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The Two Vanrevels

by Booth Tarkington · English · Gutenberg #3428 · 368,185 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Two Vanrevels

Author: Booth Tarkington


        
Release date: September 1, 2002 [eBook #3428]
                Most recently updated: March 3, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3428

Credits: Produced by Richard W. Harper, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWO VANREVELS ***




Produced by Richard W. Harper





THE TWO VANREVELS


By Booth Tarkington



     Table of Contents

     A Cat Can Do More than Look at A King
     Surviving Evils of the Reign of Terror
     The Rogue's Gallery of a Father Should be Exhibited to
         a Daughter with Particular Care
     “But Spare Your Country's Flag”
      Nero not the Last Violinist of his Kind
     The Ever Unpractical Feminine
     The Comedian
     A Tale of a Political Difference
     The Rule of the Regent
     Echoes of a Serenade
     A Voice in a Garden
     The Room in the Cupola
     The Tocsin
     The Firm of Gray and Vanrevel
     When June Came
     “Those Endearing Young Charms”
      The Price of Silence
     The Uniform
     The Flag Goes Marching By
     “Good-by”




CHAPTER I. A Cat Can Do More than Look at a King

It was long ago in the days when men sighed when they fell in love;
when people danced by candle and lamp, and did dance, too, instead of
solemnly gliding about; in that mellow time so long ago, when the young
were romantic and summer was roses and wine, old Carewe brought his
lovely daughter home from the convent to wreck the hearts of the youth
of Rouen.

That was not a far journey; only an afternoon's drive through the woods
and by the river, in an April, long ago; Miss Betty's harp carefully
strapped behind the great lumbering carriage, her guitar on the front
seat, half-buried under a mound of bouquets and oddly shaped little
bundles, farewell gifts of her comrades and the good Sisters. In her
left hand she clutched a small lace handkerchief, with which she now
and then touched her eyes, brimmed with the parting from Sister Cecilia,
Sister Mary Bazilede, the old stone steps and all the girls: but for
every time that she lifted the dainty kerchief to brush away the edge of
a tear, she took a deep breath of the Western woodland air and smiled at
least twice; for the years of strict inclosure within St. Mary's
walls and still gardens were finished and done with, and at last the
many-colored world flashed and danced in a mystery before her. This
mystery was brilliant to the convent-girl because it contained men; she
was eager to behold it.

They rumbled into town after sunset, in the fair twilight, the dogs
barking before them, and everyone would have been surprised to know that
Tom Vanrevel, instead of Mr. Crailey Gray, was the first to see her.
By the merest accident, Tom was strolling near the Carewe place at the
time; and when the carriage swung into the gates, with rattle and clink
and clouds of dust at the finish, it was not too soon lost behind the
shrubbery and trees for Tom to catch something more than a glimpse of a
gray skirt behind a mound of flowers, and of a charming face with
parted lips and dark eyes beneath the scuttle of an enormous bonnet.
It happened--perhaps it is more accurate to say that Tom thought it
happened--that she was just clearing away her veil when he turned to
look. She blushed suddenly, so much was not to be mistaken; and the eyes
that met his were remarkable for other reasons than the sheer loveliness
of them, in that, even in the one flash of them he caught, they meant
so many things at one time. They were sparkling, yet mournful; and they
were wistful, although undeniably lively with the gayest comprehension
of the recipient of their glance, seeming to say, “Oh, it's you, young
man, is it!” And they were shy and mysterious with youth, full of that
wonder at the world which has the appearance, sometimes, of wisdom
gathered in the unknown out of which we came. But, above all, these eyes
were fully conscious of Tom Vanrevel.

Without realizing what he did, Mr. Vanrevel stopped short. He had been
swinging a walkingstick, which, describing a brief arc, remained poised
half-way in its descent. There was only that one glance between them;
and the carriage disappeared, leaving a scent of spring flowers in the
air.

The young man was left standing on the wooden pavement in the midst of a
great loneliness, yet enveloped in the afterglow, his soul roseate,
his being quavering, his expression, like his cane, instantaneously
arrested. With such promptitude and finish was he disposed of, that, had
Miss Carewe been aware of his name and the condition wrought in him
by the single stroke, she could have sought only the terse Richard of
England for a like executive ability, “Off with his head! So much for
Vanrevel!”

She had lifted a slender hand to the fluttering veil, a hand in a white
glove with a small lace gauntlet at the wrist. This gesture was the
final divinity of the radiant vision which remained with the dazed young
man as he went down the street; and it may have been three-quarters of
an hour later when the background of the picture became vivid to him: a
carefully dressed gentleman with heavy brows and a handsome high nose,
who sat stiffly upright beside the girl, his very bright eyes quite as
conscious of the stricken pedestrian as were hers, vastly different,
however, in this: that they glittered, nay, almost bristled, with
hostility; while every polished button of his blue coat seemed to
reflect their malignancy, and to dart little echoing shafts of venom at
Mr. Vanrevel.

Tom was dismayed by the acuteness of his perception that a man who does
not speak to you has no right to have a daughter like the lady in the
carriage; and, the moment of this realization occurring as he sat making
a poor pretence to eat his evening meal at the “Rouen House,” he dropped
his fork rattling upon his plate and leaned back, staring at nothing, a
proceeding of which his table-mate, Mr. William Cummings, the editor of
the Rouen Journal, was too busy over his river bass to take note.

“Have you heard what's new in town?” asked Cummings presently, looking
up.

“No,” said Tom truthfully, for he had seen what was new, but not heard
it.

“Old Carewe's brought his daughter home. Fanchon Bareaud was with her
at St. Mary's until last year and Fanchon says she's not only a great
beauty but a great dear.”

“Ah!” rejoined the other with masterly indifference. “Dare say--dare
say.”

“No wonder you're not interested,” said Cummings cheerfully, returning
to the discussion of his bass. “The old villain will take precious good
care you don't come near her.”

Mr. Vanrevel already possessed a profound conviction to the same effect.
Robert Meilhac Carewe was known not only as the wealthiest citizen of
Rouen, but also as its heartiest and most steadfast hater: and, although
there were only five or six thousand inhabitants, neither was a small
distinction. For Rouen was ranked, in those easy days, as a wealthy
town; even as it was called an old town; proud of its age and its
riches, and bitter in its politics, of course. The French had built a
fort there, soon after LaSalle's last voyage, and, as Crailey Gray
said, had settled the place, and had then been settled themselves by the
pioneer militia. After the Revolution, Carolinians and Virginians had
come, by way of Tennessee and Kentucky; while the adventurous countrymen
from Connecticut, travelling thither to sell, remained to buy--and then
sell--when the country was in its teens. In course of time the little
trading-post of the Northwest Territory had grown to be the leading
centre of elegance and culture in the Ohio Valley--at least they said
so in Rouen; only a few people in the country, such as Mr. Irving of
Tarrytown, for instance, questioning whether a centre could lead.

The pivotal figure, though perhaps not the heart, of this centre, was
unquestionably Mr. Carewe, and about him the neat and tight aristocracy
of the place revolved; the old French remnant, having liberally
intermarried, forming the nucleus, together with descendants of the
Cavaliers (and those who said they were) and the industrious Yankees, by
virtue (if not by the virtues) of all whom, the town grew and prospered.
Robert Carewe was Rouen's magnate, commercially and socially, and, until
an upstart young lawyer named Vanrevel struck into his power with a
broad-axe, politically. The wharves were Carewe's; the warehouses that
stood by the river, and the line of packets which plied upon it,
were his; half the town was his, and in Rouen this meant that he was
possessed of the Middle Justice, the High and the Low. His mother was a
Frenchwoman, and, in those days, when to go abroad was a ponderous and
venturesome undertaking, the fact that he had spent most of his youth
in the French capital wrought a certain glamour about him; for to the
American, Paris was Europe, and it lay shimmering on the far horizon of
every imagination, a golden city. Scarce a drawing-room in Rouen lacked
its fearsome engraving entitled “Grand Ball at the Tuileries,” nor
was Godey's Magazine ever more popular than when it contained articles
elaborate of similar scenes of festal light, where brilliant uniforms
mingled with shining jewels, fair locks, and the white shoulders of
magnificently dressed duchesses, countesses, and ladies. Credit for this
description should be given entirely to the above-mentioned periodical.
Furthermore, a sojourn in Paris was held to confer a “certain nameless
and indescribable polish” upon the manners of the visitor; also, there
was something called “an air of foreign travel.”

They talked a great deal about polish in those days; and some examples
still extant do not deny their justification; but in the case of Mr.
Carewe, there existed a citizen of Rouen, one already quoted, who had
the temerity to declare the polish to be in truth quite nameless and
indescribable for the reason that one cannot paint a vacuum. However,
subscription to this opinion should not be over-hasty, since Mr. Crailey
Gray had been notoriously a rival of Carewe's with every pretty woman
in town, both having the same eye in such matters, and also because the
slandered gentleman could assume a manner when he chose to, whether
or not he possessed it. At his own table he exhaled a hospitable
graciousness which, from a man of known evil temper, carried the
winsomeness of surprise. When he wooed, it was with an air of stately
devotion, combined with that knowingness which sometimes offsets for a
widower the tendency a girl has to giggle at him; and the combination
had been, once or twice, too much for even the alluring Crailey.

Mr. Carewe lived in an old-fashioned house on the broad, quiet, shady
street which bore his name. There was a wide lawn in front, shadowy
under elm and locust trees, and bounded by thick shrubberies. A long
garden, fair with roses and hollyhocks, lay outside the library windows,
an old-time garden, with fine gravel paths and green arbors; drowsed
over in summer-time by the bees, while overhead the locust rasped his
rusty cadences the livelong day; and a faraway sounding love-note from
the high branches brought to mind the line, like an old refrain:

“The voice of the turtle was heard in the land.”

Between the garden and the carriage gates there was a fountain where
a bronze boy with the dropsy (but not minding it) lived in a perpetual
bath from a green goblet held over his head. Nearby, a stone sun-dial
gleamed against a clump of lilac bushes; and it was upon this spot that
the white kitten introduced Thomas Vanrevel to Miss Carewe.

Upon the morning after her arrival, having finished her piano-forte
practice, touched her harp twice, and arpeggioed the Spanish Fandango
on her guitar, Miss Betty read two paragraphs of “Gilbert” (for she was
profoundly determined to pursue her tasks with diligence), but the open
windows disclosing a world all sunshine and green leaves, she threw the
book aside with a good conscience, and danced out to the garden. There,
coming upon a fuzzy, white ball rolling into itself spirally on a lazy
pathway, she pounced at it, whereupon the thing uncurled with lightning
swiftness, and fled, more like a streak than a kitten, down the drive,
through the open gates and into the street, Miss Betty in full cry.

Across the way there chanced to be strolling a young lady in blue,
accompanied by a gentleman whose leisurely gait gave no indication
of the maneuvering he had done to hasten their walk into its present
direction. He was apparently thirty or thirty-one, tall, very straight,
dark, smooth-shaven, his eyes keen, deep-set, and thoughtful, and his
high white hat, white satin cravat, and careful collar, were evidence
of an elaboration of toilet somewhat unusual in Rouen for the morning;
also, he was carrying a pair of white gloves in his hand and dangled a
slender ebony cane from his wrist. The flying kitten headed toward the
couple, when, with a celerity only to be accounted for on the theory
that his eye had been fixed on the Carewe gateway for some time
previous to this sudden apparition, the gentleman leaped in front of the
fugitive.

The kitten attempted a dodge to pass; the gentleman was there before it.
The kitten feinted; the gentleman was altogether too much on the spot.
Immediately--and just as Miss Carewe, flushed and glowing, ran into the
street--the small animal doubled, evaded Miss Betty's frantic clutch,
re-entered the gateway, and attempted a disappearance into the lilac
bushes, instead of going round them, only to find itself, for a fatal
two seconds, in difficulties with the close-set thicket of stems.

In regard to the extraordinary agility of which the pursuing gentleman
as capable, it is enough to say that he caught the cat. He emerged
from the lilacs holding it in one hand, his gloves and white hat in the
other, and presented himself before Miss Betty with a breathlessness not
entirely attributable to his exertions.

For a moment, as she came running toward him and he met her flashing
look, bright with laughter and recognition and haste, he stammered. A
thrill nothing less than delirious sent the blood up behind his brown
cheeks, for he saw that she, too, knew that this was the second time
their eyes had met. Naturally, at that time he could not know how many
other gentlemen were to feel that same thrill (in their cases, also,
delirious, no less) with the same, accompanying, mysterious feeling,
which came just before Miss Betty's lashes fell, that one had found, at
last, a precious thing, lost long since in childhood, or left, perhaps,
upon some other planet in a life ten thousand years ago.

He could not speak at once, but when he could, “Permit me, madam,” he
said solemnly, offering the captive, “to restore your kitten.”

An agitated kitten should not be detained by clasping its waist, and
already the conqueror was paying for his victory. There ensued a final,
outrageous squirm of despair; two frantic claws, extended, drew one long
red mark across the stranger's wrist and another down the back of his
hand to the knuckles. They were good, hearty scratches, and the blood
followed the artist's lines rapidly; but of this the young man took no
note, for he knew that he was about to hear Miss Carewe's voice for the
first time.

“They say the best way to hold them,” he observed, “is by the scruff of
the neck.”

Beholding his wounds, suffered in her cause, she gave a pitying cry that
made his heart leap with the richness and sweetness of it. Catching the
kitten from him, she dropped it to the ground in such wise as to prove
nature's foresight most kind in cushioning the feet of cats.

“Ah! I didn't want it that much!”

“A cat in the hand is worth two nightingales in the bush,” he said
boldly, and laughed. “I would shed more blood than that!”

Miss Betty blushed like a southern dawn, and started back from him. From
the convent but yesterday--and she had taken a man's hand in both of
hers!

It was to this tableau that the lady in blue entered, following the hunt
through the gates, where she stopped with a discomposed countenance. At
once, however, she advanced, and with a cry of greeting, enveloped Miss
Betty in a brief embrace, to the relief of the latter's confusion. It
was Fanchon Bareaud, now two years emancipated from St. Mary's, and far
gone in taffeta. With her lustreful light hair, absent blue eyes, and
her gentle voice, as small and pretty as her face and figure, it was not
too difficult to justify Crailey Gray's characterization of her as one
of those winsome baggages who had made an air of feminine helplessness
the fashion of the day.

It is a wicked thing that some women should kiss when a man is by; in
the present instance the gentleman became somewhat faint.

“I'm so glad--glad!” exclaimed Betty. “You were just coming to see me,
weren't you? My father is in the library. Let me--”

Miss Bareaud drew back. “No, no!” she interrupted hastily and with
evident perturbation. “I--we must be on our way immediately.” She threw
a glance at the gentleman, which let him know that she now comprehended
his gloves, and why their stroll had trended toward Carewe Street. “Come
at once!” she commanded him quickly, in an undertone.

“But now that you're here,” said Miss Betty, wondering very much why he
was not presented to her, “won't you wait and let me gather a nosegay
for you? Our pansies and violets--”

“I could help,” the gentleman suggested, with the look of a lame dog at
Miss Bareaud. “I have been considered useful about a garden.”

“Fool!” Betty did not hear the word that came from Miss Bareaud's closed
teeth, though she was mightily surprised at the visible agitation of
her schoolmate, for the latter's face was pale and excited. And Miss
Carewe's amazement was complete when Fanchon, without more words,
cavalierly seized the gentleman's arm and moved toward the street with
him as rapidly as his perceptible reluctance to leave permitted. But at
the gate Miss Bareaud turned and called back over her shoulder, as if
remembering the necessity of offering an excuse for so remarkable a
proceeding: “I shall come again very soon. Just now we are upon an
errand of great importance. Good-day!”

Miss Betty waved her hand, staring after them, her eyes large with
wonder. She compressed her lips tightly: “Errand!” This was the friend
of childhood's happy hour, and they had not met in two years!

“Errand!” She ran to the hedge, along the top of which a high white hat
was now seen perambulating; she pressed down a loose branch, and called
in a tender voice to the stranger whom Fanchon had chosen should remain
nameless:

“Be sure to put some salve on your hand!”

He made a bow which just missed being too low, but did miss it.

“It is there--already,” he said; and, losing his courage after the bow,
made his speech with so palpable a gasp before the last word that the
dullest person in the world could have seen that he meant it.

Miss Betty disappeared.

There was a rigidity of expression about the gentle mouth of Fanchon
Bareaud, which her companion did not enjoy, as they went on their way,
each preserving an uneasy silence, until at her own door, she turned
sharply upon him. “Tom Vanrevel, I thought you were the steadiest--and
now you've proved yourself the craziest--soul in Rouen!” she burst out.
“And I couldn't say worse!”

“Why didn't you present me to her?” asked Vanrevel.

“Because I thought a man of your gallantry might prefer not to face a
shotgun in the presence of ladies!”

“Pooh!”

“Pooh!” mimicked Miss Bareaud. “You can 'pooh' as much as you like, but
if he had seen us from the window--” She covered her face with her
hands for a moment, then dropped them and smiled upon him. “I understand
perfectly to what I owe the pleasure of a stroll with you this morning,
and your casual insistence on the shadiness of Carewe Street!” He
laughed nervously, but her smile vanished, and she continued, “Keep
away, Tom. She is beautiful, and at St. Mary's I always thought she
had spirit and wit, too. I only hope Crailey won't see her before the
wedding! But it isn't safe for you. Go along, now, and ask Crailey
please to come at three this afternoon.”

This message from Mr. Gray's betrothed was not all the ill-starred Tom
conveyed to his friend. Mr. Vanrevel was ordinarily esteemed a person of
great reserve and discretion; nevertheless there was one man to whom he
told everything, and from whom he had no secrets. He spent the noon hour
in feeble attempts to describe to Crailey Gray the outward appearance
of Miss Elizabeth Carewe; how she ran like a young Diana; what one
felt upon hearing her voice; and he presented in himself an example
exhibiting something of the cost of looking in her eyes. His
conversation was more or less incoherent, but the effect of it was
complete.



