arm, “I love you! Do you–love me?”
To Rena this simple avowal came with much greater force than a more formal declaration could have had. It appealed to her own simple nature. Indeed, few women at such a moment criticise the form in which the most fateful words of life–but one–are spoken. Words, while pleasant, are really superfluous. Her whispered “Yes” spoke volumes.
They walked on past the house, along the country road into which the street soon merged. When they returned, an hour later, they found Warwick seated on the piazza, in a rocking-chair, smoking a fragrant cigar.
“Well, children,” he observed with mock severity, “you are late in getting home from church. The sermon must have been extremely long.”
“We have been attending an after-meeting,” replied Tryon joyfully, “and have been discussing an old text, `Little children, love one another,’ and its corollary, `It is not good for man to live alone.’ John, I am the happiest man alive. Your sister has promised to marry me. I should like to shake my brother’s hand.”
Never does one feel so strongly the universal brotherhood of man as when one loves some other fellow’s sister. Warwick sprang from his chair and clasped Tryon’s extended hand with real emotion. He knew of no man whom he would have preferred to Tryon as a husband for his sister.
“My dear George–my dear sister,” he
exclaimed, “I am very, very glad. I wish you every happiness. My sister is the most fortunate of women.”
“And I am the luckiest of men,” cried Tryon.
“I wish you every happiness,” repeated Warwick; adding, with a touch of solemnity, as a certain thought, never far distant, occurred to him, “I hope that neither of you may ever regret your choice.”
Thus placed upon the footing of an accepted lover, Tryon’s visits to the house became more frequent. He wished to fix a time for the marriage, but at this point Rena developed a strange reluctance.
“Can we not love each other for a while?” she asked. “To be engaged is a pleasure that comes but once; it would be a pity to cut it too short.”
“It is a pleasure that I would cheerfully dispense with,” he replied, “for the certainty of possession. I want you all to myself, and all the time. Things might happen. If I should die, for instance, before I married you”–
“Oh, don’t suppose such awful things,” she cried, putting her hand over his mouth.
He held it there and kissed it until she pulled it away.
“I should consider,” he resumed, completing the sentence, “that my life had been a failure.”
“If I should die,” she murmured, “I should die happy in the knowledge that you had loved me.”
“In three weeks,” he went on, “I shall have finished my business in Clarence, and there will be but one thing to keep me here. When shall it be? I must take you home with me.”
“I will let you know,” she replied, with a troubled sigh, “in a week from to-day.”
“I’ll call your attention to the subject every day in the mean time,” he asserted. “I shouldn’t like you to forget it.”
Rena’s shrinking from the irrevocable step of marriage was due to a simple and yet complex cause. Stated baldly, it was the consciousness of her secret; the complexity arose out of the various ways in which it seemed to bear upon her future. Our lives are so bound up with those of our fellow men that the slightest departure from the beaten path involves a multiplicity of small adjustments. It had not been difficult for Rena to conform her speech, her manners, and in a measure her modes of thought, to those of the people around her; but when this readjustment went beyond mere externals and concerned the vital issues of life, the secret that oppressed her took on a more serious aspect, with tragic possibilities. A discursive imagination was not one of her characteristics, or the danger of a marriage of which perfect frankness was not a condition might well have presented itself before her heart had become involved. Under the influence of doubt and fear acting upon love, the invisible bar to happiness glowed with a lambent flame that threatened dire disaster.
“Would he have loved me at all,” she asked herself, “if he had known the story of my past? Or, having loved me, could he blame me now for what I cannot help?”
There were two shoals in the channel of her life, upon either of which her happiness might go to shipwreck. Since leaving the house behind the cedars, where she had been brought into the world without her own knowledge or consent, and had first drawn the breath of life by the involuntary contraction of certain muscles, Rena had learned, in a short time, many things; but she was yet to learn that the innocent suffer with the guilty, and feel the punishment the more keenly because unmerited. She had yet to learn that the old Mosaic formula, “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children,” was graven more indelibly upon the heart of the race than upon the tables of Sinai.
But would her lover still love her, if he knew all? She had read some of the novels in the bookcase in her mother’s hall, and others at boarding- school. She had read that love was a conqueror, that neither life nor death, nor creed nor caste, could stay his triumphant course. Her secret was no legal bar to their union. If Rena could forget the secret, and Tryon should never know it, it would be no obstacle to their happiness. But Rena felt, with a sinking of the heart, that happiness was not a matter of law or of fact, but lay entirely within the domain of sentiment. We are happy when we think ourselves happy, and with a strange perversity we often differ from others with regard to what should constitute our happiness. Rena’s secret was the worm in the bud, the skeleton in the closet.
“He says that he loves me. He DOES love me. Would he love me, if he knew?” She stood before an oval mirror brought from France by one of Warwick’s wife’s ancestors, and regarded her image with a coldly critical eye. She was as little vain as any of her sex who are endowed with beauty. She tried to place herself, in thus passing upon her own claims to consideration, in the hostile attitude of society toward her hidden disability. There was no mark upon her brow to brand her as less pure, less innocent, less desirable, less worthy to be loved, than these proud women of the past who had admired themselves in this old mirror.
“I think a man might love me for myself,” she murmured pathetically, “and if he loved me truly, that he would marry me. If he would not marry me, then it would be because he didn’t love me. I’ll tell George my secret. If he leaves me, then he does not love me.”
But this resolution vanished into thin air before it was fully formulated. The secret was not hers alone; it involved her brother’s position, to whom she owed everything, and in less degree the future of her little nephew, whom she had learned to love so well. She had the choice of but two courses of action, to marry Tryon or to dismiss him. The thought that she might lose him made him seem only more dear; to think that he might leave her made her sick at heart. In one week she was bound to give him an answer; he was more likely to ask for it at their next meeting.
IX
DOUBTS AND FEARS
Rena’s heart was too heavy with these misgivings for her to keep them to herself. On the
morning after the conversation with Tryon in which she had promised him an answer within a week, she went into her brother’s study, where he usually spent an hour after breakfast before going to his office. He looked up amiably from the book before him and read trouble in her face.
“Well, Rena, dear,” he asked with a smile, “what’s the matter? Is there anything you want–money, or what? I should like to have Aladdin’s lamp–though I’d hardly need it– that you might have no wish unsatisfied.”
