“And yet the daily will not succeed?”
“No. That’s too big a jump, unless my young man’s expressions on the tariff command a wide sale amongst curio-hunters.”
“Then he is quite a fool about political matters?”
“Far from it; he is highly ingenious. His editorials are often the subtlest cups of flattery I ever sipped, many of them showing assiduous study of old files to master the method and notions of his eagle-eyed predecessor. But the tariff seems to have got him. He is a very masculine person, except for this one feminine quality, for, if I may say it without ungallantry, there is a legend that no woman has ever understood the tariff. Young Fisbee must be an extremely travelled person, because the custom-house people have made an impression upon him which no few encounters with them could explain, and he conceives the tariff to be a law which discommodes a lady who has been purchasing gloves in Paris. He thinks smuggling the great evil of the present tariff system; it is such a temptation, so insidious a break-down of moral fibre. His views must edify Carlow.”
She gave a quick, stifled cry. “Oh! there isn’t a word of truth in what you say! Not a word! I did not think you could be so cruel!”
He bent forward, peering at her in astonishment.
“Cruel!”
“You know it is a hateful distortion — an exaggeration!” she exclaimed passionately. “No man living could have so little sense as you say he has. The tariff is perfectly plain to any child. When you were in Plattville you weren’t like this — I didn’t know you were unkind!”
“I — I don’t understand, please — —”
“Miss Hinsdale has been talking — raving — to me about you! You may not know it — though I suppose you do — but you made a conquest last night. It seems a little hard on the poor young man who is at work for you in Plattville, doing his best for you, plodding on through the hot days, and doing all he knows how, while you sit listening to music in the evenings with Clara Hinsdale, and make a mock of his work and his trying to please you — —”
“But I didn’t mention him to Miss Hinsdale. In fact, I didn’t mention anything to Miss Hinsdale. What have I done? The young man is making his living by his work — and my living, too, for that matter. It only seems to me that his tariff editorials are rather humorous.”
She laughed suddenly — ringingly. “Of course they are! How should I know? Immensely humorous! And the good creature knows nothing beyond smuggling and the custom-house and chalk marks? Why, even I — ha, ha, ha! — even I — should have known better than that. What a little fool your enterprising idiot must be! — with his work-baskets and currant jelly and his trying to make the ‘Herald’ a daily! — It will be a ludicrous failure, of course. No doubt he thought he was being quite wise, and was pleased over his tariff editorials — his funny, funny editorials — his best — to please you! Ha, ha, ha! How immensely funny!”
“Do you know him?” he asked abruptly.
“I have not the honor of the gentleman’s acquaintance. Ah,” she rejoined bitterly, “I see what you mean; it is the old accusation, is it? I am a woman, and I ‘sound the personal note.’ I could not resent a cruelty for the sake of a man I do not know. But let it go. My resentment is personal, after all, since it is against a man I do know — you!”
He leaned toward her because he could not help it. “I’d rather have resentment from you than nothing.”
“Then I will give you nothing,” she answered quickly.
“You flout me!” he cried. “That is better than resentment.”
“I hate you most, I think,” she said with a tremulousness he did not perceive, “when you say you do not care to go back to Plattville.”
“Did I say it?”
“It is in every word, and it is true; you don’t care to go back there.”
“Yes, it is true; I don’t.”
“You want to leave the place where you do good; to leave those people who love you, who were ready to die to avenge your hurt!” she exclaimed vehemently. “Oh, I say that is shameful!”
“Yes, I know,” he returned gravely. “I am ashamed.”
“Don’t say that!” she cried. “Don’t say you are ashamed of it. Do you suppose I do not understand the dreariness it has been for you? Don’t you know that I see it is a horror to you, that it brings back your struggle with those beasts in the dark, and revivifies all your suffering, merely to think of it?” Her turns and sudden contradictions left him tangled in a maze; he could not follow, but must sit helpless to keep pace with her, while the sheer happiness of being with her tingled through his veins. She rose and took a step aside, then spoke again: “Well, since you want to leave Carlow, you shall; since you do not wish to return, you need not. — Are you laughing at me?” She leaned toward him, and looked at him steadily, with her face close to his. He was not laughing; his eyes shone with a deep fire; in that nearness he hardly comprehended what she said. “Thank you for not laughing,” she whispered, and leaned back from him. “I suppose you think my promises are quite wild, and they are. I do not know what I was talking about, or what I meant, any better than you do. You may understand some day. It is all — I mean that it hurts one to hear you say you do not care for Carlow.” She turned away. “Come.”
“Where?”
“It is my turn to conclude the interview. You remember, the last time it was you who—” She broke off, shuddering, and covered her face with her hands. “Ah, that!” she exclaimed. “I did not think — I did not mean to speak of that miserable, miserable night. And I to be harsh with you for not caring to go back to Carlow!”
“Your harshness,” he laughed. “A waft of eider.”