Chapter II. Surviving Evils of the Reign of Terror

Does there exist an incredulous, or jealous, denizen of another portion
of our country who, knowing that the room in the wooden cupola over
Mr. Carewe's library was commonly alluded to by Rouen as the “Tower
Chamber,” will prove himself so sectionally prejudiced as to deny
that the town was a veritable hotbed of literary interest, or that Sir
'Walter Scott was ill-appreciated there? Some of the men looked sly, and
others grinned, at mention of this apartment; but the romantic were
not lacking who spoke of it in whispers: how the lights sometimes shone
there all night long, and the gentlemen drove away, whitefaced, in the
dawn. The cupola, rising above the library, overlooked the garden; and
the house, save for that, was of a single story, with a low veranda
running the length of its front. The windows of the library and of a
row of bedrooms---one of which was Miss Betty's--lined the veranda,
“steamboat fashion;” the inner doors of these rooms all opening upon a
long hail which bisected the house, the stairway leading to the room in
the cupola rose the library itself, while the bisecting hail afforded be
only access to the library; hence, the gossips, 'eli acquainted with the
geography of the place, conferred seriously together upon what effect
Miss Betty's homecoming would have in this connection:

Dr anyone going to the stairway must needs pass her door; and, what
was more to the point, a party C gentlemen descending late from the
mysterious garret might be not so quiet as they intended, and the young
lady sufficiently disturbed to inquire of her father what entertainment
he provided that should keep his guests until four in the morning.

But at present it was with the opposite end of the house that the town
was occupied, for there, workmen were hammering and sawing and painting
day long, finishing the addition Mr. Carewe was building for his
daughter's debut. This hammering disturbed Miss Betty, who had become
almost as busy with the French Revolution as with her mantua-maker.
For she had found in her father's library many books not for
convent-shelves; and she had become a Girondin. She found memoirs,
histories, and tales of that delectable period, then not so dim with
time but that the figures of it were more than tragic shadows; and for a
week there was no meal in that house to which she sat down earlier
than half an hour Jate. She had a rightful property-interest in the
Revolution, her own great-uncle having been one of those who “suffered;”
 not, however, under the guillotine; for to Georges Meilhac appertained
the rare distinction of death by accident on the day when the
business-like young Bonaparte played upon the mob with his cannon.

There were some yellow letters of this great uncle's in a box which had
belonged to her grandmother, a rich discovery for Miss Betty, who read
and re-read them with eager and excited eyes, living more in Paris with
Georges and his friends than in Rouen with her father. Indeed, she
had little else to do. Mr. Carewe was no comrade for her, by far the
reverse. She seldom saw him, except at the table, when he sat with
averted eyes, and talked to her very little; and, while making elaborate
preparation for her introduction to his friends (such was his phrase)
he treated her with a perfunctory civility which made her wonder if her
advent was altogether welcome to him; bat when she noticed that his hair
looked darker than usual about every fourth day, she began to understand
Why he appeared ungrateful to her for growing up. He went out a great
deal, though no visitors came to the house; for it was known that Mr.
Carewe desired to present his daughter to no one until he presented her
to all. Fanchon Bareaud, indeed, made one hurried and embarrassed call,
evading Miss Betty's reference to the chevalier of the kitten with
a dexterity too nimble to be thought unintentional. Miss Carewe was
forbidden to return her friend's visit until after her debut; and Mr.
Carewe explained that there was always some worthless Young men hanging
about the Bareaud's, where (he did not add) they interfered with a
worthy oh one who desired to honor Fanchon's older sister, Virginia,
with his attentions.

This was no great hardship for Miss Betty, as, since plunging into the
Revolution with her great-uncle, she had lost some curiosity concerning
the men of to-day, doubting that they would show forth as heroic,
as debonnair, gay and tragic as he. He was the legendary hero of her
childhood; she remembered her mother's stories of him perhaps more
clearly than she remembered her mother; and one of the older Sisters had
known him in Paris and had talked of him at length, giving the flavor of
his dandyism and his beauty at first hand to his young relative. He had
been one of those hardy young men wearing unbelievable garments, who
began to appear in the garden of the Tuileries with knives in their
sleeves and cudgels in their hands, about April, 1794, and whose dash
and recklessness in many matters were the first intimations that the
Citizen Tallien was about to cause the Citizen Robespierre to shoot
himself through the jaw.

In the library hung a small, full-length drawing of Georges, done in
color by Miss Betty's grandmother; and this she carried to her own room
an& studied long and ardently, until sometimes the man himself seemed
to stand before her, in spite of the fact that Mile. Meithac had not
a distinguished talent and M. Meilhac's features might have been
anybody's. It was to be seen, however, that he was smiling.

Miss Betty had an impression that her grandmother's art of portraiture
would have been more-successful with the profile than the “full-face.”
 Nevertheless, nothing could be more clearly indicated than that the hair
of M. Melihac was very yellow, and his short, huge-lapelled waistcoat
white, striped with scarlet. An enormous cravat covered his chin; the
heavy collar of his yellow coat rose behind his ears, while its tails
fell to his ankles; and the tight trousers of white and yellow stripes
were tied with white ribbons about the middle of the calf; he wore white
stockings and gold-buckled yellow shoes, and on the back of his head
a jauntily cocked black hat. Miss Betty innocently wondered why his
letters did not speak of Petion, of Vergniaud, or of Dumoriez, since
in the historical novels which she read, the hero's lot was inevitably
linked with that of everyone of importance in his generation; yet
Georges appeared to have been unacquainted with these personages,
Robespierre being the only name of consequence mentioned in his letters;
and then it appeared in much the same fashion practised by her father
in alluding to the Governor of the State, who had the misfortune to be
unpopular with Mr. Carewe. But this did not dim her great-uncle's lustre
in Miss Betty's eyes, nor lessen for her the pathetic romance of the
smile he wore.

Beholding this smile, one remembered the end to which his light
footsteps bad led him; and it was unavoidable to picture him left lying
in the empty street behind the heels of the flying crowd, carefully
forming that same smile on his lips, and taking much pride in passing
with some small, cynical speech, murmured to himself, concerning the
futility of a gentleman's getting shot by his friends for merely being
present to applaud them. So, fancying him thus, with his yellow hair,
his scarlet-striped waistcoat, and his tragedy, the young girl felt a
share of family greatness, or, at least, of picturesqueness, descend
to her. And she smiled sadly back upon the smile in the picture, and
dreamed about its original night after night.

Whether or no another figure, that of a dark young man in a white hat,
with a white kitten etching his wrist in red, found any place in her
dreams at this period,--it is impossible to determine. She did not see
him again. It is quite another thing, hazardous to venture, to state
that he did not see her. At all events, it is certain that many people
who bad never beheld her were talking of her; that Rouen was full of
contention concerning her beauty and her gift of music, for a song can
be heard through an open window. And how did it happen that Crailey Gray
knew that it was Miss Carewe's habit to stroll in her garden for half
an hour or so, each evening before retiring, and that she went to mass
every morning soon after sunrise? Crailey Gray never rose at, or near,
sunrise in his life, though he sometimes beheld it, from another point
of view, as the end of the evening. It appears that someone must have
told him.

One night when the moon lay white on the trees and housetops, Miss Betty
paused in her evening promenade and seated herself upon a bench on the
borders of the garden, “touched,” as the books of the time would have
put it, “by the sweet tranquillity of the scene,” and wrought upon by
the tender incentive to sighs and melancholy which youth in loneliness
finds in a loveliness of the earth. The breeze bore the smells of the
old-fashioned garden, of violets and cherry blossoms, and a sound of
distant violins came on the air playing the new song from the new opera.

     “But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
     That you loved me just the same--”

they sang; and with the lilt of them and the keen beauty of the night,
the inherited pain of the ages rose from the depths of the young girl's
heart, so that she thought it must break; for what reason she could not
have told, since she was without care or sorrow that she knew, except
the French Revolution, yet tears shone upon the long lashes. She shook
them off and looked up with a sudden odd consciousness. The next second
she sprang to her feet with a gasp and a choked outcry, her bands
pressed to her breast.

Ten paces in front of her, a gap in the shrubbery where tall trees rose
left a small radiant area of illumination like that of a lime-light in
a theatre, its brilliancy intensified by the dark foliage behind. It
was open to view only from the bench by which she stood, and appeared,
indeed, like the stage of a little theatre a stage occupied by a bizarre
figure. For, in the centre of this shining patch, with the light strong
on his face, was standing a fair-haired young man, dressed in a yellow
coat, a scarlet and white striped waistcoat, wearing a jauntily cocked
black hat on his bead. And even to the last detail, the ribbon laces
above the ankle and the gold-buckled shoes, he was the sketch of Georges
Meilhac sprung into life.

About this slender figure there hung a wan sweetness like a fine
mist, almost an ethereality in that light; yet in the pale face lurked
something reckless, something of the actor, too; and though his smile
was gentle and wistful, there was a twinkle behind it, not seen at
first, something amused and impish; a small surprise underneath, like a
flea in a rose-jar.

Fixed to the spot by this apparition, Miss Betty stood wildly staring,
her straining eyelids showing the white above and below the large brown
iris. Her breath came faster and deeper, until, between her parted lips
it became vocal in a quick sound like a sob. At that he spoke.

“Forgive me!” The voice was low, vibrant, and so exceedingly musical
that he might have been accused of coolly selecting his best tone; and
it became only sweeter when, even more softly, in a semi-whisper of
almost crucial pleading, he said, “Ah--don't go away!”

In truth, she could not go; she had been too vitally stirred; she began
to tremble excessively, and sank back upon the bench, motioning him away
with vague gestures of her shaking hands.

This was more than the Incroyable had counted upon, and far from his
desires. He started forward with an exclamation.

“Don't come near me!” she gasped. “Who are you? Go away!”

“Give me one second to explain,” he began; but with the instant
reassurance of this beginning she cut him off short, her fears dispelled
by his commonplace. Nay, indignation displaced them so quickly that she
fairly flashed up before him to her full height.

“You did not come in by the gate!” she cried. “What do you mean by
coming here in that dress What right have you in my garden?”

“Just one word,” he begged quickly, but very gently. “You'd allow a
street-beggar that much!”

She stood before him, panting, and, as he thought, glorious, in her
flush of youth and anger. Tom Vanrevel had painted her incoherently,
but richly, in spite of that, his whole heart being in the portrait;
and--Crailey Gray had smiled at what he deemed the exaggeration of an
ordinarily unimpressionable man who had fallen in love “at first sight;”
 yet, in the presence of the reality, the Incroyable decided that Tom's
colors had been gray and humble. It was not that she was merely lovely,
that her nose was straight, and her chin dexterously wrought between
square and oval; that her dark hair lay soft as a shadow on her white
brow; not that the trembling hand she held against her breast sprang
from a taper wrist and tapered again to the tips of the long fingers;
nor that she was of that slenderness as strong as it is delicate; not
all the exquisite regularity of line and mould, nor simplicity of color,
gave her that significance which made the Incroyable declare to himself
that he stood for the first time in the presence of Beauty, and that now
he knew the women he had been wont to call beautiful were but pretty.
And yet her beauty, he told himself, was the least of her loveliness,
for there was a glamour about her. It was not only the richness of her
youth; but there was an ineffable exhalation which seemed to be made
partly of light, partly of the very spirit of her, and, oddly enough,
partly of the scent of the little fan that hung by a ribbon from her
waist. This was a woman like a wine, he felt, there was a bouquet.

In regard to the bouquet of the young man himself, if he possessed one,
it is pertinent to relate that at this very instant the thought skipped
across his mind (like the hop of a flea in a rose-jar) that some day
he might find the moment when he could tell her the truth about
herself--with a half-laugh--and say: “The angels sent their haloes in a
sandal-wood box to be made into a woman--and it was you!”

“If you have anything to say for yourself, say it quickly!” said Miss
Betty.

“You were singing a while ago,” he answered, somewhat huskily, “and
I stopped on the street to listen; then I came here to be nearer. The
spell of your voice--” He broke off abruptly to change the word. “The
spell of the song came over me--it is my dearest favorite--so that I
stood afterward in a sort of trance, only hearing again, in the silence,
'The stolen heart, like the gathered rose, will bloom but for a day!'
I did not see you until you came to the bench. You must believe me: I
would not have frightened you for anything in the world.”

“Why are you wearing that dress?”

He laughed, and pointed to where, behind him on the ground, lay a long
gray cloak, upon which had been tossed a white mask. “I'm on my way to
the masquerade;” he answered, with an airy gesture in the direction of
the violins. “I'm an Incroyable, you see; and I had the costume made
from my recollection of a sketch of your great-uncle. I saw it a long
time ago in your library.”

Miss Carewe's accustomed poise was quite recovered; indeed, she was
astonished to discover a distinct trace of disappointment that the
brilliant apparition must offer so tame an explanation. What he said was
palpably the truth; there was a masquerade that night, she knew, at the
Madrillon's, a little way up Carewe Street, and her father had gone, an
hour earlier, a blue domino over his arm.

The Incroyable was a person of almost magical perceptiveness; he felt
the let-down immediately and feared a failure. This would not do;
the attitude of tension between them must be renewed at once. “You'll
forgive me?” he began, in a quickly impassioned tone. “It was only after
you sang, a dream possessed me, and--”

“I cannot stay to talk with you,” Miss Betty interrupted, and added,
with a straightforwardness which made him afraid she would prove
lamentably direct: “I do not know you.”

Perhaps she remembered that already one young man had been presented to
her by no better sponsor than a white cat, and had no desire to carry
her unconventionality farther than that. In the present instance there
was not even a kitten.

She turned toward the house, whereupon he gave a little pathetic
exclamation of pleading in a voice that was masterly, being as sincere
as it was musical, and he took a few leaning steps toward her, both
hands outstretched.

“One moment more!” he cried, as she turned again to him. “It may be the
one chance of my life to speak with you; don't deny me this.--All the
rest will meet you when the happy evening comes, will dance with you,
talk with you, see you when they like, listen to you sing. I, alone,
must hover about the gates, or steal like a thief into your garden to
hear you from a distance. Listen to me--just this once--for a moment?”

“I cannot listen,” she said firmly; and stood quite still. She was now
in deep shadow.

“I will not believe you merciless! You would not condemn the meanest
criminal unheard!” Remembering that she was so lately from the convent,
he ventured this speech in a deep, thrilling voice, only to receive a
distinct shock for his pains, for she greeted it with an irrepressible,
most unexpected peal of contralto laughter, and his lips parted slightly
with the surprise of it.

They parted much farther in the next instant--in good truth, it may
be stated of the gentleman that he was left with his mouth open--for,
suddenly leaning toward him out of the shadow into the light, her face
shining as a cast of tragedy, she cried in a hoarse whisper:

“Are you a murderer?”

And with that and a whisk of her skirts, and a footfall on the gravel
path, she was gone. He stood dumbfounded, poor comedian, having come to
play the chief role, but to find the scene taken out of his hands. Then
catching the flutter of her wrap, as she disappeared into the darkness
of the veranda, he cried in a loud, manly voice:

“You are a dear!”

As he came out into the street through a gap in the hedge, he paused,
drawing his cloak about him, and lifted his face to the eastern moon. It
was a strange face: the modelling most like what is called “Greek,” save
for the nose, which was a trifle too short for that, and the features
showed a happy purity of outline almost childlike; the blue eyes,
clear, fleckless, serenely irresponsible, with more the look of refusing
responsibility than being unconscious of it; eyes without care, without
prudence, and without evil. A stranger might have said he was about
twenty-five and had never a thought in his life. There were some
blossoms on the hedge, and he touched one lightly, as though he chucked
it under the chin; he smiled upon it then, but not as he had smiled upon
Miss Betty, for this was his own, the smile that came when he was alone;
and, when it came, the face was no longer joyous as it had been in
repose; there was an infinite patience and worn tolerance-possibly for
himself. This incongruous and melancholy smile was astonishing: one
looked for the laughter of a boy and found, instead, a gentle, worldly,
old prelate.

Standing there, all alone in the moonlight, by the hedge, he lifted both
hands high and waved them toward the house, as children wave to each
other across lawns at twilight. After that he made a fantastic bow to
his corrugated shadow on the board sidewalk.

“Again, you rogue!” he exclaimed aloud. Then, as he faced about and
began to walk in the direction of the beckoning violins: “I wonder if
Tom's kitten was better, after all!”



CHAPTER III. The Rogue's Gallery of a Father Should be Exhibited to a
Daughter with Particular Care

Those angels appointed to be guardians of the merry people of Rouen,
poising one night, between earth and stars, discovered a single
brilliant and resonant spot, set in the midst of the dark, quiet town
like a jewelled music-box on a black cloth. Sounds of revelry and the
dance from the luminous spot came up through the summer stillness to the
weary guardians all night long, until, at last, when a red glow stole
into the east, and the dance still continued, nay, grew faster than
ever, the celestial watchers found the work too heavy for their
strength, and forthwith departed, leaving the dancers to their own
devices; for, as everyone knows, when a dance lasts till daylight,
guardian angels flee.

All night long the fiddles had been swinging away at their best; all
night long the candles had shone in thin rows of bright orange through
the slits of the window-blinds; but now, as the day broke over the
maples, the shutters were flung open by laughing young men, and the
drivers of the carriages, waiting in the dusty street, pressed up closer
to the hedge, or came within and stretched themselves upon the lawn,
to see the people waltzing in the daylight. The horses, having no such
desires, stood with loosened check-reins, slightly twitching their upper
lips, wistful of the tall grass which bordered the wooden sidewalk,
though now and then one would lift his head high, sniffing the morning
air and bending an earnest gaze not upon the dancers but upon the florid
east.

Over the unwearied plaint of French-horn, violin, and bassoon, rose
a silvery confusion of voices and laughter and the sound of a hundred
footfalls in unison, while, from the open windows there issued a warm
breath, heavily laden with the smell of scented fans, of rich fabrics,
of dying roses, to mingle with the spicy perfume of a wild crab-tree
in fullest blossom, which stood near enough to peer into the ball-room,
and, like a brocaded belle herself, challenge the richest to show
raiment as fine, the loveliest to look as fair and joyful in the dawn..

“Believe me, of all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so
fondly to-day, Were to fade by to-morrow and fleet from my arms, Like
fairy gifts fading away--”

So ran the violins in waltz time, so bassoon and horn to those dulcet
measures; and then, with one accord, a hundred voices joined them in the
old, sweet melody:

“Thou wouldst still be adored as this moment thou art, Let thy
loveliness fade as it will; And around the dear ruin each wish of my
heart Would entwine itself verdantly still.”

And the jealous crab-tree found but one to overmatch itself in beauty:
a lady who was the focus of the singing; for, by the time the shutters
were flung open, there was not a young man in the room, lacked he never
so greatly in music or in voice, who did not heartily desire to sing
to Miss Betty Carewe, and who did not now (craning neck over partner's
shoulder) seek to fix her with his glittering eye, while he sang “Oh,
believe me” most directly and conspicuously at her. For that night was
the beginning of Miss Betty's famous career as the belle of Rouen, and
was the date from which strangers were to hear of her as “the beautiful
Miss Carewe,” until “beautiful” was left off, visitors to the town being
supposed to have heard at least that much before they came.