He had found her very backward in asking for things that she needed. Generous with his means, he thought nothing too good for her. Her success had gratified his pride, and justified his course in taking her under his protection.
“Thank you, John. You give me already more than I need. It is something else, John. George wants me to say when I will marry him. I am afraid to marry him, without telling him. If he should find out afterwards, he might cast me off, or cease to love me. If he did not know it, I should be forever thinking of what he would do if he SHOULD find it out; or, if I should die without his having learned it, I should not rest easy in my grave for thinking of what he would have done if he HAD found it out.”
Warwick’s smile gave place to a grave expression at this somewhat comprehensive statement. He rose and closed the door carefully, lest some one of the servants might overhear the conversation. More liberally endowed than Rena with imagination, and not without a vein of sentiment, he had nevertheless a practical side that outweighed them both. With him, the problem that oppressed his sister had been in the main a matter of argument, of self-conviction. Once persuaded that he had certain rights, or ought to have them, by virtue of the laws of nature, in defiance of the customs of mankind, he had promptly sought to enjoy them. This he had been able to do by simply concealing his antecedents and making the most of his opportunities, with no troublesome qualms of conscience whatever. But he had already perceived, in their brief intercourse, that Rena’s emotions, while less easily stirred, touched a deeper note than his, and dwelt upon it with greater intensity than if they had been spread over the larger field to which a more ready sympathy would have supplied so many points of access;–hers was a deep and silent current flowing between the narrow walls of a self- contained life, his the spreading river that ran through a pleasant landscape. Warwick’s
imagination, however, enabled him to put himself in touch with her mood and recognize its bearings upon her conduct. He would have preferred her taking the practical point of view, to bring her round to which he perceived would be a matter of diplomacy.
“How long have these weighty thoughts been troubling your small head?” he asked with assumed lightness.
“Since he asked me last night to name our wedding day.”
“My dear child,” continued Warwick, “you take too tragic a view of life. Marriage is a reciprocal arrangement, by which the contracting parties give love for love, care for keeping, faith for faith. It is a matter of the future, not of the past. What a poor soul it is that has not some secret chamber, sacred to itself; where one can file away the things others have no right to know, as well as things that one himself would fain forget! We are under no moral obligation to inflict upon others the history of our past mistakes, our wayward thoughts, our secret sins, our desperate hopes, or our heartbreaking disappointments. Still less are we bound to bring out from this secret chamber the dusty record of our ancestry.
`Let the dead past bury its dead.’
George Tryon loves you for yourself alone; it is not your ancestors that he seeks to marry.”
“But would he marry me if he knew?” she persisted.
Warwick paused for reflection. He would have preferred to argue the question in a general way, but felt the necessity of satisfying her scruples, as far as might be. He had liked Tryon from the very beginning of their acquaintance. In all their intercourse, which had been very close for several months, he had been impressed by the young man’s sunny temper, his straightforwardness, his intellectual honesty. Tryon’s deference to Warwick as the elder man had very naturally proved an attraction. Whether this friendship would have stood the test of utter frankness about his own past was a merely academic speculation with which Warwick did not trouble himself. With his sister the question had evidently become a matter of conscience, –a difficult subject with which to deal in a person of Rena’s temperament.
“My dear sister,” he replied, “why should he know? We haven’t asked him for his pedigree; we don’t care to know it. If he cares for ours, he should ask for it, and it would then be time enough to raise the question. You love him, I imagine, and wish to make him happy?”
It is the highest wish of the woman who loves. The enamored man seeks his own happiness; the loving woman finds no sacrifice too great for the loved one. The fiction of chivalry made man serve woman; the fact of human nature makes woman happiest when serving where she loves.
“Yes, oh, yes,” Rena exclaimed with fervor, clasping her hands unconsciously. “I’m afraid he’d be unhappy if he knew, and it would make me miserable to think him unhappy.”
“Well, then,” said Warwick, “suppose we should tell him our secret and put ourselves in his power, and that he should then conclude that he couldn’t marry you? Do you imagine he would be any happier than he is now, or than if he should never know?”
Ah, no! she could not think so. One could not tear love out of one’s heart without pain and suffering.
There was a knock at the door. Warwick opened it to the nurse, who stood with little Albert in her arms.
“Please, suh,” said the girl, with a curtsy, “de baby ‘s be’n oryin’ an’ frettin’ fer Miss Rena, an’ I ‘lowed she mought want me ter fetch ‘im, ef it wouldn’t’sturb her.”
“Give me the darling,” exclaimed Rena, coming forward and taking the child from the nurse. “It wants its auntie. Come to its auntie, bless its little heart!”
Little Albert crowed with pleasure and put up his pretty mouth for a kiss. Warwick found the sight a pleasant one. If he could but quiet his sister’s troublesome scruples, he might erelong see her fondling beautiful children of her own. Even if Rena were willing to risk her happiness, and he to endanger his position, by a quixotic frankness, the future of his child must not be compromised.
“You wouldn’t want to make George unhappy,” Warwick resumed when the nurse retired. “Very well; would you not be willing, for his sake, to keep a secret–your secret and mine, and that of the innocent child in your arms? Would you involve all of us in difficulties merely to secure your own peace of mind? Doesn’t such a course seem just the least bit selfish? Think the matter over from that point of view, and we’ll speak of it later in the day. I shall be with George all the morning, and I may be able, by a little management, to find out his views on the subject of birth and family, and all that. Some men are very liberal, and love is a great leveler. I’ll sound him, at any rate.”
He kissed the baby and left Rena to her own reflections, to which his presentation of the case had given a new turn. It had never before occurred to her to regard silence in the light of self-sacrifice. It had seemed a sort of sin; her brother’s argument made of it a virtue. It was not the first time, nor the last, that right and wrong had been a matter of view-point.
Tryon himself furnished the opening for Warwick’s proposed examination. The younger man could not long remain silent upon the subject uppermost in his mind. “I am anxious, John,” he said, “to have Rowena name the happiest day of my life–our wedding day. When the trial in Edgecombe County is finished, I shall have no further business here, and shall be ready to leave for home. I should like to take my bride with me, and surprise my mother.”
