Part 15 (2/2)

”I'm d.a.m.ned tired making the best of things, if you want to know what is the matter with me,” he had remarked crossly to his wife.

”The idea, Mr. Peachey! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” that sprightly lady had responded while she prepared herself for her victory over Cyrus.

”Well, I ain't,” honest Tom had retorted. ”I've gone on pretending for fifty years and I'm going to stop it. What good has it done, anyway? It hasn't put a roof on, has it?”

”I told you you oughtn't to go to sleep right on top of your dinner,”

she had replied soothingly. ”I declare you're perfectly purple. I never saw you so upset. Here, take this palm-leaf fan and go and see if you can't find a draught. You know it's downright sinful to talk that way after the Lord has been so good to you.”

But Philosophy, though she is una.s.sailable when she clings to her safeguard of the universal, meets her match whenever she descends to an open engagement with the particular.

”W-what's He done for me?” demanded not Tom, but the whiskey inside of him.

Driven against that bleak rock of fact upon which so many s.h.i.+ning generalizations have come to wreck, Mrs. Peachey had cast about helplessly for some floating spar of logic which might bear her to the firm ground of established optimism. ”I declare, Tom, I believe you are out of your head!” she exclaimed, adding immediately, ”You ought to be ashamed of yourself to be so ungrateful when the good Lord has kept you out of the poorhouse. If you weren't tipsy, I'd give you a hard shaking.

Now, you take that palm-leaf fan and go right straight downstairs.”

So Tom had gone, for his wife, who lacked the gift of argument, possessed the energy of character which renders such minor attributes unnecessary; and Oliver, pa.s.sing through the hall a couple of hours later, found him still helplessly seeking the draught towards which she had directed him.

”Any chance of a breeze springing up?” inquired the young man as they moved together to the porch.

The force which was driving him out of the house into the suffocating streets was in his voice when he spoke, but honest Tom did not hear it.

After the four war years in which he had been almost sublime, the old soldier had gradually ceased even to be human, and that vegetable calm which envelops persons who have fallen into the habit of sitting still, had endowed him at last with the perfect serenity of a cabbage. The only active principle which ever moved in him was the borrowed principle of alcohol--for when that artificial energy subsided, he sank back, as he was beginning to do now, into the spiritual inertia which sustains those who have outlived their capacity for the heroic.

”I ain't felt a breath,” he replied, peering southward where the stars were coming out in a cloudless sky. ”I don't reckon we'll get it till on about eleven.”

”Looks as if we were in for a scorching summer, doesn't it?”

”You never can tell. There's always a spell in June.” And he who had been a hero, sat down in his cane-bottomed chair and waved the palm-leaf fan feebly in front of him. He had had his day; he had fought his fight; he had helped to make the history of battles--and now what remained to him? The stainless memory of the four years when he was a hero; a smoldering ember still left from that flaming glory which was his soul!

In the street the dust lay thick and still, and the wilted foliage of the mulberry trees hung motionless from the great arching boughs. Only an aspen at the corner seemed alive and tremulous, while sensitive little s.h.i.+vers ran through the silvery leaves, which looked as if they were cut out of velvet. As Oliver left the house, the town awoke slowly from its lethargy, and the sound of laughter floated to him from the porches behind their screens of honeysuckle or roses. But even this laughter seemed to him to contain the burden of weariness which oppressed and disenchanted his spirit. The pall of melancholy spread from the winding yellow river at the foot of the hill to the procession of cedars which stood pitch-black against the few dim stars on the eastern horizon.

”What is the use?” he asked himself suddenly, uttering aloud that grim question which lies always beneath the vivid, richly cl.u.s.tering impressions in the imaginative mind. Of his struggle, his sacrifice--of his art even--what was the use? A bitter despondency--the crus.h.i.+ng despondency of youth which age does not feel and has forgotten--weighed upon him like a physical burden. And because he was young and not without a certain pride in the intensity of his suffering, he increased his misery by doggedly refusing to trace it back to its natural origin in an empty stomach.

But the laws that govern the variable mind of man are as inscrutable as the secret of light. Turning into a cross street, he came upon the tower of Saint James' Church, and he grew suddenly cheerful. The quickening of his pulses changed the aspect of the town as completely as if an invigorating shower had fallen upon it. The supreme, haunting interest of life revived.

He had meant merely to pa.s.s the rectory without stopping; but as he turned into the slanting street at the foot of the twelve stone steps, he saw a glimmer of white on the terrace, and the face of Virginia looked down at him over the palings of the gate. Immediately it seemed to him that he had known from the beginning that he should meet her. A sense of recognition so piercingly sweet that it stirred his pulses like wine was in his heart as he moved towards her. The whole universe appeared to him to have been planned and perfected for this instant. The languorous June evening, the fainting sweetness of flowers, the strange lemon-coloured afterglow, and her face, s.h.i.+ning there like a star in the twilight--these had waited for him, he felt, since the beginning of earth. That fatalistic reliance upon an outside Power, which a.s.sumed for him the radiant guise of first love, and for Susan the stark certainties of Presbyterianism, dominated him as completely as if he were the predestined vehicle of its expression. Ardent, yet pa.s.sive, Virginia leaned above him on the dim terrace. So still she seemed that her breath left her parted lips as softly as the perfume detached itself from the opening rose-leaves. She made no gesture, she said no word--but suddenly he became aware that her stillness was stronger to draw him than any speech. All her woman's mystery was brooding there about her in the June twilight; and in this strange strength of quietness Nature had placed, for once, an invincible weapon in the weaker hands. Her appeal had become a part of the terrible and beneficent powers of Life.

Crossing the street, he went up the steps to where she leaned on the gate.

”It has been so long,” he said, and the words seemed to him hideously empty. ”I have not seen you but three times since the party.”

She did not answer, and as he looked at her closer, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

”Virginia!” he cried out sharply, and the next instant, at her first movement away from him, his arms were around her and his lips seeking hers.

The world stopped suddenly while a starry eternity enveloped them. All youth was packed into that minute, all the troubled sweetness of desire, all the fugitive ecstasy of fulfilment.

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