There had been much discussion of her, though only one or two had caught
glimpses of her; but most of the gallants appeared to agree with Crailey
Gray, who aired his opinion--in an exceedingly casual way--at the little
club on Main Street. Mr. Gray held that when the daughter of a man as
rich as Bob Carewe was heralded as a beauty the chances were that she
would prove disappointing, and, for his part, he was not even interested
enough to attend and investigate. So he was going down the river in a
canoe and preferred the shyness of bass to that of a girl of eighteen
just from the convent, he said. Tom Vanrevel was not present on the
occasion of these remarks; and the general concurrence with Crailey may
be suspected as a purely verbal one, since, when the evening came,
two of the most enthusiastic dancers and love-makers of the town,
the handsome Tappingham Marsh and that doughty ex-dragoon and Indian
fighter, stout old General Trumble, were upon the field before the enemy
appeared; that is to say, they were in the new ball-room before their
host; indeed, the musicians had not arrived, and Nelson, an aged negro
servitor, was engaged in lighting the house.

The crafty pair had planned this early descent with a view to monopoly
by right of priority, in case the game proved worth the candle, and they
were leaning effectively against the little railing about the musicians'
platform when Mr. Carewe entered the room with his daughter on his arm.

She was in white, touched with countless small lavender flowers; there
were rows and rows of wonderful silk and lace flounces on her skirt, and
her fan hung from a rope of great pearls. Ah, hideous, blue, rough cloth
of the convent, unforgotten, but laid aside forever, what a chrysalis
you were!

Tappingham twitched his companion's sleeve, but the General was already
posing; and neither heard the words of presentation, because Miss Betty
gave each of them a quick look, then smiled upon them as they bowed; the
slayers were prostrated before their prey. Never were lady-killers more
instantaneously tamed and subjugated by the power of the feminine eye.
Will Cummings came in soon, and, almost upon his heels, Eugene Madrillon
and young Frank Chenoweth. No others appeared for half an hour, and
the five gentlemen looked at one another aside, each divining his own
diplomacy in his fellow's eye, and each laboriously explaining to
the others his own mistake in regard to the hour designated upon Mr.
Carewe's cards of invitation. This small embarrassment, however, did
not prevent General Trumble and young Mr. Chenoweth from coming to high
words over Miss Carewe's little, gilt-filigree “programme” of dances.

It may be not untimely to remark, also, of these five redoubtable beaux,
that, during the evening, it occurred to every one of them to be glad
that Crailey Gray was betrothed to Fanchon Bareaud, and that he was down
on the Rouen River with a canoe, a rod and a tent. Nay, without more
words, to declare the truth in regard to Crailey, they felt greater
security in his absence from the field than in his betrothal. As Mr.
Chenoweth, a youth as open as out-of-doors, both in countenance and
mind, observed plaintively to Tappingham Marsh in a corner, while they
watched Miss Betty's lavender flowers miraculously swirling through a
quadrille: “Crailey, you know, well, Crailey's been engaged before!” It
was not Mr. Chenoweth's habit to disguise his apprehensions, and Crailey
Gray would not fish for bass forever.

The same Chenoweth was he, who, maddened by the General's triumphantly
familiar way of toying with Miss Betty's fan between two dances,
attempted to propose to her during the sunrise waltz. Having sung
“Oh, believe me” in her ear as loudly as he could, he expressed the
wish--quite as loudly--“That this waltz might last for always!”

That was the seventh time it had been said to Betty during the night,
and though Mr. Chenoweth's predecessors had revealed their desires in
a guise lacking this prodigious artlessness, she already possessed no
novel acquaintance with the exclamation. But she made no comment; her
partner's style was not a stimulant to repartee. “It would be
heaven,” he amplified earnestly, “it would be heaven to dance with you
forever--on a desert isle where the others couldn't come!” he finished
with sudden acerbity as his eye caught the General's.

He proceeded, and only the cessation of the music aided Miss Carewe in
stopping the declaration before it was altogether out; and at that point
Frank's own father came to her rescue, though in a fashion little saving
of her confusion. The elder Chenoweth was one of the gallant and kindly
Southern colony that made it natural for Rouen always to speak of Miss
Carewe as “Miss Betty”. He was a handsome old fellow, whose hair,
long moustache and imperial were as white as he was proud of them, a
Virginian with the admirable Southern fearlessness of being thought
sentimental. Mounting a chair with complete dignity, he lifted a glass
of wine high in the air, and, when all the other glasses had been
filled, proposed the health of his young hostess. He made a speech of
some length, pronouncing himself quite as hopelessly in love with his
old friend's daughter as all could see his own son was; and wishing her
long life and prosperity, with many allusions to fragrant bowers and the
Muses.

It made Miss Betty happy, but it was rather trying, too, for she could
only stand with downcast eyes before them all, trembling a little,
and receiving a mixed impression of Mr. Chenoweth's remarks, catching
fragments here and there: “And may the blush upon that gentle cheek,
lovelier than the radiant clouds at set of sun,” and “Yet the sands of
the hour-glass must fall, and in the calm and beauteous old age some
day to be her lot, when fond mem'ry leads her back to view again the
brilliant scene about her now, where stand 'fair women and brave men,'
winecup in hand to do her honor, oh, may she wipe the silent tear”, and
the like. As the old gentleman finished, and before the toast was drunk,
Fanchon Bareaud, kissing her hand to Betty, took up the song again; and
they all joined in, lifting their glasses to the blushing and happy girl
clinging to her father's arm:

“Thou wouldst still be adored as this moment thou art, Let thy
loveliness fade as it will; And around the dear ruin, each wish of my
heart, Would entwine itself verdantly still.”

They were happy people who had not learned to be self-conscious enough
to fear doing a pretty thing openly without mocking themselves for it;
and it was a brave circle they made about Betty Carewe, the charming
faces of the women and their fine furbelows, handsome men and tall, all
so gay, so cheerily smiling, and yet so earnest in their welcome to
her. No one was afraid to “let out” his voice; their song went full and
strong over the waking town, and when it was finished the ball was over,
too.

The veranda and the path to the gate became like tropic gardens, the
fair colors of the women's dresses, ballooning in the early breeze,
making the place seem strewn with giant blossoms. They all went away at
the same time, those in carriages calling farewells to each other and
to the little processions departing on foot in different directions to
homes near by. The sound of the voices and laughter drew away, slowly
died out altogether, and the silence of the street was strange and
unfamiliar to Betty. She went to the hedge and watched the musicians,
who were the last to go, until they passed from sight: little black
toilsome figures, carrying grotesque black boxes. While she could still
see them, it seemed to her that her ball was not quite over, and she
wished to hold the least speck of it as long as she could; but when
they had disappeared, she faced the truth with a deep sigh: the long,
glorious night was finished indeed.

What she needed now was another girl: the two would have gone to Betty's
room and danced it all over again until noon; but she had only her
father. She found him smoking a Principe cigar upon the veranda, so she
seated herself timidly, nevertheless with a hopeful glance at him, on
the steps at his feet; and, as she did so, he looked down upon her with
something more akin to geniality than anything she had ever seen in his
eye before. It was not geniality itself, but might be third cousin to
it. Indeed, in his way, he was almost proud of her, though he had no
wish to show it. Since one was compelled to display the fact that one
possessed a grown daughter, it was well that she be like this one.

They did not know each other very well, and she often doubted that they
would ever become intimate. There was no sense of companionship
for either in the other; she had been unable to break through his
perfunctory, almost formal, manner with her; therefore, because he
encouraged no af-fection in her, she felt none, and wondered why, since
he was her father. She was more curious about him than interested,
and, though she did not know it, she was prepared to judge him--should
occasion arise--precisely as she would judge any other mere
acquaintance. This morning, for the first time, she was conscious of a
sense of warmth and gratitude toward him: the elaborate fashion in which
he had introduced her to his friends made it appear possible that he
liked her; for he had forgotten nothing, and to remember everything
in this case was to be lavish, which has often the appearance of
generosity.

And yet there had been a lack: some small thing she had missed, though
she was not entirely sure that she identified it; but the lack had not
been in her father or in anything he had done. Then, too, there was
something so unexpectedly human and pleasant in his not going to bed at
once, but remaining to smoke on the veranda at this hour, that she gave
him credit for a little of her own excitement, innocently fancying that
he, also, might feel the need of a companion with whom to talk over the
brilliant passages of the night. And a moment ensued when she debated
taking his hand. She was too soon glad that her intuition forbade the
demonstration.

“It was all so beautiful, papa,” she said, timidly. “I have no way to
tell you how I thank you.”

“You may do that,” he replied, evenly, with no unkindness, with no
kindness, either, in the level of his tone, “by never dancing again more
than twice with one man in one evening.”

“I think I should much prefer not, myself,” she returned, lifting her
head to face him gravely. “I believe if I cared to dance more than once
with one, I should like to dance all of them with him.”

Mr. Carewe frowned. “I trust that you discovered none last night whom
you wished to honor with your entire programme?”

“No,” she laughed, “not last night.”

Her father tossed away his cigar abruptly “Is it too much to hope,” he
inquired, “that when you discover a gentleman with whom you desire to
waltz all night, you will omit to mention the fact to him?”

There was a brief flash of her eye as she recalled her impulse to
take his hand, but she immediately looked at him with such complete
seriousness that he feared his irony had been thrown away.

“I'll remember not to mention it,” she answered. “I'll tell him you told
me not too.”

“I think you may retire now,” said Mr. Carewe, sharply.

She rose from the steps, went to the door, then turned at the threshold.
“Were all your friends here, papa?”

“Do you think that every ninny who gabbled in my house last night was my
friend?” he said, angrily. “There was one friend of mine, Mrs. Tanberry,
who wasn't here, because she is out of town; but I do not imagine that
you are inquiring about women. You mean: Was every unmarried male
idiot who could afford a swallow-tailed coat and a clean pair of gloves
cavorting about the place? Yes, miss, they were all here except two, and
one of those is a fool, the other a knave.”

“Can't I know the fool?” she asked, eagerly.

“I rejoice to find them so rare in your experience!” he retorted. “This
one is out of town, though I have no doubt you will see him sufficiently
often when he returns. His name is Crailey Gray, and he is to marry
Fanchon Bareaud--if he remembers!”

“And the knave?”

“Is one!” Carewe shut his teeth with a venomous snap, and his whole
face reddened suddenly. “I'll mention this fellow once--now,” he said,
speaking each word with emphasis. “His name is Vanrevel. You see that
gate; you see the line of my property there: the man himself, as well
as every other person in the town, remembers well that the last time I
spoke to him, it was to tell him that if he ever set foot on ground of
mine I'd shoot him down, and he knows, and they all know, I shall keep
my word! Elsewhere, I told him that for the sake of public peace, I
should ignore him. I do. You will see him everywhere; but it will not be
difficult; no one will have the hardihood to present him to my daughter.
The quarrel between us--” Mr. Carewe broke off for a moment, his hands
clinching the arms of his chair, while he swallowed with difficulty, as
though he choked upon some acrid bolus, and he was so strongly agitated
by his own mention of his enemy that he controlled himself by a painful
effort of his will. “The quarrel between us is political--and personal.
You will remember.”

“I shall remember,” she answered in a rather frightened voice.

... It was long before she fell asleep. “I alone must hover about the
gates or steal into your garden like a thief,” the Incroyable had said.
“The last time I spoke to him it was to tell him that if he ever set
foot on ground of mine, I'd shoot him down!” had been her father's
declaration. And Mr. Carewe had spoken with the most undeniable air of
meaning what he said. Yet she knew that the Incroyable would come again.

Also, with hot cheeks pressed into her pillow, Miss Betty had identified
the young man in the white hat, that dark person whose hand she had far
too impetuously seized in both of hers. Aha! It was this gentleman
who looked into people's eyes and stammered so sincerely over a pretty
speech that you almost believed him, it was he who was to marry Fanchon
Bareaud--“if he remembers!” No wonder Fanchon had been in such a
hurry to get him away.... “If he remembers!” Such was that young man's
character, was it? Miss Carewe laughed aloud to her pillow: for, was one
to guess the reason, also, of his not having come to her ball? Had the
poor man been commanded to be “out of town?”

Then, remembering the piquant and generous face of Fanchon, Betty
clinched her fingers tightly and crushed the imp who had suggested the
unworthy thought, crushed him to a wretched pulp and threw him out of
the open window. He immediately sneaked in by the back way, for, in
spite of her victory, she still felt a little sorry for poor Fanchon.



CHAPTER IV. “But Spare Your Country's Flag”

If it be true that love is the great incentive to the useless arts, the
number of gentlemen who became poets for the sake of Miss Betty Carewe
need not be considered extraordinary. Of all that was written of her
dancing, Tom Vanrevel's lines, “I Danced with Her beneath the Lights”
 (which he certainly had not done when he wrote them) were, perhaps, next
to Crailey Gray's in merit, though Tom burned his rhymes after reading
them to Crailey. Other troubadours were not so modest, and the Rouen
Journal found no lack of tuneful offering, that spring, generously
print-ing all of it, even at the period when it became epidemic. The
public had little difficulty in recognizing the work of Mr. Francis
Chenoweth in an anonymous “Sonnet” (of twenty-three lines) which
appeared in the issue following Miss Carewe's debut. Mr. Chenoweth
wrote that while dancing the mazourka with a Lovely Being, the sweetest
feelings of his soul, in a celestial stream, bore him away beyond
control, in a seraphic dream; and he untruthfully stated that at the
same time he saw her wipe the silent tear, omitting, however, to venture
any explanation of the cause of her emotion. Old General Trumble
boldly signed his poem in full. It was called “An Ode upon Miss C--'s
Waltzing,” and it began:

“When Bettina found fair Rouen's shore, And her aged father to us bore
Her from the cloister neat, She waltzed upon the ball-room floor, And
lightly twirled upon her feet.”

Mr. Carewe was rightfully indignant, and refused to acknowledge the
General's salutation at their next meeting: Trumble was fifteen years
older than he.

As Crailey Gray never danced with Miss Carewe, it is somewhat singular
that she should have been the inspiration of his swinging verses in
waltz measure, “Heart-strings on a Violin,” the sense of which was
that when a violin had played for her dancing, the instrument should
be shattered as wine-glasses are after a great toast. However, no one,
except the author himself, knew that Betty was the subject; for Crailey
certainly did not mention it to Miss Bareaud, nor to his best friend,
Vanrevel.

It was to some degree a strange comradeship between these two young men;
their tastes led them so often in opposite directions. They had rooms
to-gether over their offices in the “Madrillon Block” on Main Street,
and the lights shone late from their windows every night in the year.
Sometimes that would mean only that the two friends were talking, for
they never reached a silent intimacy, but, even after several years of
companionship, were rarely seen together when not in interested, often
eager, conversation, so that people wondered what in the world they
still found to say to each other. But many a night the late-shining
lamp meant that Tom sat alone, with a brief or a book, or wooed the long
hours with his magical guitar. For he never went to bed until the other
came home.

And if daylight came without Crailey, Vanrevel would go out, yawning
mightily, to look for him; and when there was no finding him, Tom would
come back, sleepless, to the day's work. Crailey was called “peculiar”
 and he explained, with a kind of jovial helplessness, that he was always
prepared for the unexpected in himself, nor did such a view detract from
his picturesqueness to his own perusal of himself; though it was not
only to himself that he was interesting. To the vision of the lookers-on
in Rouen, quiet souls who hovered along the walls at merry-makings and
cheerfully counted themselves spectators at the play, Crailey Gray held
the centre of the stage and was the chief comedian of the place. Wit,
poet, and scapegrace, the small society sometimes seemed the mere
background set for his performances, spectacles which he, also, enjoyed,
and from the best seat in the house; for he was not content as the
actor, but must be the Prince in the box as well.

His friendship for Tom Vanrevel was, in a measure, that of the vine for
the oak. He was full of levities at Tom's expense, which the other
bore with a grin of sympathetic comprehension, or, at long intervals,
returned upon Crailey with devastating effect. Vanrevel was the one
steadying thing in his life, and, at the same time, the only one of the
young men upon whom he did not have an almost mesmeric influence. In
good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town.
Many a youth swore to avoid the roisterer's company for all time, and,
within two hours of the vow, found himself, flagon in hand, engaged in
a bout that would last the night, with Mr. Gray out-bumpering the
hardiest, at the head of the table. And, the next morning, the fevered,
scarlet-eyed perjurer might creep shaking to his wretched tasks, only
to behold the cause of his folly and headache tripping merrily along the
street, smiling, clean-shaven, and fresh as a dew-born primrose, with,
perchance, two or three of the prettiest girls in town at his elbow to
greet his sallies with approving laughter.

Crailey had been so long in the habit of following every impulse,
no matter how mad, that he enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from
condemnation, and, whatever his deeds, Rouen had learned to say, with
a chuckle, that it was “only Crailey Gray again.” But his followers were
not so privileged. Thus, when Mr. Gray, who in his libations sometimes
developed the humor of an urchin, went to the Pound at three in the
morning of New Year's Day, hung sleigh-bells about the necks of the
cattle and drove them up and down the streets, himself hideously blowing
a bass horn from the back of a big brown steer, those roused from
slumber ceased to rage, and accepted the exploit as a rare joke, on
learning that it was “only Crailey Gray;” but the unfortunate young
Chenoweth was heavily frowned upon and properly upbraided because he had
followed in the wake of the bovine procession, mildly attempting to play
upon a flageolet.

Crailey never denied a folly nor defended an escapade. The latter was
always done for him, because he talked of his “graceless misdoings” (so
he was wont, smilingly, to call them) over cups of tea in the afternoons
with old ladies, lamenting, in his musical voice, the lack of female
relatives to guide him. He was charmingly attentive to the elderly
women, not from policy, but because his manner was uncontrollably
chivalrous; and, ever a gallant listener, were the speaker young, old,
great or humble, he never forgot to catch the last words of a sentence,
and seldom suffered for a reply, even when he had drowsed through a
question. Moreover, no one ever heard him speak a sullen word, nor saw
him wear a brow of depression. The single creed to which he was constant
was that of good cheer; he was the very apostle of gayety, preaching
it in parlor and bar; and made merry friends with battered tramps and
homeless dogs in the streets at night.