Mothers, thought Warwick, are likely to prove inquisitive about their sons’ wives, especially when taken unawares in matters of such importance. This seemed a good time to test the liberality of Tryon’s views, and to put forward a shield for his sister’s protection.
“Are you sure, George, that your mother will find the surprise agreeable when you bring home a bride of whom you know so little and your mother nothing at all?”
Tryon had felt that it would be best to surprise his mother. She would need only to see Rena to approve of her, but she was so far prejudiced in favor of Blanche Leary that it would be wisest to present the argument after having announced the irrevocable conclusion. Rena herself would be a complete justification for the accomplished deed.
“I think you ought to know, George,” continued Warwick, without waiting for a reply to his question, “that my sister and I are not of an old family, or a rich family, or a distinguished family; that she can bring you nothing but herself; that we have no connections of which you could boast, and no relatives to whom we should be glad to introduce you. You must take us for ourselves alone–we are new people.”
“My dear John,” replied the young man warmly, “there is a great deal of nonsense about families. If a man is noble and brave and strong, if a woman is beautiful and good and true, what matters it about his or her ancestry? If an old family can give them these things, then it is valuable; if they possess them without it, then of what use is it, except as a source of empty pride, which they would be better without? If all new families were like yours, there would be no advantage in belonging to an old one. All I care to know of Rowena’s family is that she is your sister; and you’ll pardon me, old fellow, if I add that she hardly needs even you,–she carries the stamp of her descent upon her face and in her heart.”
“It makes me glad to hear you speak in that way,” returned Warwick, delighted by the young man’s breadth and earnestness.
“Oh, I mean every word of it,” replied Tryon. “Ancestors, indeed, for Rowena! I will tell you a family secret, John, to prove how little I care for ancestors. My maternal great-great-grandfather, a hundred and fifty years ago, was hanged, drawn, and quartered for stealing cattle across the Scottish border. How is that for a pedigree? Behold in me the lineal descendant of a felon!”
Warwick felt much relieved at this avowal. His own statement had not touched the vital point involved; it had been at the best but a half-truth; but Tryon’s magnanimity would doubtless protect Rena from any close inquiry concerning her past. It even occurred to Warwick for a moment that he might safely disclose the secret to Tryon; but an appreciation of certain facts of history and certain traits of human nature constrained him to put the momentary thought aside. It was a great relief, however, to imagine that Tryon might think lightly of this thing that he need never know.
“Well, Rena,” he said to his sister when he went home at noon: “I’ve sounded George.”
“What did he say?” she asked eagerly.
“I told him we were people of no family, and that we had no relatives that we were proud of. He said he loved you for yourself, and would never ask you about your ancestry.”
“Oh, I am so glad!” exclaimed Rena joyfully. This report left her very happy for about three hours, or until she began to analyze carefully her brother’s account of what had been said. Warwick’s statement had not been specific,–he had not told Tryon THE thing. George’s reply, in turn, had been a mere generality. The concrete fact that oppressed her remained unrevealed, and her doubt was still unsatisfied.
Rena was occupied with this thought when her lover next came to see her. Tryon came up the sanded walk from the gate and spoke pleasantly to the nurse, a good-looking yellow girl who was seated on the front steps, playing with little Albert. He took the boy from her arms, and she went to call Miss Warwick.
Rena came out, followed by the nurse, who offered to take the child.
“Never mind, Mimy, leave him with me,” said Tryon.
The nurse walked discreetly over into the garden, remaining within call, but beyond the hearing of conversation in an ordinary tone.
“Rena, darling,” said her lover, “when shall it be? Surely you won’t ask me to wait a week. Why, that’s a lifetime!”
Rena was struck by a brilliant idea. She would test her lover. Love was a very powerful force; she had found it the greatest, grandest, sweetest thing in the world. Tryon had said that he loved her; he had said scarcely anything else for several weeks, surely nothing else worth remembering. She would test his love by a hypothetical question.
“You say you love me,” she said, glancing at him with a sad thoughtfulness in her large dark eyes. “How much do you love me?”
“I love you all one can love. True love has no degrees; it is all or nothing!”
“Would you love me,” she asked, with an air of coquetry that masked her concern, pointing toward the girl in the shrubbery, “if I were Albert’s nurse yonder?”
“If you were Albert’s nurse,” he replied, with a joyous laugh, “he would have to find another within a week, for within a week we should be married.”
The answer seemed to fit the question, but in fact, Tryon’s mind and Rena’s did not meet. That two intelligent persons should each attach a different meaning to so simple a form of words as
Rena’s question was the best ground for her misgiving with regard to the marriage. But love blinded her. She was anxious to be convinced. She interpreted the meaning of his speech by her own thought and by the ardor of his glance, and was satisfied with the answer.
“And now, darling,” pleaded Tryon, “will you not fix the day that shall make me happy? I shall be ready to go away in three weeks. Will you go with me?”
“Yes,” she answered, in a tumult of joy. She would never need to tell him her secret now. It would make no difference with him, so far as she was concerned; and she had no right to reveal her brother’s secret. She was willing to bury the past in forgetfulness, now that she knew it would have no interest for her lover.
X
THE DREAM
The marriage was fixed for the thirtieth of the month, immediately after which Tryon and his bride were to set out for North Carolina. Warwick would have liked it much if Tryon had
lived in South Carolina; but the location of his North Carolina home was at some distance from Patesville, with which it had no connection by steam or rail, and indeed lay altogether out of the line of travel to Patesville. Rena had no acquaintance with people of social standing in North Carolina; and with the added maturity and charm due to her improved opportunities, it was unlikely that any former resident of Patesville who might casually meet her would see in the elegant young matron from South Carolina more than a passing resemblance to a poor girl who had once lived in an obscure part of the old town. It would of course be necessary for Rena to keep away from Patesville; save for her mother’s sake, she would hardly be tempted to go back.
On the twentieth of the month, Warwick set out with Tryon for the county seat of the adjoining county, to try one of the lawsuits which had required Tryon’s presence in South Carolina for so long a time. Their destination was a day’s drive from Clarence, behind a good horse, and the trial was expected to last a week.
“This week will seem like a year,” said Tryon ruefully, the evening before their departure, “but I’ll write every day, and shall expect a letter as often.”
“The mail goes only twice a week, George,” replied Rena.
“Then I shall have three letters in each mail.”