“We must go,” she said. He did not move, but sat staring at her like a thirsty man drinking. With an impulsive and pretty gesture she reached out her hand to him. Her little, white glove trembled in the night before his eyes, and his heart leaped to meet its sudden sweet generosity; his thin fingers closed over it as he rose, and then that hand he had likened to a white butterfly lay warm and light and quiet in his own. And as they had so often stood together in their short day and their two nights of the moon, so now again they stood with a serenading silence between them. A plaintive waltz-refrain from the house ran through the blue woof of starlit air as a sad-colored thread through the tapestry of night; they heard the mellow croon of the ‘cello and the silver plaints of violins, the chiming harp, and the triangle bells, all woven into a minor strain of dance-music that beat gently upon their ears with such suggestion of the past, that, as by some witchcraft of hearing, they listened to music made for lovers dancing, and lovers listening, a hundred years ago.
“I care for only one thing in this world,” he said, tremulously. “Have I lost it? I didn’t mean to ask you, that last night, although you answered. Have I no chance? Is it still the same? Do I come too late?”
The butterfly fluttered in his hand and then away.
She drew back and looked at him a moment.
“There is one thing you must always understand,” she said gently, “and that is that a woman can be grateful. I give you all the gratitude there is in me, and I think I have a great deal; it is all yours. Will you always remember that?”
“Gratitude? What can there—”
“You do not understand now, but some day you will. I ask you to remember that my every act and thought which bore reference to you — and there have been many — came from the purest gratitude. Although you do not see it now, will you promise to believe it?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“For the rest—” She paused. “For the rest — I do not love you.”
He bowed his head and did not lift it.
“Do you understand?” she asked.
“I understand,” he answered, quietly.
She looked at him long, and then, suddenly, her hand to her heart, gave a little, pitying, tender cry and moved toward him. At this he raised his head and smiled sadly. “No; don’t you mind,” he said. “It’s al
l right. I was such a cad the other time I needed to be told; I was so entirely silly about it, I couldn’t face the others to tell them good-night, and I left you out there to go in to them alone. I didn’t realize, for my manners were all gone. I’d lived in a kind of stupor, I think, for a long time; then being with you was like a dream, and the sudden waking was too much for me. I’ve been ashamed often, since, in thinking of it — and I was well punished for not taking you in. I thought only of myself, and I behaved like a whining, unbalanced boy. But I had whined from the moment I met you, because I was sickly with egoism and loneliness and self-pity. I’m keeping you from the dancing. Won’t you let me take you back to the house?”
A commanding and querulous contralto voice was heard behind them, and a dim, majestic figure appeared under the Japanese lantern.
“Helen?”
The girl turned quickly. “Yes, mamma.”
“May I ask you to return to the club-house for supper with me? Your father has been very much worried about you. We have all been looking for you.”
“Mamma, this is Mr. Harkless.”
“How do you do?” The lady murmured this much so far under her breath that the words might have been mistaken for anything else — most plausibly, perhaps, for, “Who cares if it is?” — nor further did she acknowledge John’s profound inclination. Frigidity and complaint of ill-usage made a glamour in every fold of her expensive garments; she was large and troubled and severe. A second figure emerged from behind her and bowed with the suave dignity that belonged to Brainard Macauley. “Mr. Macauley has asked to sit at our table,” Mrs. Sherwood said to Helen. “May I beg you to come at once? Your father is holding places for us.”
“Certainly,” she answered. “I will follow you with Mr. Harkless.”
“I think Mr. Harkless will excuse you,” said the elder lady. “He has an engagement. Mr. Meredith has been looking everywhere for him to take Miss Hinsdale out to supper.”
“Good-night, Miss Sherwood,” said John in a cheerful voice. “I thank you for sitting out the dance with me.”
“Good-night,” she said, and gave him her hand. “I’m so sorry I shan’t see you again; I am only in Rouen for this evening, or I should ask you to come to see me. I am leaving to-morrow morning. Good-night. — Yes, mamma.”
The three figures went toward the bright lights of the club-house. She was leaning on Macauley’s arm and chatting gaily, smiling up at him brightly. John watched her till she was lost in the throng on the veranda. There, in the lights, where waiters were arranging little tables, every one was talking and moving about, noisily, good-humored and happy. There was a flourish of violins, and then the orchestra swung into a rampant march that pranced like uncurbed cavalry; it stirred the blood of old men with militant bugle calls and blast of horns; it might have heralded the chariot of a flamboyant war god rioting out of sunrise, plumed with youth. Some quite young men on the veranda made as if they were restive horses champing at the bit and heading a procession, and, from a group near by, loud laughter pealed.
John Harkless lifted to his face the hand that had held hers; there was the faint perfume of her glove. He kissed his own hand. Then he put that hand and the other to his forehead, and sank into her chair.
“Let me get back,” he said. “Let me get back to Plattville, where I belong.”
Tom Meredith came calling him. “Harkless? John Harkless?”
“Here I am, Tom.”