Now and then he would spend several days in the offices of Gray
& Vanrevel, Attorneys and Counsellors-at-Law, wearing an air of
unassailable virtue; though he did not far overstate the case when he
said, “Tom does all the work and gives me all the money not to bother
him when he's getting up a case.”

The working member of the firm got up cases to notable effect, and few
lawyers in the State enjoyed having Tom Vanrevel on the other side.
There was nothing about him of the floridity prevalent at that time; he
withered “oratory” before the court; he was the foe of jury pathos; and,
despising noise and the habitual voice-dip at the end of a sentence,
was, nevertheless, at times an almost fearfully effective orator. So,
by degrees the firm of Gray & Vanrevel, young as it was, and in spite
of the idle apprentice, had grown to be the most prosperous in the
district. For this eminence Crailey was never accused of assuming the
credit. Nor did he ever miss an opportunity of making known how much he
owed to his partner. What he owed, in brief, was everything. How well
Vanrevel worked was demonstrated every day, but how hard he worked,
only Crailey knew. The latter had grown to depend upon him for even his
political beliefs, and lightly followed his partner into Abolitionism;
though that was to risk unpopularity, bitter hatred, and worse.
Fortunately, on certain occasions, Vanrevel had made himself (if not
his creed) respected, at least so far that there was no longer danger
of mob-violence for an Abolitionist in Rouen. He was a cool-headed
young man ordinarily, and possessed of an elusive forcefulness not to
be trifled with, though he was a quiet man, and had what they called a
“fine manner.” And, not in the latter, but in his dress, there was an
echo of the Beau, which afforded Mr. Gray a point of attack for sallies
of wit; there was a touch of the dandy about Vanrevel; he had a large
and versatile wardrobe, and his clothes always fit him not only in line
but in color; even women saw how nobly they were fashioned.

These two young men were members of a cheerful band, who feasted,
laughed, wrangled over politics, danced, made love, and sang terrible
chords on summer evenings, together, as young men will. Will Cummings,
editor of the Rouen Journal, was one of these; a tall, sallow man, very
thin, very awkward and very gentle. Mr. Cummings proved himself always
ready with a loud and friendly laugh for the poorest joke in the world,
his countenance shining with such kindness that no one ever had the
heart to reproach him with the evils of his journalistic performances,
or for the things he broke when he danced. Another was Tappingham Marsh,
an exceedingly handsome person, somewhat languid in appearance, dainty
in manner with women, offhand with men; almost as reckless as Crailey,
and often the latter's companion and assistant in dissipation. Young
Francis Chenoweth never failed to follow both into whatever they
planned; he was short and pink, and the uptilt of his nose was coherent
with the appealing earnest-ness which was habitual with him. Eugene
Madrillon was the sixth of these intimates; a dark man, whose Latin eyes
and color advertised his French ancestry as plainly as his emotionless
mouth and lack of gesture betrayed the mingling of another strain.

All these, and others of the town, were wont to “talk politics” a great
deal at the little club on Main Street and all were apt to fall foul of
Tom Vanrevel or Crailey Gray before the end of any discussion. For those
were the days when they twisted the Lion's tail in vehement and bitter
earnest; when the eagle screamed in mixed figures; when few men knew how
to talk, and many orated; when party strife was savagely personal; when
intolerance was called the “pure fire of patriotism;” when criticism of
the existing order of things surely incurred fiery anathema and black
invective; and brave was he, indeed, who dared to hint that his country,
as a whole and politically, did lack some two or three particular
virtues, and that the first step toward obtaining them would be to help
it to realize their absence.

This latter point-of-view was that of the firm of Gray & Vanrevel,
which was a unit in such matters. Crailey did most of the talking--quite
beautifully, too--and both had to stand against odds in many a sour
argument, for they were not only Abolitionists, but opposed the attitude
of their country in its difficulty with Mexico; and, in common with
other men of the time who took their stand, they had to grow accustomed
to being called Disloyal Traitors, Foreign Toadies, Malignants, and
Traducers of the Flag. Tom had long been used to epithets of this sort,
suffering their sting in quiet, and was glad when he could keep Crailey
out of worse employment than standing firm for an unpopular belief.

There was one place to which Vanrevel, seeking his friend and partner,
when the latter did not come home at night, could not go; this was the
Tower Chamber, and it was in that mysterious apartment of the Carewe
cupola that Crailey was apt to be deeply occupied when he remained away
until daylight. Strange as it appears, Mr. Gray maintained peculiar
relations of intimacy with Robert Carewe, in spite of the feud between
Carewe and his own best friend. This intimacy, which did not necessarily
imply any mutual fondness (though Crailey seemed to dislike nobody), was
betokened by a furtive understanding, of a sort, between them. They held
brief, earnest conversations on the street, or in corners when they
met at other people's houses, always speaking in voices too low to be
overheard; and they exercised a mysterious symbolism, somewhat in the
manner of fellow members of a secret society: they had been observed to
communicate across crowded rooms, by lifted eyebrow, nod of head, or a
surreptitious turn of the wrist: so that those who observed them knew
that a question had been asked and answered.

It was noticed, also, that there were five other initiates to this
masonry: Eugene Madrillon, the elder Chenoweth, General Trumble,
Tappingham Marsh, and Jefferson Bareaud. Thus, on the afternoon
following Miss Betty's introduction to Rouen's favorite sons and
daughters, Mr. Carewe, driving down Main Street, held up one forefinger
to Madrillon as he saw the young man turning in at the club. Eugene
nodded gravely, and, as he went in, discovering Marsh, the General, and
others, listening to Mr. Gray's explanation of his return from the river
with no fish, stealthily held up one finger in his turn. Trumble replied
with a wink, Tappingham nodded, but Crailey slightly shook his head.
Marsh and the General started with surprise, and stared incredulously.
That Crailey should shake his head! If the signal had been for a
church-meeting they might have understood.

Mr. Gray's conduct was surprising two other people at about the same
time: Tom Vanrevel and Fanchon Bareaud; the former by his sudden
devotion to the law; the latter by her sudden devotion to herself. In a
breath, he became almost a domestic character. No more did he spend his
afternoons between the club and the Rouen House bar, nor was his bay
mare so often seen stamping down the ground about Mrs. McDougal's
hitching-post while McDougal was out on the prairie with his engineering
squad. The idle apprentice was at his desk, and in the daytime he
displayed an aversion for the streets, which was more than his partner
did, for the industrious Tom, undergoing quite as remarkable an
alteration of habit, became, all at once, little better than a
corner-loafer. His favorite lounging-place was a small drug-store
where Carewe Street debouched upon Main; nevertheless, so adhesive is a
reputation once fastened, his air of being there upon business deceived
everyone except Mr. Gray.

Miss Bareaud was even happier than she was astonished (and she was
mightily astonished) to find her betrothed developing a taste for her
society alone. Formerly, she had counted upon the gayeties of her home
to keep Crailey near her; now, however, he told her tenderly he wished
to have her all to himself. This was not like him, but Fanchon did not
question; and it was very sweet to her that he began to make it his
custom to come in by a side gate and meet her under an apple-tree in
the dusk, where they would sit quietly together through the evening,
listening to the noise and laughter from the lighted house.

That house was the most hospitable in Rouen. Always cheerfully “full of
company,” as they said, it was the sort of house where a carpet-dance
could be arranged in half an hour; a house with a sideboard like
the widow's cruse; the young men always found more. Mrs. Bareaud, a
Southerner, loving to persuade the visitor that her home was his, not
hers, lived only for her art, which was that of the table. Evil
cooks, taking service with her, became virtuous, dealt with nectar and
ambrosia, and grew fit to pander to Olympus, learning of their mistress
secrets to make the ill-disposed as genial gods ere they departed. Mr.
Bareaud at fifty had lived so well that he gave up walking, which did
not trouble him; but at sixty he gave up dancing, which did trouble him.
His only hope, he declared, was in Crailey Gray's promise to invent for
him: a concave partner.

There was a thin, quizzing shank of a son, Jefferson, who lived upon
quinine, ague and deviltry; and there were the two daughters, Fanchon
and Virginia. The latter was three years older than Fanchon, as dark as
Fanchon was fair, though not nearly so pretty: a small, good-natured,
romping sprite of a girl, who had handed down the heart and hand of
Crailey Gray to her sister with the best grace in the world. For she
had been the heroine of one of Mr. Gray's half-dozen or so most serious
affairs, and, after a furious rivalry with Mr. Carewe, the victory
was generally conceded to Crailey. His triumph had been of about a
fort-night's duration when Fanchon returned from St. Mary's; and,
with the advent of the younger sister, the elder, who had decided that
Crailey was the incomparable she had dreamed of since infancy, was
generously allowed to discover that he was not that vision--that she had
fallen in love with her own idea of him; whereas Fanchon cared only
that he be Crailey Gray, whatever kind of vision that was. And Fanchon
discovered that it was a great many kinds.

The transfer was made comfortably, with nice judgment of a respectable
interregnum, and to the greater happiness of each of the three young
people; no objection ensuing from the easy-going parents, who were
devotedly fond of Crailey, while the town laughed and said it was
only that absurd Crailey Gray again. He and Virginia were the best of
friends, and accepted their new relation with a preposterous lack of
embarrassment.

To be in love with Crailey became Fanchon's vocation; she spent all her
time at it, and produced a blurred effect upon strangers. The only man
with whom she seemed quite alive was Vanrevel: a little because Tom
talked of Crailey, and a great deal because she could talk of Crailey to
Tom; could tell him freely, as she could tell no one else, how wonderful
Crailey was, and explain to him her lover's vagaries on the ground that
it was a necessity of geniuses to be unlike the less gifted. Nor was she
alone in suspecting Mr. Gray of genius: in the first place, he was so
odd; in the second, his poems were “already attracting more than local
attention,” as the Journal remarked, generously, for Crailey had ceased
to present his rhymes to that valuable paper. Ay! Boston, no less, was
his mart.

He was rather radical in his literary preferences, and hurt the elder
Chenoweth's feelings by laughing heartily at some poems of the late Lord
Byron; offended many people by disliking the style of Sir Edward Bulwer,
and even refused to admit that James Fenimore Cooper was the greatest
novelist that ever lived. But these things were as nothing compared with
his unpatriotic defence of Charles Dickens. Many Americans had fallen
into a great rage over the vivacious assault upon the United States in
“Martin Chuzzlewit;” nevertheless, Crailey still boldly hailed him (as
everyone had heretofore agreed) the most dexterous writer of his day and
the most notable humorist of any day. Of course the Englishman had not
visited and thoroughly studied such a city as Rouen, Crailey confessed,
twinklingly; but, after all, wasn't there some truth in “Martin
Chuzzlewit?” Mr. Dickens might have been far from a clear understanding
of our people; but didn't it argue a pretty ticklish vanity in ourselves
that we were so fiercely resentful of satire; and was not this very heat
over “Martin Chuzzlewit” a confirmation of one of the points the book
had presented against us? General Trumble replied to this suggestion
with a personal one to the effect that a man capable of saying a good
word for so monstrous a slander, that a man, sir, capable of declaring
his native country to be vain or sensitive ought to be horsewhipped, and
at this Crailey laughed consumedly.

Trumble retorted with the names of Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr. “And
if it comes to a war with these Greasers,” he spluttered apoplectically,
“and it is coming, mighty soon, we'll find Mr. Gray down in Mexico,
throwing mud on the Stars and Stripes and cheering for that one-legged
horse-thief, Santa Anna! Anything to seek out something foolish amongst
your own people!”

“Don't have to seek far, sometimes, General,” murmured Crailey, from the
depths of the best chair in the club, whereupon Trumble, not trusting
himself to answer, went out to the street.

And yet, before that same evening was over, the General had shed honest
tears of admiration and pity for Crailey Gray; and Miss Betty saw her
Incroyable again, for that night (the second after the Carewe dance)
Rouen beheld the great warehouse tire.



CHAPTER V. Nero not the Last Violinist of his Kind

Miss Carewe was at her desk, writing to Sister Cecilia, whom she most
loved of all the world, when the bells startled her with their sudden
clangor. The quill dropped from her hand; she started to her feet,
wide-eyed, not understanding; while the whole town, drowsing peacefully
a moment ago, resounded immediately with a loud confusion. She ran to
the front door and looked out, her heart beating wildly.

The western sky was touched with a soft rose-color, which quickly became
a warm glow, fluctuated, and, in the instant, shot up like the coming of
a full Aurora. Then through the broken foliage of the treetops could be
seen the orange curls of flames, three-quarters of a mile away though
they were.

People, calling loudly that “it was Carewe's warehouses,” were running
down the street. From the stable, old Nelson, on her father's best
horse, came galloping, and seeing the white figure in the doorway, cried
out in a quavering voice, without checking his steed.

“I goin' tell yo' pa, Miss Betty, he in de kentry on lan' bus'ness. Go
back in de house, Missy!”

The other servants, like ragged sketches in the night, flitted by, with
excited ejaculations, to join the runners, and Miss Betty followed them
across the dew-strewn turf in her night slippers, but at the gate she
stopped.

From up the street came the sound of a bell smaller than those of the
churches and courthouse, yet one that outdid all others in the madness
of its appeal to clear the way. It was borne along by what seemed at
first an indefinite black mass, but which--as the Aurora grew keener,
producing even here a faint, yellow twilight--resolved itself into a
mob of hoarsely-shouting men and boys, who were running and tugging at
ropes, which drew along three extraordinary vehicles. They came rapidly
down the street and passed Miss Betty with a hubbub and din beyond all
understanding; one line of men, most of them in red shirts and oil-cloth
helmets, at a dead run with the hose-cart; a second line with the
hand-engine; the third dragging the ladder-wagon. One man was riding, a
tall, straight gentleman in evening clothes and without a hat, who stood
precariously in the hose-cart, calling in an annoyed tone through a
brazen trumpet. Miss Betty recognized him at once; it was he who caught
her kitten; and she thought that if she had been Fanchon Bareaud she
must have screamed a warning, for his balance appeared a thing of mere
luck, and, if he fell, he would be trampled under foot and probably run
over by the engine. But, happily (she remembered), she was not Fanchon
Bareaud!

Before, behind, and beside the Department, raced a throng of boys,
wild with the joy experienced by their species when property is being
handsomely destroyed; after them came panting women, holding their sides
and gasping with the effort to keep up with the flying procession.

Miss Betty trembled, for she had never seen the like in her life; she
stood close to the hedge and let them go by; then she turned in after
them and ran like a fleet young deer. She was going to the fire.

Over all the uproar could be heard the angry voice through the trumpet,
calling the turns of the streets to the men in the van, upbraiding them
and those of the other two companies impartially; and few of his hearers
denied the chief his right to express some chagrin; since the Department
(organized a half-year, hard-drilled, and this its first fire worth the
name) was late on account of the refusal of the members to move until
they had donned their new uniforms; for the uniforms had arrived from
Philadelphia two months ago, and tonight offered the first opportunity
to display them in public.

“Hail Vanrevel!” panted Tappingham Marsh to Eugene Madrillon, as the
two, running in the van of the “Hose Company,” splattered through a
mud-puddle. “You'd think he was Carewe's only son and heir instead of
his worst enemy. Hark to the man!”

“I'd let it burn, if I were he,” returned the other.

“It was all Crailey's fault,” said Tappingham, swinging an arm free
to wipe the spattered mud from his face. “He swore he wouldn't budge
without his uniform, and the rest only backed him up; that was all.
Crailey said Carewe could better afford to lose his shanties than the
overworked Department its first chance to look beautiful and earnest.
Tom asked him why he didn't send for a fiddle,” Marsh finished with a
chuckle.

“Carewe might afford to lose a little, even a warehouse or two, if only
out of what he's taken from Crailey and the rest of us, these three
years!”

“Taken from Vanrevel, you mean. Who doesn't know where Crailey's--Here's
Main Street; look out for the turn!”

They swung out of the thick shadows of Carewe Street into full view of
the fire, and their faces were illuminated as by sunrise.

The warehouses stood on the river-bank, at the foot of the street,
just south of the new “covered bridge.” There were four of them, huge,
bare-sided buildings; the two nearer the bridge of brick, the others
of wood, and all of them rich with stores of every kind of
river-merchandise and costly freight: furniture that had voyaged from
New England down the long coast, across the Mexican Gulf, through
the flat Delta, and had made the winding journey up the great river a
thousand miles, and almost a thousand more, following the greater
and lesser tributaries; cloth from Connecticut that had been sold in
Philadelphia, then carried over mountains and through forests by steam,
by canal, by stage, and six-mule freight-wagons, to Pittsburg, down the
Ohio, and thence up to Rouen on the packet; Tennessee cotton, on its way
to Massachusetts and Rhode Island spindles, lay there beside huge mounds
of raw wool from Illinois, ready to be fed to the Rouen mill; dates and
nuts from the Caribbean Sea; lemons from groves of the faraway tropics;
cigars from the Antilles; tobacco from Virginia and Kentucky; most
precious of all, the great granary of the farmers' wheat from the level
fields at home; and all the rich stores and the houses that held them,
as well as the wharves upon which they had been landed, and the steamers
that brought them up the Rouen River, belonged to Robert Carewe.

That it was her father's property which was imperilled attested to the
justification of Miss Betty in running to a fire; and, as she followed
the crowd into Main Street, she felt a not unpleasant proprietary
interest in the spectacle. Very opposite sensations animated the breast
of the man with the trumpet, who was more acutely conscious than any
other that these were Robert Carewe's possessions which were burning
so handsomely. Nor was he the only one among the firemen who ground his
teeth over the folly of the uniforms; for now they could plainly see the
ruin being wrought, the devastation threatened. The two upper stories
of the southernmost warehouse had swathed themselves in one great flame;
the building next on the north, also of frame, was smoking heavily; and
there was a wind from the southwest, which, continuing with the fire
unchecked, threatened the town itself. There was work for the Volunteer
Brigade that night.

They came down Main Street with a rush, the figure of their chief
swaying over them on his high perch, while their shouting was drowned in
the louder roar of greeting from the crowd, into which they plunged as
a diver into the water, swirls and eddies of people marking the wake.
A moment later a section of the roof of the burning warehouse fell in,
with a sonorous and reverberating crash.

The “Engine Company” ran the force-pump out to the end of one of the
lower wharves; two lines of pipe were attached; two rows of men mounted
the planks for the pumpers, and, at the word of command, began the
up-and-down of the hand-machine with admirable vim. Nothing happened;
the water did not come; something appeared to be wrong with the
mechanism. As everyone felt the crucial need of haste, nothing could
have been more natural than that all the members of the “Engine Company”
 should simultaneously endeavor to repair the defect; therefore ensued
upon the spot a species of riot which put the engine out of its sphere
of usefulness.