Warwick and Tryon were to set out in the cool of the morning, after an early breakfast. Rena was up at daybreak that she might preside at the breakfast-table and bid the travelers good-by.
“John,” said Rena to her brother in the morning, “I dreamed last night that mother was ill.”
“Dreams, you know, Rena,” answered Warwick lightly, “go by contraries. Yours undoubtedly signifies that our mother, God bless her simple soul! is at the present moment enjoying her usual perfect health. She was never sick in her life.”
For a few months after leaving Patesville with her brother, Rena had suffered tortures of homesickness; those who have felt it know the pang. The severance of old ties had been abrupt and complete. At the school where her brother had taken her, there had been nothing to relieve the strangeness of her surroundings–no schoolmate from her own town, no relative or friend of the family near by. Even the compensation of human sympathy was in a measure denied her, for Rena was too fresh from her prison-house to doubt that sympathy would fail before the revelation of the secret the consciousness of which oppressed her at that time like a nightmare. It was not strange that Rena, thus isolated, should have been prostrated by homesickness for several weeks after leaving Patesville. When the paroxysm had passed, there followed a dull pain, which gradually subsided into a resignation as profound, in its way, as had been her longing for home. She loved, she suffered, with a quiet intensity of which her outward demeanor gave no adequate expression. From some ancestral source she had derived a strain of the passive fatalism by which alone one can submit uncomplainingly to the inevitable. By the same token, when once a thing had been decided, it became with her a finality, which only some extraordinary stress of emotion could disturb. She had acquiesced in her brother’s plan; for her there was no withdrawing; her homesickness was an incidental thing which must be endured, as patiently as might be, until time should have brought a measure of relief.
Warwick had made provision for an occasional letter from Patesville, by leaving with his mother a number of envelopes directed to his address. She could have her letters written, inclose them in these envelopes, and deposit them in the post- office with her own hand. Thus the place of Warwick’s residence would remain within her own knowledge, and his secret would not be placed at the mercy of any wandering Patesvillian who might perchance go to that part of South Carolina. By this simple means Rena had kept as closely in touch with her mother as Warwick had considered prudent; any closer intercourse was not consistent with their present station in life.
The night after Warwick and Tryon had ridden away, Rena dreamed again that her mother was ill. Better taught people than she, in regions more enlightened than the South Carolina of that epoch, are disturbed at times by dreams. Mis’ Molly had a profound faith in them. If God, in ancient times, had spoken to men in visions of the night, what easier way could there be for Him to convey his meaning to people of all ages? Science, which has shattered many an idol and destroyed many a delusion, has made but slight inroads upon the shadowy realm of dreams. For Mis’ Molly, to whom science would have meant nothing and psychology would have been a meaningless term, the land of dreams was carefully mapped and bounded. Each dream had some special significance, or was at least susceptible of classification under some significant head. Dreams, as a general rule, went by contraries; but a dream three times repeated was a certain portent of the thing defined. Rena’s few years of schooling at Patesville and her months at Charleston had scarcely disturbed these hoary superstitions which lurk in the dim corners of the brain. No lady in Clarence, perhaps, would have remained undisturbed by a vivid dream, three times repeated, of some event bearing materially upon her own life.
The first repetition of a dream was decisive of nothing, for two dreams meant no more than one. The power of the second lay in the suspense, the uncertainty, to which it gave rise. Two doubled the chance of a third. The day following this second dream was an anxious one for Rena. She could not for an instant dismiss her mother from her thoughts, which were filled too with a certain self-reproach. She had left her mother alone; if her mother were really ill, there was no one at home to tend her with loving care. This feeling grew in force, until by nightfall Rena had become very unhappy, and went to bed with the most dismal forebodings. In this state of mind, it is not surprising that she now dreamed that her mother was lying at the point of death, and that she cried out with heart-rending pathos:–
“Rena, my darlin’, why did you forsake yo’r pore old mother? Come back to me, honey; I’ll die ef I don’t see you soon.”
The stress of subconscious emotion engendered by the dream was powerful enough to wake Rena, and her mother’s utterance seemed to come to her with the force of a fateful warning and a great reproach. Her mother was sick and needed her, and would die if she did not come. She felt that she must see her mother,–it would be almost like murder to remain away from her under such circumstances.
After breakfast she went into the business part of the town and inquired at what time a train would leave that would take her toward Patesville. Since she had come away from the town, a railroad had been opened by which the long river
voyage might be avoided, and, making allowance for slow trains and irregular connections, the town of Patesville could be reached by an all-rail route in about twelve hours. Calling at the post-office for the family mail, she found there a letter from her mother, which she tore open in great excitement. It was written in an unpracticed hand and badly spelled, and was in effect as follows:–
MY DEAR DAUGHTER,–I take my pen in hand to let you know that I am not very well. I have had a kind of misery in my side for two weeks, with palpitations of the heart, and I have been in bed for three days. I’m feeling mighty poorly, but Dr. Green says that I’ll get over it in a few days. Old Aunt Zilphy is staying with me, and looking after things tolerably well. I hope this will find you and John enjoying good health. Give my love to John, and I hope the Lord will bless him and you too. Cousin Billy Oxendine has had a rising on his neck, and has had to have it lanced. Mary B. has another young one, a boy this time. Old man Tom Johnson was killed last week while trying to whip black Jim Brown, who lived down on the Wilmington Road. Jim has run away. There has been a big freshet in the river, and it looked at one time as if the new bridge would be washed away.
Frank comes over every day or two and asks about you. He says to tell you that he don’t believe you are coming back any more, but you are to remember him, and that foolishness he said about bringing you back from the end of the world with his mule and cart. He’s very good to me, and brings over shavings and kindling-wood, and made me a new well-bucket for nothing. It’s a comfort to talk to him about you, though I haven’t told him where you are living.
I hope this will find you and John both well, and doing well. I should like to see you, but if it’s the Lord’s will that I shouldn’t, I shall be thankful anyway that you have done what was the best for yourselves and your children, and that I have given you up for your own good.
Your affectionate mother,
MARY WALDEN.
