Part 13 (1/2)
”He's suspected of having a love somewhere; some mysterious love whom he meets in the moonlit forest of Arden--when it's moonlight; and, maybe, when it isn't.”
”What have you to support this?” the old gentleman frowned. He, too, had sometimes wondered what took Brent away so frequently of late. These were uncomfortable thoughts to the Colonel, who allowed suspicions no place in his estimate of people.
”Oh, we just support it for the sake of gossip,” she laughed. ”Aunt Timmie dreamed it, I believe.”
”I thought you were serious,” he smiled, yet showing his distaste for the subject, ”nor will I permit any gossiping here!”
”But, Heavens, Daddy--”
”My dear,” he interrupted her, ”I trust you will never learn to gossip.
It is purely a trade, carried on by a breed of fawning Judases--of self-satisfied butchers, to deal in the choicest cuts of their unsuspecting friends' characters. The shelter of my roof must also afford protection to the good name of my guest.”
”'Good name' in the present instance is hardly a calculable statement,”
she murmured, for Ann could be biting, as well as sweet, when her feelings were touched.
”I quite agree with John,” Miss Liz arose to the occasion. ”It is strange,” she added, turning the lorgnette this time carefully at Jane, ”that he does not find a nice young girl to marry.”
”Such a cynosure of niceness, too,” Ann added her little dig, and Jane suggested:
”He might try advertising!”
”What's advertising?” Dale asked.
”Oh, Lord,” the Colonel exploded into his napkin.
When dinner was over, Jane crossed the porch unnoticed and walked out under the trees. The lorgnette which had said to her ”it is strange he does not find some nice girl to marry,” left a disquieting effect. Ann had only that day suggested the same idea, and Bob had laughed to her about it the previous evening. Even Aunt Timmie, the ebony font of wisdom, had but recently looked slyly at her, remarking: ”'Foh long we's gwine to have a weddin' in a private cyar!” (Aunt Timmie had never seen a private car, but it typified her idea of grandeur). She now strolled on beneath the trees, beneath giant clinging wild grape and trumpet vines, to a circle of low spreading cedars, wherein lay a carpet of odorous tanbark. It was a favorite spot with her.
Gliding carefully through the meeting branches which hid the path, she dropped into a yielding hammock and gazed for several minutes up at the network of black limbs, watching a star here and there which showed in a few small patches of visible sky. One arm stretched down at full length until her fingers touched the ground, and in this way she was keeping the hammock gently in motion.
She made a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place, and no judge of the human form could have pa.s.sed without a quick breath of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds that her thoughts were wandering.
Having acquired much of the Colonel's reliance in breeding, and in the fitness of appropriately mated things, she was wondering! Her father and mother had been illiterate mountaineers, but did there not exist a time prior to this when their ancestors were people of refinement? This, she felt, must be surely so, because of her early love of refined things--truly refined, to a degree far beyond the ken of mountain life.
Without substantiating records, she seemed to know that in early Colonial days her family of gentle blood had floated with the migratory tide across the Appalachian range. That was the origin of all mountaineers! What had held some there, instead of sending them on to the rich, unsurveyed plains? A birth enroute? That sometimes happened.
The man of the family died, or was killed, and the woman forced to build a shelter as best she might until the boys grew big enough to help?
That, too, had happened. Whatever the reason, some of the best Anglo-Saxon stock had been stranded in the c.u.mberlands, staying there literally and figuratively while the world advanced.
Perhaps her strain was purer than the Colonel's! Few mountaineers made alien marriages, for the very sufficient reason that they seldom roamed--even though this had meant stagnation in their own environment.
Still, the strain was pure! If one occasionally escaped these mountain fastnesses, why should he not--why should she not--with a free rein, dash out to regain lost prestige? Why should she not with one stroke blot out five or six generations of ignorance, and bring the stifled line of her honorable ancestry to the place it had been rightfully demanding for a century? But, in the face of uncertainties, would her blood commingled with the blood of established lineage now be fair?
Would she ever feel a rebuke in infant eyes? Would they not burn her soul if she wantonly summoned them to open on a world which might point back with a superior smile? Could she ever kiss the little lips which might some day praise the father and be silent of her?
Thus her sensitive thoughts, bringing a succession of confusions, wandered dreamily on, while the hammock gradually ceased its swinging and hung as a thing asleep.
CHAPTER XII
A LIGHT ABOVE THE MOUNTAIN