In the meantime, fifty or sixty men and boys who ran with the machines,
but who had no place in their operation, being the Bucket Brigade, had
formed a line and were throwing large pails of water in the general
direction of the southernmost warehouse, which it was now impossible to
save; while the gentlemen of the “Hook-and-Ladder Company,” abandoning
their wagons, and armed with axes, heroically assaulted the big door
of the granary, the second building, whence they were driven by the
exasperated chief, who informed them that the only way to save the
wheat was to save the building. Crailey Gray, one of the berated axemen,
remained by the shattered door after the others had gone, and, struck by
a sudden thought, set his hand upon the iron latch and opened the door
by this simple process. It was not locked. Crailey leaned against the
casement and laughed with his whole soul and body.

Meanwhile, by dint of shouting in men's ears when near them, through
the trumpet when distant, tearing axes from their hands, imperiously
gesticulating to subordinate commanders, and lingering in no one spot
for more than a second, Mr. Vanrevel reduced his forces to a semblance
of order in a remarkably short time, considering the confusion into
which they had fallen.

The space between the burning warehouse and that next it was not more
than fifty feet in width, but fifty feet so hot no one took thought
of entering there; an area as discomfiting in appearance as it was
beautiful with the thick rain of sparks and firebrands that fell upon
it. But the chief had decided that this space must be occupied, and
more: must be held, since it was the only point of defence for the
second warehouse. The roof of this building would burn, which would mean
the destruction of the warehouse, unless it could be mounted, because
the streams of water could not play upon it from the ground, nor, from
the ladders, do much more than wet the projecting eaves. It was a gable
roof, the eaves twenty feet lower on the south side than on the north,
where the ladders could not hope to reach them. Vanrevel swung his line
of bucketeers round to throw water, not upon the flames, but upon the
ladder-men.

Miss Carewe stood in the crowd upon the opposite side of the broad
street. Even there her cheeks were uncomfortably hot, and sometimes she
had to brush a spark from her shoulder, though she was too much excited
to mind this. She was watching the beautiful fiery furnace between the
north wall of the burning warehouse and the south wall of its neighbor,
the fifty feet brilliant and misty with vaporous rose-color, dotted
with the myriad red stars, her eyes shining with the reflection of their
fierce beauty. She saw how the vapors moved there, like men walking in
fire, and she was vaguely recalling Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego,
when, over the silhouetted heads of the crowd before her, a long black
ladder rose, wobbled, tilted crazily, then lamely advanced and ranged
itself against the south wall of the second warehouse, its top rung
striking ten feet short of the eaves. She hoped that no one had any
notion of mounting that ladder.

A figure appeared upon it immediately, that of a gentleman, bareheaded
and in evening dress, with a brass trumpet swinging from a cord about
his shoulders; the noise grew less; the shouting died away, and the
crowd became almost silent, as the figure, climbing slowly drew up above
their heads. Two or three rungs beneath, came a second--a man in helmet
and uniform. The clothes of both men, drenched by the bucketeers, clung
to them, steaming. As the second figure mounted, a third appeared;
but this was the last, for the ladder was frail, and sagged toward the
smoking wall with the weight of the three.

The chief, three-fourths of the way to the top, shouted down a stifled
command, and a short grappling-ladder, fitted at one end with a pair of
spiked iron hooks, was passed to him. Then he toiled upward until his
feet rested on the third rung from the top; here he turned, setting his
back to the wall, lifted the grappling-ladder high over his head so
that it rested against the eaves above him, and brought it down sharply,
fastening the spiked hooks in the roof. As the eaves projected fully
three feet, this left the grappling-ladder hanging that distance out
from the wall, its lowest rung a little above the level of the chief's
shoulders.

Miss Betty drew in her breath with a little choked cry. There was a
small terraced hill of piled-up packing-boxes near her, possession of
which had been taken by a company of raggamuffinish boys, and she found
herself standing on the highest box and sharing the summit with these
questionable youths, almost without noting her action in mounting
thither, so strained was the concentration of her attention upon the
figure high up in the rose-glow against the warehouse wall. The man,
surely, surely, was not going to trust himself to that bit of wooden web
hanging from the roof! Where was Miss Bareaud that she permitted it?
Ah, if Betty had been Fanchon and madwoman enough to have accepted
this madman, she would have compelled him to come down at once, and
thereafter would lock him up in the house whenever the bells rang!

But the roof was to be mounted or Robert Carewe's property lost. Already
little flames were dancing up from the shingles, where firebrands had
fallen, their number increasing with each second. So Vanrevel raised his
arms, took a hard grip upon the lowest rung of the grappling-ladder and
tried it with his weight; the iron hooks bit deeper into the roof; they
held. He swung himself out into the air with nothing beneath him, caught
the rung under his knee, and for a moment hung there while the crowd
withheld from breathing; then a cloud of smoke, swirling that way, made
him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted him out altogether,
and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and empty, so that
at first there was an instant when they thought that he had fallen. But,
as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on the roof.

It was an agile and daring thing to do, and the man who did it was
mightily applauded. The cheering bothered him, however, for he was
trying to make them understand, below, what would happen to the “Engine
Company” in case the water was not sent through the lines directly; and
what he said should be done to the engineers included things that would
have blanched the cheek of the most inventive Spanish Inquisitor that
ever lived.

Miss Betty made a gesture as if to a person within whispering distance.
“Your coat is on fire,” she said in an ordinary conversational tone,
without knowing she had spoken aloud, and Mr. Vanrevel, more than one
hundred feet away, seemed particularly conscious of the pertinence of
her remark. He removed the garment with alacrity, and, for the lack
of the tardy water, began to use it as a flail upon the firebrands and
little flames about him; the sheer desperate best of a man in a rage,
doing what he could when others failed him. Showers of sparks fell upon
him; the smoke was rising everywhere from the roof and the walls below;
and, growing denser and denser, shrouded him in heavy veils, so that, as
he ran hither and thither, now visible, now unseen, stamping and beating
and sweeping away the brands that fell, he seemed but the red and
ghostly caricature of a Xerxes, ineffectually lashing the sea. They were
calling to him imploringly to come down, in heaven's name to come down!

The second man had followed to the top of the ladder against the wall,
and there he paused, waiting to pass up the line of hose when the
word should come that the force-pump had been repaired; but the people
thought that he waited because he was afraid to trust himself to the
grappling-ladder. He was afraid, exceedingly afraid; though that was not
why he waited; and he was still chuckling over the assault of the axes.

His situation had not much the advantage of that of the chief: his red
shirt might have been set with orange jewels, so studded it was with the
flying sparks; and, a large brand dropping upon his helmet, he threw up
his hand to dislodge it and lost the helmet. The great light fell
upon his fair hair and smiling face, and it was then that Miss Betty
recognized the Incroyable of her garden.



CHAPTER VI. The Ever Unpractical Feminine

It was an investigating negro child of tender years, who, possessed of
a petty sense of cause and effect, brought an illuminative simplicity to
bear upon the problem of the force-pump; and a multitudinous agitation
greeted his discovery that the engineers had forgotten to connect their
pipes with the river.

This naive omission was fatal to the second warehouse; the wall burst
into flame below Crailey Gray, who clung to the top of the ladder,
choking, stifled, and dizzily fighting the sparks that covered him, yet
still clutching the nozzle of the hose-line they had passed to him. When
the stream at last leaped forth, making the nozzle fight in his grasp,
he sent it straight up into the air and let the cataract fall back upon
himself and upon the two men beneath him on the ladder.

There came a moment of blessed relief; and he looked out over the broad
rosy blur of faces in the street, where no one wondered more than he
how the water was to reach the roof. Suddenly he started, wiped his eyes
with his wet sleeve, and peered intently down from under the shading
arm. His roving glance crossed the smoke and flame to rest upon a tall,
white figure that stood, full-length above the heads of the people, upon
a pedestal wrought with the grotesque images of boys: a girl's figure,
still as noon, enrapt, like the statue of some young goddess for whom
were made these sacrificial pyres. Mr. Gray recognized his opportunity.

A blackened and unrecognizable face peered down from the eaves, and the
voice belonging to it said, angrily: “Why didn't they send up that line
before they put the water through it?”

“Never mind, Tom,” answered Crailey cheerfully, “I'll bring it up.” “You
can't; I'll come down for it. Don't be every kind of a fool!”

“You want a monopoly, do you?” And Crailey, calling to Tappingham Marsh,
next below him, to come higher, left the writhing nozzle in the latter's
possession, swung himself out upon the grappling-ladder, imitating the
chief's gymnastics, and immediately, one hand grasping the second rung,
one knee crooked over the lowest, leaned head down and took the nozzle
from Marsh. It was a heavy weight, and though Marsh supported the line
beneath it, the great stream hurtling forth made it a difficult thing to
manage, for it wriggled, recoiled and struggled as if it had been alive.
Crailey made three attempts to draw himself up; but the strain was too
much for his grip, and on the third attempt his fingers melted from
the rung, and he swung down fearfully, hanging by his knee, but still
clinging to the nozzle.

“Give it up, Crailey; it isn't worth it,” Vanrevel called from overhead,
not daring the weight of both on the light grappling-ladder.

But though Crailey cared no more for the saving of Robert Carewe's
property than for a butterfly's wing in China, he could not give up now,
any more than as a lad he could have forborne to turn somersaults when
the prettiest little girl looked out of the school-house window. He
passed the nozzle to Tappingham, caught the second rung with his left
hand, and, once more hanging head downward, seized the nozzle; then,
with his knee hooked tight, as the gushing water described a huge
semicircle upon the smoke and hot vapor, he made a mad lurch through the
air, while women shrieked; but he landed upright, half-sitting on the
lowest rung. He climbed the grappling-ladder swiftly, in spite of the
weight and contortions of the unmanageable beast he carried with him;
Tom leaned far down and took it from him; and Crailey, passing the
eaves, fell, exhausted, upon the roof. Just as he reached this temporary
security, a lady was borne, fainting, out of the acclaiming crowd.
Fanchon was there.

Word had been passed to the gentlemen of the “Engine Company” to shut
off the water in order to allow the line to be carried up the ladder,
and they received the command at the moment Tom lifted the nozzle, so
that the stream dried up in his hands. This was the last straw, and the
blackened, singed and scarred chief, setting the trumpet to his lips,
gave himself entirely to wrath.

It struck Crailey, even as he lay, coughing and weeping with smoke, that
there was something splendid and large in the other's rage. Vanrevel was
ordinarily so steady and cool that this was worth seeing, this berserker
gesture; worth hearing, this wonderful profanity, like Washington's one
fit of cursing; and Crailey, knowing Tom, knew, too, that it had not
come upon him because Carewe had a daughter into whose eyes Tom had
looked; nor did he rage because he believed that Crailey's life and
his were in the greater hazard for the lack of every drop of water that
should have issued from the empty nozzle. Their lungs were burdened with
smoke, while the intolerable smarting of throat, eyes, and nostrils was
like the incision of a thousand needles in the membranes; their clothes
were luminous with glowing circles where the sparks were eating; the
blaze widened on the wall beneath them, and Marsh was shouting hoarsely
that he could no longer hold his position on the ladder; yet Crailey
knew that none of this was in Tom's mind as he stood, scorched,
blistered, and haggard, on the edge of the roof, shaking his fist at
the world. It was because his chance of saving the property of a man he
despised was being endangered.

Crailey stretched forth a hand and touched his friend's knee. “Your side
of the conversation is a trifle loud, Tom,” he said. “Miss Carewe is
down there, across the street, on a pile of boxes.”

Tom stopped in the middle of a word, for which he may have received
but half a black stroke from the recording angel. He wheeled toward the
street, and, shielding his inflamed eyes with his hand, gazed downward
in a stricken silence. From that moment Mr. Vanrevel's instructions to
his followers were of a decorum at which not the meekest Sunday-school
scholar dare have cavilled.

The three men now on the long ladder, Marsh, Eugene Madrillon, and Will
Cummings, found their position untenable; for the flames, reaching all
along the wall, were licking at the ladder itself, between Marsh and
Eugene. “I can't stand this any longer,” gasped Tappingham, “but I can't
leave those two up there, either.”

“Not alone,” shouted Cummings from beneath Madrillon. “Let's go up.”

Thus it happened, that when the water came again, and Vanrevel let it
fall in a grateful cascade upon Crailey and himself, three manly voices
were heard singing, as three men toiled through the billows of rosy
gray, below the beleaguered pair:

“Oh the noble Duke of York, He had Ten thousand men; He marched them up
the side of a house, And marched them down again!”


A head appeared above the eaves, and Marsh, then Eugene, then Cummings,
came crawling over the cornice in turn, to join their comrades. They
were a gallant band, those young gentlemen of Rouen, and they came with
the ironical song on their lips, and, looking at one another, ragged and
scarified, burst into hoarse but indomitable laughter.

Two others made an attempt to follow, and would not be restrained. It
was noticed that parts of the lower ladder had been charring; and the
ladder-men were preparing to remove it to a less dangerous point, when
old General Trumble and young Jefferson Bareaud made a rush to mount it,
and were well upon their upward way before the ladder, weakened at the
middle, sagged, splintered, and broke, Trumble and Bareaud falling with
it. And there was the grappling-ladder, dangling forty feet above the
ground; and there were the five upon the roof.

The Department had no other ladder of more than half the length of the
shattered one. Not only the Department, but every soul in Rouen,
knew that; and there rose the thick, low sigh of a multitude, a sound
frightful to hear. It became a groan, then swelled into a deep cry of
alarm and lamentation.

And now, almost simultaneously, the west wall of the building, and
the south wall, and all the southwestern portions of the roof, covered
them-selves with voluminous mantles of flame, which increased so hugely
and with such savage rapidity that the one stream on the roof was seen
to be but a ridiculous and useless opposition.

Everybody began to shout advice to his neighbor; and nobody listened
even to himself. The firemen were in as great a turmoil as was the
crowd, while women covered their eyes. Young Frank Chenoweth was sobbing
curses upon the bruised and shaking Trumble and Jefferson Bareaud, who
could only stand remorseful, impotently groaning, and made no answer.

The walls of the southernmost warehouse followed the roof, crashing
inward one after the other, a sacrificial pyre with its purpose
consummated; and in the seeth and flare of its passing, Tom Vanrevel
again shaded his eyes with his hand, and looked down across the upturned
faces. The pedestal with the grotesque carvings was still there; but the
crowning figure had disappeared--the young goddess was gone. For she,
of all that throng, had an idea in her head, and, after screaming it
to every man within reach, only to discover the impossibility of making
herself understood in that Babel, she was struggling to make her way
toward the second warehouse, through the swaying jam of people. It was
a difficult task, as the farther in she managed to go, the denser became
the press and the more tightly she found the people wedged, until she
received involuntary aid from the firemen. In turning their second
stream to play ineffectually upon the lower strata of flame, they
accidentally deflected it toward the crowd, who separated wildly,
leaving a big gap, of which Miss Betty took instant advantage. She
darted across, and the next moment, unnoticed, had entered the building
through the door which Crailey Gray had opened.

The five young men on the roof were well aware that there was little to
do but to wait, and soon they would see which was to win, they or the
fire; so they shifted their line of hose to the eastern front of the
building--out of harm's way, for a little time, at least--and held the
muzzle steady, watching its work. And in truth it was not long before
they understood which would conquer. The southern and western portions
of the building had flung out great flames that fluttered and flared
on the breeze like Titanic flags; and steadily, slowly, at first, then
faster as the seconds flew, the five were driven backward, up the low
slope of the roof toward the gable-ridge. Tom Vanrevel held the first
joint of the nozzle, and he retreated with a sulky face, lifting his
foot grudgingly at each step. They were all silent, now, and no one
spoke until Will Cummings faltered:

“Surely they'll get a rope up to us some way?”

Will knew as well as did the others that there was no way; but his
speech struck the sullen heart of the chief with remorse. He turned. “I
hope you'll all forgive me for getting you up here.”

A sound, half sob, half giggle, came from the parched lips of Eugene
Madrillon, as he patted Tom on the shoulder without speaking, and
Crailey nodded quietly, then left the group and went to the eastern edge
of the roof and looked out upon the crowd. Cummings dropped the line
and sat down, burying his hot face in his arms, for they all saw that
Vanrevel thought “it was no use,” but a question of a few minutes, and
they would retreat across the gable and either jump or go down with the
roof.

Since the world began, idle and industrious philosophers have speculated
much upon the thoughts of men about to die; yet it cannot be too
ingenuous to believe that such thoughts vary as the men, their
characters, and conditions of life vary. Nevertheless, pursuant with
the traditions of minstrelsy and romance, it is conceivable that young,
unmarried men, called upon to face desperate situations, might, at the
crucial moment, rush to a common experience of summoning the vision,
each of his heart's desire, and to meet, each his doom, with her name
upon his lips.

An extraordinary thing occurred in the present instance, for, by means
of some fragmentary remarks let fall at the time, and afterward recalled
such as Tappingham Marsh's gasping: “At least it will be on her father's
roof!” and from other things later overheard, an inevitable deduction
has been reached that four of the five gentlemen in the perilous case
herein described were occupied with the vision of the same person, to
wit: Miss Elizabeth Carewe, “the last--the prettiest--to come to town!”

Crailey Gray, alone, spoke not at all; but why did he strain and strain
his eyes toward that empty' pedestal with the grotesque carvings? Did he
seek Fanchon there, or was Miss Carewe the last sweet apparition in the
fancies of all five of the unhappy young men?

The coincidence of the actual appearance of the lady among them,
therefore seemed the more miraculous, when, wan and hopeless, staggering
desperately backward to the gable-ridge, they heard a clear contralto
voice behind them:

“Hadn't you better all come down now?” it said.--“The stairway will be
on fire before long.”

Only one thing could have been more shockingly unexpected to the five
than that there should be a sixth person on the roof, and this was that
the sixth person should be Miss Betty Carewe.

They turned, aghast, agape, chopfallen with astonishment, stunned, and
incredulous.

She stood just behind the gable-ridge, smiling amiably, a most
incongruous little pink fan in her hand, the smoke-wreaths partly
obscuring her and curling between the five and her white dress, like
mists floating across the new moon.