Rena shed tears over this simple letter, which, to her excited imagination, merely confirmed the warning of her dream. At the date of its writing her mother had been sick in bed, with the symptoms of a serious illness. She had no nurse but a purblind old woman. Three days of progressive illness had evidently been quite sufficient to reduce her parent to the condition indicated by the third dream. The thought that her mother might die without the presence of any one who loved her pierced Rena’s heart like a knife and lent wings to her feet. She wished for the enchanted horse of which her brother had read to her so many years before on the front piazza of the house behind the cedars, that she might fly through the air to her dying mother’s side. She determined to go at once to Patesville.
Returning home, she wrote a letter to Warwick inclosing their mother’s letter, and stating that she had dreamed an alarming dream for three nights in succession; that she had left the house in charge of the servants and gone to Patesville; and that she would return as soon as her mother was out of danger.
To her lover she wrote that she had been called away to visit a sick-bed, and would return very soon, perhaps by the time he got back to Clarence. These letters Rena posted on her way to the train, which she took at five o’clock in the afternoon. This would bring her to Patesville early in the morning of the following day.
XI
A LETTER AND A JOURNEY
War has been called the court of last resort. A lawsuit may with equal aptness be compared to a battle–the parallel might be drawn very closely all along the line. First we have the casus belli, the cause of action; then the various protocols and proclamations and general orders, by way of pleas, demurrers, and motions; then the preliminary skirmishes at the trial table; and then the final struggle, in which might is quite as likely to prevail as right, victory most often resting with the strongest battalions, and truth and justice not seldom overborne by the weight of odds upon the other side.
The lawsuit which Warwick and Tryon had gone to try did not, however, reach this ultimate stage, but, after a three days’ engagement, resulted in a treaty of peace. The case was compromised and settled, and Tryon and Warwick set out on their homeward drive. They stopped at a farm- house at noon, and while at table saw the stage- coach from the town they had just left, bound for their own destination. In the mail-bag under the driver’s seat were Rena’s two letters; they had been delivered at the town in the morning, and immediately remailed to Clarence, in accordance with orders left at the post-office the evening before. Tryon and Warwick drove leisurely homeward through the pines, all unconscious of the fateful squares of white paper moving along the road a few miles before them, which a mother’s yearning and a daughter’s love had thrown, like the apple of discord, into the narrow circle of their happiness.
They reached Clarence at four o’clock. Warwick got down from the buggy at his office. Tryon drove on to his hotel, to make a hasty toilet before visiting his sweetheart.
Warwick glanced at his mail, tore open the envelope addressed in his sister’s handwriting, and read the contents with something like dismay. She had gone away on the eve of her wedding, her lover knew not where, to be gone no one knew how long, on a mission which could not be frankly disclosed. A dim foreboding of disaster flashed across his mind. He thrust the letter into his pocket, with others yet unopened, and started toward his home. Reaching the gate, he paused a moment and then walked on past the house. Tryon would probably be there in a few minutes, and he did not care to meet him without first having had the opportunity for some moments of reflection. He must fix upon some line of action in this emergency.
Meanwhile Tryon had reached his hotel and opened his mail. The letter from Rena was read first, with profound disappointment. He had really made concessions in the settlement of that lawsuit–had yielded several hundred dollars of his just dues, in order that he might get back to Rena three days earlier. Now he must cool his heels in idleness for at least three days before she would return. It was annoying, to say the least. He wished to know where she had gone, that he might follow her and stay near her until she should be ready to come back. He might ask Warwick– no, she might have had some good reason for not having mentioned her destination. She had probably gone to visit some of the poor relations of whom her brother had spoken so frankly, and she would doubtless prefer that he should not see her amid any surroundings but the best. Indeed, he did not know that he would himself care to endanger, by suggestive comparisons, the fine aureole of superiority that surrounded her. She represented in her adorable person and her pure heart the finest flower of the finest race that God had ever made–the supreme effort of creative power, than which there could be no finer. The flower would soon be his; why should he care to dig up the soil in which it grew?
Tryon went on opening his letters. There were several bills and circulars, and then a letter from his mother, of which he broke the seal:–
MY DEAREST GEORGE,–This leaves us well. Blanche is still with me, and we are impatiently awaiting your return. In your absence she seems almost like a daughter to me. She joins me in the hope that your lawsuits are progressing favorably, and that you will be with us soon. . . .
On your way home, if it does not keep you away from us too long, would it not be well for you to come by way of Patesville, and find out whether there is any prospect of our being able to collect our claim against old Mr. Duncan McSwayne’s estate? You must have taken the papers with you, along with the rest, for I do not find them here. Things ought to be settled enough now for people to realize on some of their securities. Your grandfather always believed the note was good, and meant to try to collect it, but the war interfered. He said to me, before he died, that if the note was ever collected, he would use the money to buy a wedding present for your wife. Poor father! he is dead and gone to heaven; but I am sure that even there he would be happier if he knew the note was paid and the money used as he intended.
If you go to Patesville, call on my cousin, Dr. Ed. Green, and tell him who you are. Give him my love. I haven’t seen him for twenty years. He used to be very fond of the ladies, a very gallant man. He can direct you to a good lawyer, no doubt. Hoping to see you soon,
Your loving mother,
ELIZABETH TRYON.
P. S. Blanche joins me in love to you.
This affectionate and motherly letter did not give Tryon unalloyed satisfaction. He was glad to hear that his mother was well, but he had hoped that Blanche Leary might have finished her visit by this time. The reasonable inference from the letter was that Blanche meant to await his return. Her presence would spoil the fine romantic flavor of the surprise he had planned for his mother; it would never do to expose his bride to an unannounced meeting with the woman whom he had tacitly rejected. There would be one advantage in such a meeting: the comparison of the two women would be so much in Rena’s favor that his mother could not hesitate for a moment between them. The situation, however, would have elements of constraint, and he did not care to expose either Rena or Blanche to any disagreeable contingency. It would be better to take his wife on a wedding trip, and notify his mother, before he returned home, of his marriage. In the extremely improbable case that she should disapprove his choice after having seen his wife, the ice would at least have been broken before his arrival at home.
“By Jove!” he exclaimed suddenly, striking his knee with his hand, “why shouldn’t I run up to Patesville while Rena’s gone? I can leave here at five o’clock, and get there some time to-morrow morning. I can transact my business during the day, and get back the day after to-morrow; for Rena might return ahead of time, just as we did, and I shall want to be here when she comes; I’d rather wait a year for a legal opinion on a doubtful old note than to lose one day with my love. The train goes in twenty minutes. My bag is already packed. I’ll just drop a line to George and tell him where I’ve gone.”