“Come along, boy. What on earth are you doing out here all alone? I thought you were with — I thought some people were with you. You’re bored to death, I know; but come along and be bored some more, because I promised to bring you in for supper. Then we’ll go home. They’ve saved a place for you by Miss Hinsdale.”
“Very well, lad,” answered Harkless, and put his hand on the other’s shoulder. “Thank you.”
The next day he could not leave his bed; his wounds were feverish and his weakness had returned. Meredith was shaken with remorse because he had let him wander around in the damp night air with no one to look after him.
CHAPTER XVII. HELEN’S TOAST
JUDGE BRISCOE WAS sitting out under the afternoon sky with his chair tilted back and his feet propped against the steps. His coat was off, and Minnie sat near at hand sewing a button on the garment for him, and she wore that dreamy glaze that comes over women’s eyes when they sew for other people.
From the interior of the house rose and fell the murmur of a number of voices engaged in a conversation, which, for a time, seemed to consist of dejected monosyllables; but presently the judge and Minnie heard Helen’s voice, clear, soft, and trembling a little with excitement. She talked only two or three minutes, but what she said stirred up a great commotion. All the voices burst forth at once in ejaculations — almost shouts; but presently they were again subdued and still, except for the single soft one, which held forth more quietly, but with a deeper agitation, than any of the others.
“You needn’t try to bamboozle me,” said the judge in a covert tone to his daughter, and with a glance at the parlor window, whence now issued the rumble of Warren Smith’s basso. “I tell you that girl would follow John Harkless to Jericho.”
Minnie shook her head mysteriously, and bit a thread with a vague frown.
“Well, why not?” asked the judge crossly.
“Why wouldn’t she have him, then?”
“Well, who knows he’s asked her yet?”
Minnie screamed derisively at the density of man, “What made him run off that way, the night he was hurt? Why didn’t he come back in the house with her?”
“Pshaw!”
“Don’t you suppose a woman understands?”
“Meaning that you know more about it than I do, I presume,” grunted the old gentleman.
“Yes, father,” she replied, smiling benignantly upon him.
“Did she tell you?” he asked abruptly.
“No, no. I guess the truth is that women don’t know more than men so much as they see more; they understand more without having to read about it.”
“That’s the way of it, is it?” he laughed. “Well, it don’t make any difference, she’ll have him some time.”
“No, father; it’s only gratitude.”
“Gratitude!” The judge snorted scornfully. “Girls don’t do as much as she’s done for him out of gratitude. Look what she’s doing; not only running the ‘Herald’ for him, but making it a daily, and a good daily at that. First time I saw her I knew right away she was the smartest girl I ever laid eyes on; — I expect she must have got it from her mother. Gratitude! Pooh! Look how she’s studied his interests, and watched like a cat for chances for him in everything. Didn’t she get him into Eph Watts’s company? She talked to Watts and the other fellows, day after day, and drove around their leased land with ’em, and studied it up, and got on the inside, and made him buy. Now, if they strike it — and she’s sure they will, and I’m sure she knows when to have faith in a thing — why, they’ll sell out to the Standard, and they can all quit work for the rest of their lives if they want to; and Harkless gets as much as any without lifting a finger, all because he had a little money — mighty little, too — laid up in bank and a girl that saw where to put it. She did that for him, didn’t she?”
“Don’t you see what fun it’s been for her?” returned Minnie. “She’s been having the best time she ever had; I never knew any one half so happy.”
“Yes; she went up and saw him at that party, and she knows he’s still thinking about her. I shouldn’t be surprised if he asked her then, and that’s what makes her so gay.”
“Well, she couldn’t have said ‘yes,’ because he went back to his bed the next day, and he’s been there most of the time since.”
“Pshaw! He wasn’t over his injuries, and he was weak and got malaria.”
“Well, she couldn’t be so happy while he’s sick, if she cared very much about him.”
“He’s not very sick. She’s happy because she’s workin
g for him, and she knows his illness isn’t serious. He’ll be a well man when she says the word. He’s love-sick, that’s what he is; I never saw a man so taken down with it in my life.”
“Then it isn’t malaria?” Minnie said, with a smile of some superiority.
“You’re just like your poor mother,” the old gentleman answered, growing rather red. “She never could learn to argue. What I say is that Helen cares about him, whether she says she does or not, whether she acts like it or not — or whether she thinks she does or not,” he added irascibly. “Do you know what she’s doing for him to-day?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, when they were talking together at that party, he said something that made her think he was anxious to get away from Plattville — you’re not to repeat this, child; she told me, relying on my discretion.”
“Well?”
“Do you know why she’s got these men to come here to-day to meet her — Warren Smith and Landis and Homer, and Boswell and young Keating of Amo, and Tom Martin and those two fellows from Gaines County?”
“Something about politics, isn’t it?”
“‘Something about politics!’” he echoed. “I should say it is! Wait till it’s done, and this evening I’ll tell you — if you can keep a secret.”
Minnie set her work-basket on the steps. “Oh, I guess I can keep a secret,” she said. “But it won’t make any difference.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 25