Was it but a kindly phantasm of the brain? Was it the incarnation of
the last vision of the lost Volunteers? Was it a Valkyrie assuming that
lovely likeness to perch upon this eyrie, waiting to bear their heroic
souls to Valhalla, or--was it Miss Betty Carewe?

To the chief she spoke--all of them agreed to that afterward--but it was
Crailey who answered, while Tom could only stare, and stand wagging his
head at the lovely phantom, like a Mandarin on a shelf.

“My mother in heaven!” gasped Crailey. “How did you come up here?”

“There's a trap in the roof on the other side of the ridge,” she said,
and she began to fan herself with the pink fan. “A stairway runs all the
way down--old Nelson showed me through these buildings yesterday--and
that side isn't on fire yet. I'm so sorry I didn't think of it until a
moment ago, because you could have brought the water up that way. But
don't you think you'd better come down now?”



CHAPTER VII. The Comedian

Not savage Hun, nor “barbarous Vandyke,” nor demon Apache, could wish
to dwell upon the state of mind of the Chief of the Rouen Volunteer
Fire Department; therefore, let the curtain of mercy descend. Without
a word, he turned and dragged the nozzle to the eastern eaves, whence,
after a warning gesture to those below, he dropped it to the ground.
And, out of compassion, it should be little more than hinted that the
gesture of warning was very slight.

When the rescued band reached the foot of the last flight of stairs,
they beheld the open doorway as a frame for a great press of intent and
con-torted faces, every eye still strained to watch the roof; none
of the harrowed spectators comprehending the appearance of the girl's
figure there, nor able to see whither she had led the five young men,
until Tappingham Marsh raised a shout as he leaped out of the door and
danced upon the solid earth again.

Then, indeed, there was a mighty uproar; cheer after cheer ascended to
the red vault of heaven; women wept, men whooped, and the people rushed
for the heroes with wide-open, welcoming arms. Jefferson Bareaud
and Frank Chenoweth and General Trumble dashed at Tom Vanrevel with
incoherent cries of thanksgiving, shaking his hands and beating him
hysterically upon the back. He greeted them with bitter laughter.

“Help get the water into the next warehouse; this one is beyond control,
but we can save the other two. Take the lines in through the door!”
 He brushed the rejoicing friends off abruptly, and went on in a queer,
hollow voice: “There are stairs--and I'm so sorry I didn't think of it
until a moment ago, because you could have brought the water up that
way!”

A remarkable case of desertion had occurred, the previous instant, under
his eyes. As the party emerged from the warehouse into the street, Tom
heard Crailey say hurriedly to Miss Carewe: “Let me get you away come
quickly!” saw him suddenly seize her band, and, eluding the onrushing
crowd, run with her round the corner of the building. And somehow,
through what inspiration, or through what knowledge of his partner's
“temperament,” heaven knows, the prophetic soul of the chief was
unhappily assured that Crailey would offer himself as escort to her
home, and find acceptance. But why not? Was it Crailey who had publicly
called his fellow-man fool, idiot, imbecile, at the top of his lungs,
only to find himself the proven numskull of the universe! Tom stood for
a moment staring after the vanishing pair, while over his face stole the
strangest expression that ever man saw there; then, with meekly bowed
shoulders, he turned again to his work.

At the corner of the warehouse, Miss Carewe detached her hand from
Crailey's, yet still followed him as he made a quick detour round the
next building. A minute or two later they found themselves, undetected,
upon Main Street in the rear of the crowd. There Crailey paused.

“Forgive me,” he said, breathlessly, “for taking your hand. I thought
you would like to get away.”

She regarded him gravely, so that he found it difficult to read
her look, except that it was seriously questioning; but whether the
interrogation was addressed to him or to herself he could not determine.
After a silence she said:

“I don't know why I followed you. I believe it must have been because
you didn't give me time to think.”

This, of course, made him even quicker with her than before. “It's all
over,” he said briskly. “The first warehouse is gone; the second will
go, but they'll save the others easily enough, now that you have
pointed out that the lines may be utilized otherwise than as adjuncts of
performances on the high trapeze!” They were standing by a picket-fence,
and he leaned against it, overcome by mirth in which she did not join.
Her gravity reacted upon him at once, and his laughter was stopped
short. “Will you not accept me as an escort to your home?” he said
formally. “I do not know,” she returned simply, the sort of honest
trouble in her glance that is seen only in very young eyes.

“'What reason in the world!” he returned, with a crafty sharpness of
astonishment.

She continued to gaze upon him thoughtfully, while he tried to look into
her eyes, but was baffled because the radiant beams from the lady's orbs
(as the elder Chenoweth might have said) rested somewhere dangerously
near his chin, which worried him, for, though his chin made no retreat
and was far from ill-looking, it was, nevertheless, that feature which
he most distrusted. “Won't you tell me why not?” he repeated, uneasily.

“Because,” she answered at last, speaking hesitatingly, “because it
isn't so easy a matter for me as you seem to think. You have not been
introduced to me, and I know you never will be, and that what you told
me was true.”

“Which part of what I told you?” The question escaped from him
instantly.

“That the others might come when they liked, but that you could not.”

“Oh yes, yes.” His expression altered to a sincere dejection; his
shoulders drooped, and his voice indicated supreme annoyance. “I might
have known someone would tell you! Who was it? Did they say why I--”

“On account of your quarrel with my father.”

“My quarrel with your father!” he exclaimed; and his face lit with an
elated surprise; his shoulders straightened. He took a step nearer her,
and asked, eagerly: “Who told you that?”

“My father himself. He spoke of a Mr. Vanrevel whom he--disliked, and
whom I must not meet; and, remembering what you had said, of course I
knew that you were he.”

“Oh!” Crailey's lips began to form a smile of such appealing and
inimitable sweetness that Voltaire would have trusted him; a smile
alto-gether rose-leaves. “Then I lose you,” he said, “for my only chance
to know you was in keeping it hidden from you. And now you understand!”

“No,” she answered, gravely, “I don't understand; that is what troubles
me. If I did, and believed you had the right of the difference, I could
believe it no sin that you should speak to me, should take me home now.
I think it is wrong not to act from your own understanding of things.”

The young man set his expression as one indomitably fixed upon the
course of honor, cost what it might; and, in the very action, his
lurking pleasure in doing it hopped out in the flicker of a twinkle in
his eyes, and as instantly sought cover again--the flea in the rose-jar.

“Then you must ask some other,” he said, firmly. “A disinterested person
should tell you. The difference was political in the beginning, but
became personal afterward; and it is now a quarrel which can never be
patched up, though, for my part, I wish that it could be. I can say no
more, because a party to it should not speak.”

She met his level look squarely at last; and no man ever had a
more truthful pair of eyes than Crailey Gray, for it was his great
accomplishment that he could adjust his emotion, his reason, and
something that might be called his faith, to fit any situation in any
character.

“You may take me home,” she answered. “I may be wrong, and even
disloyal; but I do not feel it so, now. You did a very brave thing
tonight to save him from loss, and I think that what you have said was
just what you should have said.”

So they went down the street, the hubbub and confusion of the fire
growing more and more indistinct behind them. They walked slowly, and,
for a time, neither spoke; yet the silence was of a kind which the
adept rejoiced to have produced thus soon--their second meeting. For he
believed there were more strange things in heaven and earth than
Horatio wot; and one of the strangest was that whenever he was near
an attractive woman during a silence such as this, something not to be
defined, but as effective as it was indefinite, always went out from
him to her. It was like a word of tenderness, a word too gentle, too
compelling, too sweet, to be part of any tongue, spoken or written. And
more: this ineffable word had an echo, and came back to him from the
woman.

As his partner had in dress, so Crailey had with women, some color of
the Beau; but it was not in what experience had given him to recognize
as a fact: that they were apt to fall in love with him. (That they were
apt to remain in love with him--he understood perfectly--was another
matter.) And he knew when they were doing it; could have told them
accurately, at each step, what they were feeling, thinking, dreaming,
during the process, because he was usually exhibiting the same symptoms
to himself at the same time.

Thus, his own breast occupied with that dizzy elation which followed its
reception of the insane young god's arrows, and his heart warm with the
rise of the old emotion that he knew so well, he was nevertheless able
to walk with his finger on the pulse of the exquisite moment, counting
her heartbeats and his own.

So, to his fancy, as they walked, the little space between them was hung
with brilliant strands, like gossamer chains of gold, already linking
them together; every second fixing another slender, precious fetter,
binding them closer, drawing her nearer. He waited until they passed
into the shadows of the deserted Carewe Street before he spoke. There he
stopped abruptly; at which she turned, astonished.

“Now that you have saved my life,” he said, in a low, tremulous tone,
“what are you going to do with it?”

Her eyes opened almost as widely as they had at her first sight of him
in her garden. There was a long pause before she replied, and when she
did, it was to his considerable surprise.

“I have never seen a play, except the funny little ones we acted at the
convent,” she said, “but isn't that the way they speak on the stage?”

Crailey realized that his judgment of the silence bad been mistaken, and
yet it was with a thrill of delight that he recognized her clear reading
of him. He had been too florid again.

“Let us go.” His voice was soft with restrained forgiveness. “You mocked
me once before.

“Mocked you?” she repeated, as they went on.

“Mocked me,” he said, firmly. “Mocked me for seeming theatrical, and yet
you have learned that what I said was true; as you will again.”

She mused upon this; then, as in whimsical indulgence to an importunate
child:

“Well, tell me what you mean when you say I saved your life.”

“You came alone,” he began, hastily, “to stand upon that burning roof--”

“Whence all but him had fled!” Her laughter rang out, interrupting
him. “My room was on the fourth floor at St. Mary's, and I didn't mind
climbing three flights this evening.”

Crailey's good-nature was always perfect. “You mock me and you mock me!”
 he cried, and made her laughter but part of a gay duet. “I know I have
gone too fast, have said things I should have waited to say; but, ah!
remember the small chance I have against the others who can see you
when they like. Don't flout me because I try to make the most of a rare,
stolen moment with you.”

“Do!” she exclaimed, grave upon the instant. “Do make the most of it! I
have nothing but inexperience. Make the most by treating me seriously.
Won't you? I know you can, and I--I--” She faltered to a full stop. She
was earnest and quiet, and there had been something in her tone, too--as
very often there was--that showed how young she was. “Oh!” she began
again, turning to him impulsively, “I have thought about you since that
evening in the garden, and I have wished I could know you. I can't be
quite clear how it happened, but even those few minutes left a number
of strong impressions about you. And the strongest was that you were one
with whom I could talk of a great many things, if you would only be
real with me. I believe--though I'm not sure why I do--that it is very
difficult for you to be real; perhaps because you are so different at
different times that you aren't sure, yourself, which the real you is.
But the person that you are beginning to be for my benefit must be the
most trifling of all your selves, lighter and easier to put on than the
little mask you carried the other night. If there were nothing better
underneath the mask, I might play, too.”

“Did you learn this at the convent?” gasped Crailey.

“There was a world there in miniature,” she answered, speaking very
quickly. “I think all people are made of the same materials, only in
such different proportions. I think a little world might hold as much as
the largest, if you thought it all out hard enough, and your experience
might be just as broad and deep in a small corner of the earth as
anywhere else. But I don't know! I want to understand--I want to
understand everything! I read books, and there are people--but no one
who tells me what I want--I--”

“Stop.” He lifted his hand. “I won't act; I shall never 'play' for you
again.” He was breathless; the witching silence was nothing to what
stirred him now. A singular exaltation rose in him, together with the
reckless impulse to speak from the mood her vehement confidence had
in-spired. He gave way to it.

“I know, I know,” he said huskily. “I understand all you mean, all you
feel, all you wish. It is all echoing here, and here, and here!” He
touched his breast, his eyes, and his forehead with the fingers of his
long and slender hand. “We sigh and strain our eyes and stretch out our
arms in the dark, groping always for the strange blessing that is just
beyond our grasp, seeking for the precious unknown that lies just over
the horizon! It's what they meant by the pot of gold where the rainbow
ends--only, it may be there, after all!”

They stopped unconsciously, and remained standing at the lower end of
the Carewe hedge. The western glow had faded, and she was gazing at him
through the darkness, leaning forward, never dreaming that her tight
grasp had broken the sticks of the little pink fan.

“Yes,” she whispered, eagerly. “You are right: you understand!”

He went on, the words coming faster and faster: “We are haunted--you and
I--by the wish to know all things, and by the question that lies under
every thought we have: the agonizing Whither? Isn't it like that? It
is really death that makes us think. You are a good Catholic: you go
to mass; but you wish to know. Does God reign, or did it all happen?
Sometimes it seems so deadly probable that the universe just was, no
God to plan it, nothing but things; that we die as sparrows die, and the
brain is all the soul we have, a thing that becomes clogged and stops
some day. And is that all?”

She shivered slightly, but her steadfast eyes did not shift from him. He
threw back his head, and his face, uplifted to the jewelled sky of the
moonless night, was beatific in its peacefulness, as he continued in an
altered tone, gentle and low:

“I think all questions are answered there. The stars tell it all. When
you look at them you know! They have put them on our flag. There are
times when this seems but a poor nation: boastful, corrupt, violent, and
preparing, as it is now, to steal another country by fraud and war; yet
the stars on the flag always make me happy and confident. Do you see
the constellations swinging above us, such unimaginable vastnesses, not
roving or crashing through the illimitable at haphazard, but moving in
more excellent measure, and to a finer rhythm, than the most delicate
clockwork man ever made? The great ocean-lines mark our seas with their
paths through the water; the fine brains of the earth are behind the
ships that sail from port to port, yet how awry the system goes! When
does a ship come to her harbor at an hour determined when she sailed?
What is a ship beside the smallest moon of the smallest world? But,
there above us, moons, worlds, suns, all the infinite cluster of
colossi, move into place to the exactness of a hair at the precise
instant. That instant has been planned, you see; it is part of a
system--and can a system exist that no mind made? Think of the Mind that
made this one! Do you believe so inconceivably majestic an Intelligence
as that could be anything but good? Ah, when you wonder, look above you;
look above you in the night, I say,” he cried, his hand upraised like
his transfigured face. “Look above you and you will never fear that a
sparrow's fall could go unmarked!”

It was not to the stars that she looked, but to the orator, as long as
he held that pose, which lasted until a hard-ridden horse came galloping
down the street. As it dashed by, though the rider looked neither to
right nor left, Miss Betty unconsciously made a feverish clutch at her
companion's sleeve, drawing him closer to the hedge.

“It is my father,” she said hurriedly in a low voice. “He must not
see you. You must never come here. Perhaps--” She paused, then quickly
whispered: “You have been very kind to me. Good-night.”

He looked at her keenly, and through the dimness saw that her face was
shining with excitement. He did not speak again, but, taking a step
back-ward, smiled faintly, bent his head in humble acquiescence, and
made a slight gesture of his hand for her to leave him. She set her eyes
upon his once more, then turned swiftly and almost ran along the hedge
to the gate; but there she stopped and looked back. He was standing
where she had left him, his face again uplifted to the sky.

She waved him an uncertain farewell, and ran into the garden, both palms
against her burning cheeks.

Night is the great necromancer, and strange are the fabrics he weaves;
he lays queer spells; breathes so eerie an intoxication through the
dusk; he can cast such glamours about a voice! He is the very king of
fairyland.

Miss Betty began to walk rapidly up and down the garden paths, her
head bent and her bands still pressed to her cheeks; now and then an
unconscious exclamation burst from her, incoherent, more like a gasp
than a word. A long time she paced the vigil with her stirring heart,
her skirts sweeping the dew from the leaning flowers. Her lips moved
often, but only the confused, vehement “Oh, oh!” came from them, until
at last she paused in the middle of the garden, away from the trees,
where all was open to the sparkling firmament, and extended her arms
over her head.

“O, strange teacher,” she said aloud, “I take your beautiful stars! I
shall know how to learn from them!”

She gazed steadily upward, enrapt, her eyes resplendent with their own
starlight.

“Oh, stars, stars, stars!” she whispered.

In the teeth of all wizardry, Night's spells do pass at sunrise;
marvellous poems sink to doggerel, mighty dreams to blown ashes and
solids regain weight. Miss Betty, waking at daybreak, saw the motes
dancing in the sun at her window, and watched them with a placid,
unremembering eye. She began to stare at them in a puzzled way, while a
look of wonder slowly spread over her face. Suddenly she sat upright, as
though something had startled her. Her fingers clenched tightly.

“Ah, if that was playing!”



CHAPTER VIII. A Tale of a Political Difference

Mr. Carewe was already at the breakfast-table, but the light of his
countenance, hidden behind the Rouen Journal, was not vouchsafed to his
daughter when she took her place opposite him, nor did he see fit to
return her morning greeting, from which she generously concluded that
the burning of the two warehouses had meant a severe loss to him.

“I am so sorry, father,” she said gently. (She had not called him
“papa” since the morning after her ball.) “I hope it isn't to be a great
trouble to you.” There was no response, and, after waiting for some
time, she spoke again, rather tremulously, yet not timidly: “Father?”

He rose, and upon his brow were marked the blackest lines of anger she
had ever seen, so that she leaned back from him, startled; but he threw
down the open paper before her on the table, and struck it with his
clenched fist.

“Read that!” he said. And he stood over her while she read.

There were some grandiloquent headlines: “Miss Elizabeth Carewe an Angel
of Mercy! Charming Belle Saves the Lives of Five Prominent Citizens! Her
Presence of Mind Prevents Conflagration from Wiping Out the City!” It
may be noted that Will Cummings, editor and proprietor of the Journal,
had written these tributes, as well as the whole account of the
evening's transactions, and Miss Betty loomed as large in Will's
narrative as in his good and lovelorn heart. There was very little
concerning the fire in the Journal; it was nearly all about Betty. That
is one of the misfortunes which pursue a lady who allows an editor to
fall in love with her.

However, there was a scant mention of the arrival of the Volunteers
“upon the scene” (though none at all at the cause of their delay) and
an elo-quent paragraph was devoted to their handsome appearance, Mr.
Cummings having been one of those who insisted that the new uniforms
should be worn. “Soon,” said the Journal, “through the daring of the
Chief of the Department, and the Captain of the Hook-and-Ladder Company,
one of whom placed and mounted the grappling-ladder, over which he was
immediately followed by the other carrying the hose, a stream was sent
to play upon the devouring element, a feat of derring-do personally
witnessed by a majority of our readers. Mr. Vanrevel and Mr. Gray were
joined by Eugene Madrillon, Tappingham Marsh, and the editor of this
paper, after which occurred the unfortunate accident to the long ladder,
leaving the five named gentlemen in their terrible predicament, face to
face with death in its most awful form. At this frightful moment “--and
all the rest was about Miss Carewe.