He put Rena’s letter into his breast pocket, and turning to his trunk, took from it a handful of papers relating to the claim in reference to which he was going to Patesville. These he thrust into the same pocket with Rena’s letter; he wished to read both letter and papers while on the train. It would be a pleasure merely to hold the letter before his eyes and look at the lines traced by her hand. The papers he wished to study, for the more practical purpose of examining into the merits of his claim against the estate of Duncan McSwayne.
When Warwick reached home, he inquired if Mr. Tryon had called.
“No, suh,” answered the nurse, to whom he had put the question; “he ain’t be’n here yet, suh.”
Warwick was surprised and much disturbed.
“De baby ‘s be’n cryin’ for Miss Rena,” suggested the nurse, “an’ I s’pec’ he’d like to see you, suh. Shall I fetch ‘im?”
“Yes, bring him to me.”
He took the child in his arms and went out upon the piazza. Several porch pillows lay invitingly near. He pushed them toward the steps with his foot, sat down upon one, and placed little Albert upon another. He was scarcely seated when a messenger from the hotel came up the walk from the gate and handed him a note. At the same moment he heard the long shriek of the afternoon train leaving the station on the opposite side of the town.
He tore the envelope open anxiously, read the note, smiled a sickly smile, and clenched the paper in his hand unconsciously. There was nothing he could do. The train had gone; there was no telegraph to Patesville, and no letter could leave Clarence for twenty-four hours. The best laid schemes go wrong at times–the stanchest ships are sometimes wrecked, or skirt the breakers perilously. Life is a sea, full of strange currents and uncharted reefs–whoever leaves the traveled path must run the danger of destruction. Warwick was a lawyer, however, and accustomed to balance probabilities.
“He may easily be in Patesville a day or two without meeting her. She will spend most of her time at mother’s bedside, and he will be occupied with his own affairs.”
If Tryon should meet her–well, he was very much in love, and he had spoken very nobly of birth and blood. Warwick would have preferred, nevertheless, that Tryon’s theories should not be put to this particular test. Rena’s scruples had so far been successfully combated; the question would be opened again, and the situation unnecessarily complicated, if Tryon should meet Rena in Patesville.
“Will he or will he not?” he asked himself. He took a coin from his pocket and spun it upon the floor. “Heads, he sees her; tails, he does not.”
The coin spun swiftly and steadily, leaving upon the eye the impression of a revolving sphere. Little Albert, left for a moment to his own devices, had crept behind his father and was watching the whirling disk with great pleasure. He felt that he would like to possess this interesting object. The coin began to move more slowly, and was wabbling to its fall, when the child stretched forth his chubby fist and caught it ere it touched the floor.
XII
TRYON GOES TO PATESVILLE
Tryon arrived in the early morning and put up at the Patesville Hotel, a very comfortable inn. After a bath, breakfast, and a visit to the barbershop, he inquired of the hotel clerk the way to the office of Dr. Green, his mother’s cousin.
“On the corner, sir,” answered the clerk, “by the market-house, just over the drugstore. The doctor drove past here only half an hour ago. You’ll probably catch him in his office.”
Tryon found the office without difficulty. He climbed the stair, but found no one in except a young colored man seated in the outer office, who rose promptly as Tryon entered.
“No, suh,” replied the man to Tryon’s question, “he ain’t hyuh now. He’s gone out to see a patient, suh, but he’ll be back soon. Won’t you set down in de private office an’ wait fer ‘im, suh?”
Tryon had not slept well during his journey, and felt somewhat fatigued. Through the open door of the next room he saw an inviting armchair, with a window at one side, and upon the other a table strewn with papers and magazines.
“Yes,” he answered, “I’ll wait.”
He entered the private office, sank into the armchair, and looked out of the window upon the square below. The view was mildly interesting. The old brick market-house with the tower was quite picturesque. On a wagon-scale at one end the public weighmaster was weighing a load of hay. In the booths under the wide arches several old negro women were frying fish on little charcoal stoves– the odor would have been appetizing to one who had not breakfasted. On the shady side stood half a dozen two-wheeled carts, loaded with lightwood and drawn by diminutive steers, or superannuated army mules branded on the flank with the cabalistic letters “C. S. A.,” which represented a vanished dream, or “U. S. A.,” which, as any negro about the market-house would have borne witness, signified a very concrete fact. Now and then a lady or gentleman passed with leisurely step–no one ever hurried in Patesville–or some poor white sandhiller slouched listlessly along toward store or bar-room.
Tryon mechanically counted the slabs of gingerbread on the nearest market-stall, and calculated the cubical contents of several of the meagre loads of wood. Having exhausted the view, he turned to the table at his elbow and picked up a medical journal, in which he read first an account of a marvelous surgical operation. Turning the leaves idly, he came upon an article by a Southern writer, upon the perennial race problem that has vexed the country for a century. The writer maintained that owing to a special tendency of the negro blood, however diluted, to revert to the African type, any future amalgamation of the white and black races, which foolish and wicked Northern negrophiles predicted as the ultimate result of the new conditions confronting the South, would therefore be an ethnological impossibility; for the smallest trace of negro blood would inevitably drag down the superior race to the level of the inferior, and reduce the fair Southland, already devastated by the hand of the invader, to the frightful level of Hayti, the awful example of negro incapacity. To forefend their beloved land, now doubly sanctified by the blood of her devoted sons who had fallen in the struggle to maintain her liberties and preserve her property, it behooved every true Southron to stand firm against the abhorrent tide of radicalism, to maintain the supremacy and purity of his all- pervading, all-conquering race, and to resist by every available means the threatened domination of an inferior and degraded people, who were set to rule hereditary freemen ere they had themselves scarce ceased to be slaves.
When Tryon had finished the article, which seemed to him a well-considered argument, albeit a trifle bombastic, he threw the book upon the table. Finding the armchair wonderfully comfortable, and feeling the fatigue of his journey, he yielded to a drowsy impulse, leaned his head on the cushioned back of the chair, and fell asleep. According to the habit of youth, he dreamed, and pursuant to his own individual habit, he dreamed of Rena. They were walking in the moonlight, along the quiet road in front of her brother’s house. The air was redolent with the perfume of flowers. His arm was around her waist. He had asked her if she loved him, and was awaiting her answer in tremulous but confident expectation. She opened her lips to speak. The sound that came from them seemed to be:–
“Is Dr. Green in? No? Ask him, when he comes back, please, to call at our house as soon as he can.”
Tryon was in that state of somnolence in which one may dream and yet be aware that one is dreaming,–the state where one, during a dream, dreams that one pinches one’s self to be sure that one is not dreaming. He was therefore aware of a ringing quality about the words he had just heard that did not comport with the shadowy converse of a dream–an incongruity in the remark, too, which marred the harmony of the vision. The shock was sufficient to disturb Tryon’s slumber, and he struggled slowly back to consciousness. When fully awake, he thought he heard a light footfall descending the stairs.
“Was there some one here?” he inquired of the attendant in the outer office, who was visible through the open door.
“Yas, suh,” replied the boy, “a young cullud ‘oman wuz in jes’ now, axin’ fer de doctuh.”
Tryon felt a momentary touch of annoyance that a negro woman should have intruded herself into his dream at its most interesting point. Nevertheless, the voice had been so real, his imagination had reproduced with such exactness the dulcet tones so dear to him, that he turned his head involuntarily and looked out of the window. He could just see the flutter of a woman’s skirt disappearing around the corner.
A moment later the doctor came bustling in,– a plump, rosy man of fifty or more, with a frank, open countenance and an air of genial good nature. Such a doctor, Tryon fancied, ought to enjoy a wide popularity. His mere presence would suggest life and hope and healthfulness.
“My dear boy,” exclaimed the doctor cordially, after Tryon had introduced himself, “I’m delighted to meet you–or any one of the old blood. Your mother and I were sweethearts, long ago, when we both wore pinafores, and went to see our grandfather at Christmas; and I met her more than once, and paid her more than one compliment, after she had grown to be a fine young woman. You’re like her! too, but not quite so handsome– you’ve more of what I suppose to be the Tryon favor, though I never met your father. So one of old Duncan McSwayne’s notes went so far as that? Well, well, I don’t know where you won’t find them. One of them turned up here the other day from New York.
“The man you want to see,” he added later in the conversation, “is old Judge Straight. He’s getting somewhat stiff in the joints, but he knows more law, and more about the McSwayne estate, than any other two lawyers in town. If anybody can collect your claim, Judge Straight can. I’ll send my boy Dave over to his office. Dave,” he called to his attendant, “run over to Judge Straight’s office and see if he’s there.
“There was a freshet here a few weeks ago,” he want on, when the colored man had departed, “and they had to open the flood-gates and let the water out of the mill pond, for if the dam had broken, as it did twenty years ago, it would have washed the pillars from under the judge’s office and let it down in the creek, and”–
“Jedge Straight ain’t in de office jes’ now, suh,” reported the doctor’s man Dave, from the head of the stairs.
“Did you ask when he’d be back?”
“No, suh, you didn’t tell me ter, suh.”
“Well, now, go back and inquire.
“The niggers,” he explained to Tryon, “are getting mighty trifling since they’ve been freed. Before the war, that boy would have been around there and back before you could say Jack Robinson; now, the lazy rascal takes his time just like a white man.”
Dave returned more promptly than from his first trip. “Jedge Straight’s dere now, suh,” he said. “He’s done come in.”
“I’ll take you right around and introduce you,” said the doctor, running on pleasantly, like a babbling brook. “I don’t know whether the judge ever met your mother or not, but he knows a gentleman when he sees one, and will be glad to meet you and look after your affair. See to the patients, Dave, and say I’ll be back shortly, and don’t forget any messages left for me. Look sharp, now! You know your failing!”
They found Judge Straight in his office. He was seated by the rear window, and had fallen into a gentle doze–the air of Patesville was conducive to slumber. A visitor from some bustling city might have rubbed his eyes, on any but a market-day, and imagined the whole town asleep –that the people were somnambulists and did not know it. The judge, an old hand, roused himself so skillfully, at the sound of approaching footsteps, that his visitors could not guess but that he had been wide awake. He shook hands with the doctor, and acknowledged the introduction to Tryon with a rare old-fashioned courtesy, which the young man thought a very charming survival of the manners of a past and happier age.
“No,” replied the judge, in answer to a question by Dr. Green, “I never met his mother; I was a generation ahead of her. I was at school with her father, however, fifty years ago–fifty years ago! No doubt that seems to you a long time, young gentleman?”
“It is a long time, sir,” replied Tryon. “I must live more than twice as long as I have in order to cover it.”
“A long time, and a troubled time,” sighed the judge. “I could wish that I might see this unhappy land at peace with itself before I die. Things are in a sad tangle; I can’t see the way out. But the worst enemy has been slain, in spite of us. We are well rid of slavery.”
“But the negro we still have with us,” remarked the doctor, “for here comes my man Dave. What is it, Dave?” he asked sharply, as the negro stuck his head in at the door.
“Doctuh Green,” he said, “I fuhgot ter tell you, suh, dat dat young ‘oman wuz at de office agin jes’ befo’ you come in, an’ said fer you to go right down an’ see her mammy ez soon ez you could.”
“Ah, yes, and you’ve just remembered it! I’m afraid you’re entirely too forgetful for a doctor’s office. You forgot about old Mrs. Latimer, the other day, and when I got there she had almost choked to death. Now get back to the office, and remember, the next time you forget anything, I’ll hire another boy; remember that! That boy’s head,” he remarked to his companions, after Dave had gone, “reminds me of nothing so much as a dried gourd, with a handful of cowpeas rattling around it, in lieu of gray matter. An old woman out in Redbank got a fishbone in her throat, the other day, and nearly choked to death before I got there. A white woman, sir, came very near losing her life because of a lazy, trifling negro!”
“I should think you would discharge him, sir,” suggested Tryon.
“What would be the use?” rejoined the doctor. “All negroes are alike, except that now and then there’s a pretty woman along the border-line. Take this patient of mine, for instance,–I’ll call on her after dinner, her case is not serious,–thirty years ago she would have made any man turn his head to look at her. You know who I mean, don’t you, judge?”