As Will himself admitted, he had “laid himself out on that description.”
 One paragraph was composed of short sentences, each beginning with the
word “alone.” “Alone she entered the shattered door! Alone she set foot
upon the first flight of stairs! Alone she ascended the second! Alone
she mounted the third. Alone she lifted her hand to the trap! Alone
she opened it!” She was declared to have made her appearance to the
unfortunate prisoners on the roof, even as “the palm-laden dove to the
despairing Noah,” and Will also asserted repeatedly that she was the
“Heroine of the Hour.”

Miss Betty blushed to see her name so blazoned forth in print; but she
lacked one kind of vanity, and failed to find good reason for more than
a somewhat troubled laughter, the writer's purpose was so manifestly
kind in spite of the bizarre result.

“Oh, I wish Mr. Cummings hadn't!” she exclaimed. “It would have been
better not to speak of me at all, of course; but I can't see that there
is anything to resent--it is so funny!”

“Funny!” Mr. Carewe repeated the word in a cracked falsetto, with
the evident intention of mocking her, and at the same time hideously
contorted his face into a grotesque idiocy of expression, pursing
his lips so extremely, and setting his brows so awry, that his other
features were cartooned out of all familiar likeness, effecting an
alteration as shocking to behold, in a man of his severe cast of
countenance, as was his falsetto mimicry to hear. She rose in a kind of
terror, perceiving that this contortion was produced in burlesque of her
own expression, and, as he pressed nearer her, stepped back, overturning
her chair. She had little recollection of her father during her
childhood; and as long as she could remember, no one had spoken to her
angrily, or even roughly.

As she retreated from him, he leaned forward, thrusting the hideous mask
closer to her white and horror-stricken face.

“You can't see anything to resent in that!” he gibbered. “It's so funny,
is it? Funny! Funny! Funny! I'll show you whether it's funny or not,
I'll show you!” His voice rose almost to a shriek. “You hang around
fires, do you, on the public streets at night? You're a nice one for me
to leave in charge of my house while I'm away, you trollop! What did you
mean by going up on that roof? You knew that damned Vanrevel was there!
You did, I say, you knew it!”

She ran toward the door with a frightened cry; but he got between it and
her, menacing her with his upraised open hands, shaking them over her.

“You're a lovely daughter, aren't you!” he shouted hoarsely. “You knew
perfectly well who was on that roof, and you went! Didn't you go? Answer
me that! If I'd had arms about me when I got there, I'd have shot that
man dead! He was on my property, giving orders, the black hound! And
when I ordered him out, he told me if I interfered with his work before
it was finished, he'd have me thrown out--me that owned the whole place;
and there wasn't a man that would lend me a pistol! 'Rescue!' You'd
better rescue him from me, you palm-laden dove, for I'll shoot him, I
will! I'll kill that dog; and he knows it. He can bluster in a crowd,
but he'll hide now! He's a coward and--”

“He came home with me; he brought me home last night!” Her voice rang
out in the room like that of some other person, and she hardly knew that
it was herself who spoke.

“You lie!” he screamed, and fell back from her, his face working as
though under the dominance of some physical disorder, the flesh of it
plastic beyond conception, so that she cried out and covered her face
with her arm. “You lie! I saw you at the hedge with Crailey Gray, though
you thought I didn't. What do you want to lie like that for? Vanrevel
didn't even speak to you. I asked Madrillon. You lie!”

He choked upon the words; a racking cough shook him from head to foot;
he staggered back and dropped upon her overturned chair, his arms
beating the table in front of him, his head jerking spasmodically
backward and forward as he gasped for breath.

“Ring the bell,” he panted thickly, with an incoherent gesture. “Nelson
knows. Ring!”

Nelson evidently knew. He brought brandy and water from the sideboard
with no stinting hand, and within ten minutes Mr. Carewe was in his
accustomed seat, competent to finish his breakfast. In solitude,
however, he sat, and no one guessed his thoughts.

For Miss Betty had fled to her own room, and had bolted the door. She
lay upon the bed, shuddering and shivering with nausea and cold,
though the day was warm. Then, like a hot pain in her breast, came a
homesickness for St. Mary's, and the flood-tide of tears, as she thought
of the quiet convent in the sunshine over to the west, the peace of it,
and the goodness of everybody there.

“Sister Cecilia!” Her shoulders shook with the great sob that followed
this name, dearest to her in the world, convulsively whispered to the
pil-low “Dear Sister Cecilia!” She patted the white pillow with her
hand, as though it were the cool cheek against which she yearned to lay
her own. “Ah, you would know--you would know!” With the thought of the
serene face of the good Sister, and of the kind arms that would have
gone round her in her trouble, her sobbing grew loud and uncontrollable.
But she would not have her father hear it, and buried her face deep in
the pillow. After a time, she began to grow quieter, turned, and lay
with wet eyes staring unseeingly at the wall, her underlip quivering
with the deep intake of each broken sigh.

“Oh, stars, stars, stars!” she whispered.

“Missy?” There came a soft knock upon the door and the clink of silver
upon china. “Missy?”

“What is it?”

So quick was Miss Betty that, although she answered almost at once, the
tears were washed away, and she was passing a cool, wet towel over her
eyes at the moment she spoke.

“Jass me. I brung yo' breakfas', honey.”

Old Nelson's voice was always low and gentle, with a quaver and
hesitancy in the utterance; now it was tender and comforting with the
comprehension of one in suffering, the extraordinary tact, which the
old of his race nearly all come to possess. “Li'l chicken-wing on piece
brown toast, honey.”

When she opened the door he came in, bending attentively over his tray,
and, without a glance toward his young mistress, made some show of fuss
and bustle, as he placed it upon a table near the window and drew up a
chair for her so that she could sit with her back to the light.

“Dah now!” he exclaimed softly, removing the white napkin and displaying
other dainties besides the chicken wing. “Dass de way! Dat ole Mamie in
de kitchen, she got her failin's an' her grievin' sins; but de way she
do han'le chicken an' biscuit sutney ain't none on 'em! She plead fo' me
to ax you how you like dem biscuit.”

He kept his head bent low over the table, setting a fork closer to
Betty's hand; arranging the plates, then rearranging them, but never
turning his eyes in her direction.

“Dat ole Mamie mighty vain, yessuh!” He suffered a very quiet chuckle to
escape him. “She did most sutney 'sist dat I ax you ain't you like dem
biscuit. She de ve'y vaines' woman in dis State, dat ole Mamie, yessuh!”
 And now he cast one quick glance out of the corner of his eye at Miss
Betty, before venturing a louder chuckle. “She reckon dem biscuit goin'
git her by Sain' Petuh when she 'proach de hevumly gates! Uhuh! I tell
her she got git redemption fo' de aigs she done ruin dese many yeahs;
'cause she as useless wid an ommelick as a two-day calf on de slick
ice!” Here he laughed loud and long. “You jass go and talk wid dat
Mamie, some day, Missy; you'll see how vain dat woman is.”

“Has father gone out, Nelson?” asked Betty in a low voice.

“Yes'm; he up town.” The old man's tone sank at once to the level of
her own; became confidential, as one speaks to another in a room where
somebody is ill. “He mekkin' perpetration to go down de rivuh dis
aft'noon. He say he done broke de news to you dat he goin' 'way. Dey
goin' buil' dem wa'house right up, an' yo' pa he necistate go 'way
'count de contrack. He be gone two week', honey,” Nelson finished,
without too much the air of imparting cheery tidings, but with just
enough.

“I am to stay here alone?”

“Law no, Missy! Dat big Miz Tanberry, dass de bes' frien' we all got,
she home ag'in, an' yo' pa goin' invite her visit at de house, whiles he
gone, an' to stay a mont' aftuh he git back, too, soze she kin go to
all de doin's an' junketin's wid you, and talk wid de young mens dat you
don' like whiles you talks wid dem you does like.”

“What time will father come home?”

“Home? He be gone two week', honey!”

“No; I mean to-day.”

“Law! He ain' comin' back. Bid me pack de trunk an' ca'y um down to de
boat at noon. Den he bid me say far'-ye-well an' a kine good-bye fo'
him, honey. 'Say he think you ain't feelin' too well, soze he won't
'sturb ye, hisself, an' dat he unestly do hope you goin' have splen'id
time whiles he trabblin'.” (Nelson's imagination covered many deficits
in his master's courtesy.) “Say he reckon you an' ole Miz Tanberry goin'
git 'long mighty nice wid one'nurr. An' dass what me an' Mamie reckon
'spechually boun' to take place, 'cause dat a mighty gay lady, dat big
Miz Tanberry, an' ole frien' 'er owah fambly. She 'uz a frien' er yo'
momma's, honey.”

Miss Betty had begun by making a pretence to eat, only to please the
old man, but the vain woman's cookery had been not unduly extolled, and
Nelson laughed with pleasure to see the fluffy biscuits and the chicken
wing not nibbled at but actually eaten. This was a healthy young lady,
he thought, one who would do the household credit and justify the
extravagant pride which kitchen and stable already had in her. He was
an old house-servant, therefore he had seen many young ladies go through
unhappy hours, and he admired Miss Betty the more because she was
the first who had indulged in strong weeping and did not snuffle at
intervals afterward. He understood perfectly everything that had passed
between father and daughter that morning.

When her breakfast was finished, she turned slowly to the window, and,
while her eyes did not refill, a slight twitching of the upper lids made
him believe that she was going over the whole scene again in her mind;
whereupon he began to move briskly about the room with a busy air,
picking up her napkin, dusting a chair with his hand, exchanging the
position of the andirons in the fireplace; and, apparently discovering
that the por-trait of Georges Meilhac was out of line, he set it awry,
then straight again, the while he hummed an old “spiritual” of which
only the words “Chain de Lion Down” were allowed to be quite audible.
They were repeated often, and at each repetition of them he seemed
profoundly, though decorously, amused, in a way which might have led
to a conjecture that the refrain bore some distant reference to his
master's eccentricity of temper. At first be chuckled softly, but at the
final iteration of “Chain de Lion Down” burst into outright laughter.

“Honey, my Law!” he exclaimed, “But yo' pa de 'ceivin'dest man! He
mighty proud er you!”

“Proud of me!” She turned to him in astonishment.

Nelson's laughter increased. “Hain't be jass de 'ceivin'dest man!
Yessuh, he de sot-uppest man in dis town 'count what you done last
night. What he say dis mawn', dat jass his way!”

“Ah, no!” said Miss Betty, sadly.

“Yes'm! He proud er you, but he teahbul mad at dat man. He hain't mad at
you, but he gotter cuss somebody! Jass reach out fo' de nighes' he kin
lay han's on, an' dis mawn' it happen soze it were you, honey. Uhuh! You
oughter hearn him ins' night when he come home. Den it were me. Bless
God, I ain't keerin'. He weren't mad at me, no mo'n' he were at you. He
jass mad!”

Miss Betty looked at the old fellow keenly. He remained, however,
apparently unconscious of her scrutiny, and occupied himself with
preparations for removing the tray.

“Nelson, what is the quarrel between my father and Mr. Vanrevel?”

He had lifted the tray, but set it down precipitately, bending upon her
a surprised and sobered countenance.

“Missy,” he said, gravely, “Dey big trouble 'twix' dem two.”

“I know,” she returned quietly. “What is it?”

“Wha' fo' you ax me, Missy?”

“Because you're the only one I can ask. I don't know anyone here well
enough, except you.”

Nelson's lips puckered solemnly. “Mist' Vanrevel vote Whig; but he ag'in
Texas.”

“Well, what if he is?”

“Yo' pa mighty strong fo' Texas.”

“No'm, dat ain't hardly de beginnin'. Mist' lanrevel he a Ab'litionist.”

“Well? Won't you tell me?”

“Honey, folks roun' heah mos' on 'em like Mist' Vanrevel so well dey
ain't hole it up ag'in' him--but, Missy, ef dey one thing topper God's
worl' yo' pa do desp'itly and contestably despise, hate, cuss,
an' outrageously 'bominate wuss'n' a yaller August spiduh it are a
Ab'litionist! He want stomple 'em eve'y las' one under he boot-heel,
'cep'n dat one Mist' Crailey Gray. Dey's a considabul sprinklin' er dem
Ab'litionists 'bout de kentry, honey; dey's mo' dat don' know w'ich
dey is; an' dey's mo' still dat don' keer. Soze dat why dey go git up a
quo'l twix' yo' pa an' dat man; an' 'range to have 'er on a platfawm, de
yeah 'fo' de las' campaign; an', suh, dey call de quo'l a de-bate; an'
all de folks come in f'um de kentry, an' all de folks in town come, too.
De whole possetucky on 'em sit an' listen.

“Fus' yo' pa talk; den Mist' Vanrevel, bofe on 'em mighty cole an'
civilized. Den yo' pa git wo'm up, Missy, like he do, 'case he so useter
have his own way; 'tain't his fault, he jass cain't help hollerin' an'
cussin' if anybody 'pose him; but Mist' Vanrevel he jass as suvvige, but
he stay cole, w'ich make yo' pa all de hotter. He holler mighty strong,
Missy, an' some de back ranks 'gun snickerin' at him. Uhuh! He fa'r
jump, he did; an' den bimeby Mist' Vanrevel he say dat no man oughter be
given de pilverige to sell another, ner to wollop him wid a blacksnake,
whether he 'buse dat pilverige er not. 'My honabul 'ponent,' s's he,
'Mist' Carewe, rep'sent in hisseif de 'ristocratic slave-ownin' class er
de Souf, do' he live in de Nawf an' 'ploy free labor; yit it sca'sely to
be b'lieve dat any er you would willin'ly trus' him wid de powah er life
an' death ovah yo' own chillun, w'ich is virchously what de slave-ownah
p'sess.'

“Missy, you jass oughter see yo' pa den! He blue in de face an' dance de
quadrille on de boa'ds. He leave his cha'h, git up, an' run 'cross to
de odder side de platfawm, an' shake be fis' ovah dat man's head, an'
screech out how it all lies dat de slaves evah 'ceive sich a treatments.
'Dat all lies, you pu'juh!' he holler. 'All lies, you misabul thief,' he
holler. 'All lies, an' you know it, you low-bawn slandah' an' scoun'le!'

“An' wid dat Mist' Vanrevel, be laff in yo' pa face, an' tuhn to de
crowd, he did, an' say: 'You reckon dat if dish yuh man a slave-ownah,
an' a slave had anguhed him as I have anguhed him tonight, does any er
you b'lieve dat dat slave wouldn' be tied up an' whipped tell de blood
run, an' den sole down de rivuh to-morrer?'

“Well, suh, 'co'se mos' on 'em b'lieve same as yo' pa; but dat sutney
fotch 'em, an' win de de-bate, 'case dey jass natchully lay back an'
roah, dey did, Missy; dey laff an' stomp an' holler tell you could a
hearn 'em a mild away. An' honey, yo' pa'd a millyum times druther Mist'
Vanrevel'd a kilt him dan tuhn de laff on him. He'd shoot a man, honey,
ef he jass s'picion him to grin out de cornder his eye at him; an' to
stan' up dah wid de whole county fa'r roahin' at him--it's de God's
mussy be did'n have no ahms wid him, dat night! Ole Mist' Chen'eth
done brung him home, an' yo' pa reach out an' kick me squah' out'n' de
liberry winder soon's he ketch sight er me!” The old man's gravity gave
way to his enjoyment of the recollection, and he threw back his head
to laugh. “He sho' did, honey! Uhuh! Ho, ho, ho! He sho' did, honey, he
sho' did!”

Nevertheless, as he lifted the tray again and crossed the room to go,
his solemnity returned. “Missy,” he said earnestly, “ef dat young gelmun
fall in love wid you, w'ich I knows he will ef he ketch sight er you,
lemme say dis, an' please fo' to ba'h in mine: better have nuttin' do
wid him fo' he own sake; an' 'bove all, keep him fur sway f'um dese
p'emises. Don' let him come in a mild er dis house.”

“Nelson, was that all the quarrel between them?”

“Blessed Mussy! ain' dat 'nough? Ef dey's any mo' I ain' hearn what dat
part were,” he answered quickly, but with a dogged tightening of the
lips which convinced Miss Betty that he knew very well.

“Nelson, what was the rest of it?”

“Please, Missy, I got pack yo' pa trunk; an' it time, long ago, fer me
to be at my wu'k.” He was half out of the door.

“What was the rest of it?” she repeated quietly.

“Now, honey,” he returned with a deprecatory shake of his head, “I got
my own wu'k 'tend to; an' I ain't nevah ax nobody what 'twas, an' I
ain't goin' ax 'em. An' lemme jass beg you f oiler de ole man's advice:
you do de same, 'case nobody ain't goin' tell you. All I know is dat it
come later and were somep'n 'bout dat riprarin Crailey Gray. Yo' pa he
sent a channelge to Mist' Vanrevel, an' Mist' Vanrevel 'fuse to fight
him 'cause he say he don' b'lieve shootin' yo' pa goin' do yo' pa any
good, an' he still got hope mekkin' good citizen outer him. Dat brung de
laff on yo' pa ag'in; an' he 'clare to God ef he ketch Vanrevel on any
groun' er hisn he shoot him like a mad dog. 'Pon my livin' soul he mean
dem wuds, Missy! Dey had hard 'nough time las' night keepin' him fum
teahin' dat man to pieces at de fiah. You mus' keep dat young gelmun
'way fum heah!”

“He came home with me last night, Nelson; I told father so.”

“Yes'm. Yo' pa tole me you say dat, but he reckon you done it to mek him
madder, 'cause you mad, too. He say he done see dat Crailey Gray comin'
'long de hedge wid you.”

“He was mistaken, it was Mr. Vanrevel.”

Nelson rolled his eyes fervently to heaven. “Den dat young man run
pintedly on he death! Ef you want keep us all dis side er de Jawdan
Rivuh, don' let him set foot in dis neighbo'hood when yo' pa come back!
An', honey--” his voice sank to a penetrating whisper--“'fo' I do
a lick er wu'k I goin' out in de stable an' git down on my knees an'
retu'n thanksgiving to de good God 'case he hole Carewe Street in de
dahkness las' night!”

This was the speech he chose for his exit, but, after closing the door
behind him, he opened it again, and said, cheerfully:

“Soon's I git de trunk fix f' yo' pa, I bring 'roun' dat bay colt wid de
side saddle. You better set 'bout gittin' on yo' ridin'-habit, Missy. De
roads is mighty good dis sunshiny wedduh.”