“Yes. I think so,” said the judge promptly. “I’ve transacted a little business for her now and then.”
“I don’t know whether you’ve seen the daughter or not–I’m sure you haven’t for the past year or so, for she’s been away. But she’s in town now, and, by Jove, the girl is really beautiful. And I’m a judge of beauty. Do you remember my wife thirty years ago, judge?”
“She was a very handsome woman, Ed,” replied the other judicially. “If I had been twenty years younger, I should have cut you out.”
“You mean you would have tried. But as I was saying, this girl is a beauty; I reckon we might guess where she got some of it, eh, Judge? Human nature is human nature, but it’s a d–d shame that a man should beget a child like that and leave it to live the life open for a negro. If she had been born white, the young fellows would be tumbling over one another to get her. Her mother would have to look after her pretty closely as things are, if she stayed here; but she disappeared mysteriously a year or two ago, and has been at the North, I’m told, passing for white. She’ll probably marry a Yankee; he won’t know any better, and it will serve him right–she’s only too white for them. She has a very striking figure, something on the Greek order, stately and slow-moving. She has the manners of a lady, too –a beautiful woman, if she is a nigger!”
“I quite agree with you, Ed,” remarked the judge dryly, “that the mother had better look closely after the daughter.”
“Ah, no, judge,” replied the other, with a flattered smile, “my admiration for beauty is purely abstract. Twenty-five years ago, when I was younger”–
“When you were young,” corrected the judge.
“When you and I were younger,” continued the doctor ingeniously,–“twenty-five years ago, I could not have answered for myself. But I would advise the girl to stay at the North, if she can. She’s certainly out of place around here.”
Tryon found the subject a little tiresome, and the doctor’s enthusiasm not at all contagious. He could not possibly have been interested in a colored girl, under any circumstances, and he was engaged to be married to the most beautiful white woman on earth. To mention a negro woman in the same room where he was thinking of Rena seemed little short of profanation. His friend the doctor was a jovial fellow, but it was surely doubtful taste to refer to his wife in such a conversation. He was very glad when the doctor dropped the subject and permitted him to go more into detail about the matter which formed his business in Patesville. He took out of his pocket the papers concerning the McSwayne claim and laid them on the judge’s desk.
“You’ll find everything there, sir,–the note, the contract, and some correspondence that will give you the hang of the thing. Will you be able to look over them to-day? I should like,” he added a little nervously, “to go back to-morrow.”
“What!” exclaimed Dr. Green vivaciously, “insult our town by staying only one day? It won’t be long enough to get acquainted with our young ladies. Patesville girls are famous for their beauty. But perhaps there’s a loadstone in South Carolina to draw you back? Ah, you change color! To my mind there’s nothing finer than the ingenuous blush of youth. But we’ll spare you if you’ll answer one question–is it serious?”
“I’m to be married in two weeks, sir,” answered Tryon. The statement sounded very pleasant, in spite of the slight embarrassment caused by the inquiry.
“Good boy!” rejoined the doctor, taking his arm familiarly–they were both standing now. “You ought to have married a Patesville girl, but you people down towards the eastern counties seldom come this way, and we are evidently too late to catch you.”
“I’ll look your papers over this morning,” said the judge, “and when I come from dinner will stop at the court house and examine the records and see whether there’s anything we can get hold of. If you’ll drop in around three or four o’clock, I may be able to give you an opinion.”
“Now, George,” exclaimed the doctor, “we’ll go back to the office for a spell, and then I’ll take you home with me to luncheon.”
Tryon hesitated.
“Oh, you must come! Mrs. Green would never forgive me if I didn’t bring you. Strangers are rare birds in our society, and when they come we make them welcome. Our enemies may overturn our institutions, and try to put the bottom rail on top, but they cannot destroy our Southern hospitality. There are so many carpet-baggers and other social vermin creeping into the South, with the Yankees trying to force the niggers on us, that it’s a genuine pleasure to get acquainted with another real Southern gentleman, whom one can invite into one’s house without fear of contamination, and before whom one can express his feelings freely and be sure of perfect sympathy.”
XIII
AN INJUDICIOUS PAYMENT
When Judge Straight’s visitors had departed, he took up the papers which had been laid loosely on the table as they were taken out of Tryon’s breast- pocket, and commenced their perusal. There was a note for five hundred dollars, many years overdue, but not yet outlawed by lapse of time; a contract covering the transaction out of which the note had grown; and several letters and copies of letters modifying the terms of the contract. The judge had glanced over most of the papers, and was getting well into the merits of the case, when he unfolded a letter which read as follows:–
MY DEAREST GEORGE,– I am going away
for about a week, to visit the bedside of an old friend, who is very ill, and may not live. Do not be alarmed about me, for I shall very likely be back by the time you are.
Yours lovingly,
ROWENA WARWICK.
The judge was unable to connect this letter with the transaction which formed the subject of his examination. Age had dimmed his perceptions somewhat, and it was not until he had finished the letter, and read it over again, and noted the signature at the bottom a second time, that he perceived that the writing was in a woman’s hand, that the ink was comparatively fresh, and that the letter was dated only a couple of days before. While he still held the sheet in his hand, it dawned upon him slowly that he held also one of the links in a chain of possible tragedy which he himself, he became uncomfortably aware, had had a hand in forging.
“It is the Walden woman’s daughter, as sure as fate! Her name is Rena. Her brother goes by the name of Warwick. She has come to visit her sick mother. My young client, Green’s relation, is her lover–is engaged to marry her–is in town, and is likely to meet her!”
The judge was so absorbed in the situation thus suggested that he laid the papers down and pondered for a moment the curious problem involved. He was quite aware that two races had not dwelt together, side by side, for nearly three hundred years, without mingling their blood in greater or less degree; he was old enough, and had seen curious things enough, to know that in this mingling the current had not always flowed in one direction. Certain old decisions with which he was familiar; old scandals that had crept along obscure channels; old facts that had come to the knowledge of an old practitioner, who held in the hollow of his hand the honor of more than one family, made him know that there was dark blood among the white people–not a great deal, and that very much diluted, and, so long as it was sedulously concealed or vigorously denied, or lost in the mists of tradition, or ascribed to a foreign or an aboriginal strain, having no perceptible effect upon the racial type.