“Nelson?”

“Do you think such an attack as father had this morning--is--dangerous?”

He had hoped for another chance to laugh violently before he left her,
and this completely fitted his desire. “Ho, ho, he!” he shouted. “No'm,
no, no, honey! He jass git so mad it mek him sick. You couldn' kill dat
man wid a broad-ax, Missy!”

And he went down the hail leaving the reverberations of his hilarity
behind him. The purpose of his visit had been effected, for, when Miss
Betty appeared upon the horse-block in her green habit and gauntlets,
she was smiling; so that only a woman--or a wise old man--could have
guessed that she had wept bitterly that morning.

She cantered out to the flat, open country to the east, where she found
soft dirt-roads that were good for the bay colt's feet, and she reached
a cross-road several miles from town before she was overcome by the
conviction that she was a wicked and ungrateful girl. She could not
place the exact spot of her guilt, but she knew it was there, somewhere,
since she felt herself a guilty thing.

For the picture which Nelson had drawn rose before her: the one man
standing alone in his rage on the platform, overwhelmed by his calm
young adversary, beaten and made the butt of laughter for a thousand.
Her father had been in the wrong in that quarrel, and somehow she was
sure, too, he must have been wrong in the “personal” one, as well: the
mysterious difficulty over Fanchon's Mr. Gray, who had looked so ashamed
last night. What feud could they make over him, of all people in the
world? He looked strong enough to take care of his own quarrels, even if
he was so rigorously bound by Fanchon's apron-string when it came to a
word with another girl!

But the conclusion that her father had been in error did not lessen the
pathetic appeal of the solitary figure facing the ridicule of the crowd.
She felt that he always honestly believed himself in the right; she
knew that he was vain; that he had an almost monstrous conception of his
dignity; and, realizing the bitterness of that public humiliation which
he had undergone, she understood the wrath, the unspeakable pain and
sense of outrage, which must have possessed him.

And now she was letting him go forth upon a journey--his way beset with
the chances of illness and accident--whence he might never return; she
was letting him go without seeing him again; letting him go with no
word of farewell from his daughter. In brief: she was a wicked girl. She
turned the colt's head abruptly to the west and touched his flanks with
her whip.

So it fell out that as the packet foamed its passage backward from
Carewe's wharf into the current, the owner of the boat, standing upon
the hurricane deck, heard a cry from the shore, and turned to behold
his daughter dash down to the very end of the wharf on the well-lathered
colt. Miss Betty's hair was blown about her face; her cheeks were rosy,
her eager eyes sparkling from more than the hard riding.

“Papa!” she cried, “I'm sorry!”

She leaned forward out of the saddle, extending her arms to him
appealingly in a charming gesture, and, absolutely ignoring the idlers
on the wharf and the passengers on the steamer, was singly intent upon
the tall figure on the hurricane-deck. “Papa--good-by. Please forgive
me!”

“By the Almighty, but that's a fine woman!” said the captain of the boat
to a passenger from Rouen. “Is she his daughter?”

“Please forgive me!” the clear voice came again, with its quaver of
entreaty, across the widening water; and then, as Mr. Carewe made
no sign, by word or movement, of hearing her, and stood without the
slightest alteration of his attitude, she cried to him once more:

“Good-by!”

The paddle-wheels reversed; the boat swung down the river, Mr. Carewe
still standing immovable on the hurricane-deck, while, to the gaze of
those on the steamer, the figure on the bay colt at the end of the wharf
began to grow smaller and smaller. She was waving her handkerchief in
farewell, and they could see the little white speck in the distance,
dimmer and dimmer, yet fluttering still as they passed out of sight
round the bend nearly three-quarters of a mile below.



CHAPTER IX. The Rule of the Regent

Betty never forgot her first sight of the old friend of her family.
Returning with a sad heart, she was walking the colt slowly through
the carriage-gates, when an extravagantly stout lady, in green muslin
illustrated with huge red flowers, came out upon the porch and waved a
fat arm to the girl. The visitor wore a dark-green turban and a Cashmere
shawl, while the expanse of her skirts was nothing short of magnificent:
some cathedral-dome seemed to have been misplaced and the lady dropped
into it. Her outstretched hand terrified Betty: how was she to approach
near enough to take it?

Mrs. Tanberry was about sixty, looked forty, and at first you might have
guessed she weighed nearly three hundred, but the lightness of her smile
and the actual buoyancy which she somehow imparted to her whole dominion
lessened that by at least a hundred-weight. She ballooned out to the
horse-block with a billowy rush somewhere between bounding and soaring;
and Miss Betty slid down from the colt, who shied violently, to find
herself enveloped, in spite of the dome, in a vast surf of green and red
muslin.

“My charming girl!” exclaimed the lady vehemently, in a voice of such
husky richness, of such merriment and unction of delight, that it fell
upon Miss Betty's ear with more of the quality of sheer gayety than any
she had ever heard. “Beautiful child! What a beautiful child you are!”

She kissed the girl resoundingly on both cheeks; stepped back from her
and laughed, and clapped her fat hands, which were covered with flashing
rings. “Oh, but you are a true blue Beauty! You're a Princess! I am Mrs.
Tanberry, Jane Tanberry, young Janie Tanberry. I haven't seen you since
you were a baby and your pretty mother was a girl like us!”

“You are so kind to come,” said Betty hesitatingly. “I shall try to be
very obedient.”

“Obedient!” Mrs. Tanberry uttered the word with a shriek. “You'll be
nothing of the kind. I am the light-mindedest woman in the universe,
and anyone who obeyed me would be embroiled in everlasting trouble every
second in the day. You'll find that I am the one that needs looking
after, my charmer!”

She tapped Miss Betty's cheek with her jeweled fingers as the two
mounted the veranda steps. “It will be worry enough for you to obey
yourself; a body sees that at the first blush. You have conscience
in your forehead and rebellion in your chin. Ha, ha, ha!” Here Mrs.
Tanberry sat upon, and obliterated, a large chair, Miss Carewe taking a
stool at her knee.

“People of our age oughtn't to be bothered with obeying; there'll be
time enough for that when we get old and can't enjoy anything. Ha, ha!”

Mrs. Tanberry punctuated her observations with short volleys of husky
laughter, so abrupt in both discharge and cessation that, until Miss
Betty became accustomed to the habit, she was apt to start slightly at
each salvo. “I had a husband--once,” the lady resumed, “but only once,
my friend! He had ideas like your father's--your father is such an
imbecile!--and he thought that wives, sisters, daughters, and such like
ought to be obedient: that is, the rest of the world was wrong unless it
was right; and right was just his own little, teeny-squeeny prejudices
and emotions dressed up for a crazy masquerade as Facts. Poor man! He
only lasted about a year!” And Mrs. Tanberry laughed heartily.

“They've been at me time and again to take another.” She lowered her
voice and leaned toward Betty confidentially. “Not I! I'd be willing
to engage myself to Crailey Gray (though Crailey hasn't got round to me
yet) for I don't mind just being engaged, my dear; but they'll have to
invent something better than a man before I marry any one of 'em again!
But I love 'em, I do, the Charming Billies! And you'll see how they
follow me!” She patted the girl's shoulder, her small eyes beaming
quizzically. “We'll have the gayest house in Rouen, ladybird! The young
men all go to the Bareauds', but they'll come here now, and we'll have
the Bareauds along with 'em. I've been away a long time, just finished
unpacking yesterday night when your father came in after the fire--Whoo!
what a state he was in with that devilish temper of his! Didn't I snap
him up when he asked me to come and stay with you? Ha, ha! I'd have
come, even if you hadn't been beautiful; but I was wild to be your
playmate, for I'd heard nothing but 'Miss Betty Carewe, Miss Betty
Carewe' from everybody I saw, since the minute my stage came in. You set
'em all mad at your ball, and I knew we'd make a glorious house-full,
you and I! Some of the vagabonds will turn up this very evening, you'll
see if they don't. Ha, ha! The way they follow me!”

Mrs. Tanberry was irresistible: she filled the whole place otherwise
than by the mere material voluminousness of her; bubbling over with
froth of nonsense which flew through the house, driven by her energy,
like sea-foam on a spring gale; and the day, so discordantly begun for
Miss Betty, grew musical with her own laughter, answering the husky
staccato of the vivacious newcomer. Nelson waited upon them at table,
radiant, his smile like the keyboard of an ebony piano, and his
disappearances into the kitchen were accomplished by means of a
surreptitious double-shuffle, and followed by the cachinnating echoes
of the vain Mamie's reception of the visitor's sallies, which Nelson
hastily retailed in passing.

Nor was Mrs. Tanberry's prediction allowed to go unfulfilled regarding
the advent of those persons whom she had designated as vagabonds. It may
have been out of deference to Mr. Carewe's sense of decorum (or from
a cautious regard of what he was liable to do when he considered that
sense outraged) that the gallants of Rouen had placed themselves under
the severe restraint of allowing three days to elapse after their
introduction to Miss Carewe before they “paid their respects at the
house;” but, be that as it may, the dictator was now safely under way
down the Rouen River, and Mrs. Tanberry reigned in his stead. Thus,
at about eight o'clock that evening, the two ladies sat in the library
engaged in conversation--though, for the sake of accuracy, it should
be said that Mrs. Tanberry was engaged in conversation, Miss Betty in
giving ear--when their attention was arrested by sounds of a somewhat
musical nature from the lawn, which sounds were immediately identified
as emanating from a flute and violin.

Mrs. Tanberry bounded across the room like a public building caught by a
cyclone, and, dashing at the candles, “Blow 'em out, blow 'em out!” she
exclaimed, suiting the action to the word in a fluster of excitement.

“Why?” asked Miss Carewe, startled, as she rose to her feet. The candles
were out before the question.

“'Why!” repeated the merry, husky voice in the darkness. “My goodness,
child precious, those vagabonds are here! To think of your never having
been serenaded before!”

She drew the girl to the window and pointed to a group of dim figures
near the iliac bushes. “The dear, delightful vagabonds!” she chuckled.
“I knew they'd come! It's the beautiful Tappingham Marsh with his
fiddle, and young Jeff Bareaud with his flute, and 'Gene Madrillon
and little Frank Chenowith and thin Will Cummings to sing. Hark to the
rascals!”

It is perfectly truthful to say that the violin and flute executed the
prelude, and then the trio sounded full on the evening air, the more
effective chords obligingly drawn out as long as the breath in the
singers could hold them, in order to allow the two fair auditors
complete benefit of the harmony. They sang “The Harp that Once Thro'
Tara's Halls,” and followed it with “Long, Long Ago.”

“That,” Mrs. Tanberry whispered, between stifled gusts of almost
uncontrollable laughter, “is meant for just me!”

“Tell me the tales that to me were so dear,” entreated the trio.

“I told 'em plenty!” gurgled the enlivening widow. “And I expect between
us we can get up some more.” “Now you are come my grief is removed,”
 they sang.

“They mean your father is on his way to St. Louis,” remarked Mrs.
Tanberry.

“Let me forget that so long you have roved, Let me believe that you love
as you loved, Long, long ago, long ago.”

“Applaud, applaud!” whispered Mrs. Tanberry, encouraging the minstrels
by a hearty clapping of hands.

Hereupon dissension arose among the quintet, evidently a dispute in
regard to their next selection; one of the gentlemen appearing more
than merely to suggest a solo by himself, while the others too frankly
expressed adverse opinions upon the value of the offering. The argument
became heated, and in spite of many a “Sh!” and “Not so loud!” the
ill-suppressed voice of the intending soloist, Mr. Chenoweth, could be
heard vehemently to exclaim: “I will! I learned it especially for this
occasion. I will sing it!”

His determination, patently, was not to be balked without physical
encounter, consequently he was permitted to advance some paces from the
lilac bushes, where he delivered himself, in an earnest and plaintive
tenor, of the following morbid instructions, to which the violin played
an obligato in tremulo, so execrable, and so excruciatingly discordant,
that Mr. Chenoweth's subsequent charge that it was done with a
deliberately evil intention could never be successfully opposed:

     “Go! Forget me!
     Why should Sorrow
     O'er that brow a shadow fling?
     Go! Forget me, and, to-morrow,
     Brightly smile and sweetly sing!

     “Smile! tho' I may not be near thee;
     Smile! tho' I may never see thee;
     May thy soul with pleasure shine
     Lasting as this gloom of mine!”

Miss Carewe complied at once with the request; while her companion,
unable to stop with the slight expression of pleasure demanded by the
songster, threw herself upon a sofa and gave way to the mirth that
consumed her.

Then the candles were relit, the serenaders invited within; Nelson came
bearing cake and wine, and the house was made merry. Presently, the
romp, Virginia Bareaud, making her appearance on the arm of General
Trumble, Mrs. Tanberry led them all in a hearty game of Blind-man's
Buff, followed by as hearty a dancing of Dan Tucker. After that, a
quadrille being proposed, Mrs. Tanberry suggested that Jefferson should
run home and bring Fanchon for the fourth lady. However, Virginia
explained that she had endeavored to persuade both her sister and
Mr. Gray to accompany the General and herself, but that Mr. Gray had
complained of indisposition, having suffered greatly from headache, on
account of inhaling so much smoke at the warehouse fire; and, of
course, Fanchon would not leave him. (Miss Carewe permitted herself the
slightest shrug of the shoulders.)

So they danced the quadrille with Jefferson at the piano and Mr. Marsh
performing in the character of a lady, a proceeding most unacceptable to
the General, whom Mrs. Tanberry forced to be his partner. And thus the
evening passed gayly away, and but too quickly, to join the ghosts of
all the other evenings since time began; and each of the little company
had added a cheerful sprite to the long rows of those varied shades that
the after years bring to revisit us, so many with pathetic reproach, so
many bearing a tragic burden of faces that we cannot make even to weep
again, and so few with simple merriment and lightheartedness. Tappingham
Marsh spoke the truth, indeed, when he exclaimed in parting, “O rare
Mrs. Tanberry!”

But the house had not done with serenades that night. The guests had
long since departed; the windows were still and dark under the wan old
moon, which had risen lamely, looking unfamiliar and not half itself;
the air bore an odor of lateness, and nothing moved; when a delicate
harmony stole out of the shadows beyond the misty garden. Low but
resonant chords sounded on the heavier strings of a guitar, while above
them, upon the lighter wires, rippled a slender, tinkling melody that
wooed the slumberer to a delicious half-wakefulness, as dreamily, as
tenderly, as the croon of rain on the roof soothes a child to
sleep. Under the artist's cunning touch the instrument was both the
accompaniment and the song; and Miss Betty, at first taking the music
to be a wandering thread in the fabric of her own bright dreams, drifted
gradually to consciousness to find herself smiling. Her eyes opened
wide, but half closed again with the ineffable sweetness of the sound.

Then a voice was heard, eerily low, yet gallant and clear, a vibrant
baritone, singing to the guitar.

“My lady's hair, That dark delight, Is both as fair And dusk as night.
I know some lovelorn hearts that beat In time to moonbeam twinklings
fleet, That dance and glance like jewels there, Emblazoning the raven
hair!

“Ah, raven hair! So dark and bright, What loves lie there Enmeshed,
to-night? I know some sighing lads that say Their hearts were snared and
torn away; And now as pearls one fate they share, Entangled in the raven
hair.

“Ah, raven hair, From such a plight Could you not spare One acolyte? I
know a broken heart that went To serve you but as ornament. Alas! a ruby
now you wear, Ensanguining the raven hair!”

The song had grown fainter and fainter, the singer moving away as he
sang, and the last lines were almost inaudible in the distance The
guitar could be heard for a moment or two more, then silence came again.
It was broken by a rustling in the room next to Miss Betty's, and Mrs.
Tanberry called softly through the open door:

“Princess, are you awake? Did you hear that serenade?”

After a pause the answer came hesitatingly in a small, faltering voice:
“Yes--if it was one. I thought perhaps he was only singing as he passed
along the street.”

“Aha!” ejaculated Mrs. Tanberry, abruptly, as though she had made an
unexpected discovery. “You knew better; and this was a serenade that
you did not laugh at. Beautiful, I wouldn't let it go any farther, even
while your father is gone. Something might occur that would bring him
home without warning--such things have happened. Tom Vanrevel ought to
be kept far away from this house.”

“Oh, it was not he,” returned Miss Betty, quickly. “It was Mr. Gray.
Didn't you--”

“My dear,” interrupted the other, “Crailey Gray's specialty is talking.
Most of the vagabonds can sing and play a bit, and so can Crailey,
particularly when he's had a few bowls of punch; but when Tom Vanrevel
touches the guitar and lifts up his voice to sing, there isn't an angel
in heaven that wouldn't quit the place and come to hear him! Crailey
wrote those words to Virginia Bareaud. (Her hair is even darker than
yours, you know.) That was when he was being engaged to her; and Tom
must have set the music to 'em lately, and now comes here to sing 'em
to you; and well enough they fit you! But you must keep him away,
Princess.”

Nevertheless, Betty knew the voice was not that which had bid her look
to the stars, and she remained convinced that it belonged to Mr. Crailey
Gray, who had been too ill, a few hours earlier, to leave the Bareaud
house, and now, with Fanchon's kisses on his lips, came stealing into
her garden and sang to her a song he had made for another girl!

And the angels would leave heaven to listen when he sang, would they?
Poor Fanchon! No wonder she held him so tightly in leading strings!
He might risk his life all he wished at the end of a grappling-ladder,
dangling in a fiery cloud above nothing; but when it came to--ah, well,
poor Fanchon! Did she invent the headaches for him, or did she make him
invent them for himself?

If there was one person in the world whom Miss Betty held in bitter
contempt and scorn, it was the owner of that voice and that guitar.



CHAPTER X. Echoes of a Serenade

More than three gentlemen of Rouen wore their hearts in their eyes for
any fool to gaze upon; but three was the number of those who told their
love before the end of the first week of Mr. Carewe's absence, and told
it in spite of Mrs. Tanberry's utmost effort to preserve, at all
times, a conjunction between herself and Miss Betty. For the good lady,
foreseeing these declarations much more surely than did the subject of
them, wished to spare her lovely charge the pain of listening to them.

Miss Carewe honored each of the lorn three with few minutes of gravity;
but the gentle refusal prevented never a swain from being as truly
her follower as before; not that she resorted to the poor device of
half-dismissal, the every-day method of the school-girl flirt, who thus
keeps the lads in dalliance, but because, even for the rejected, it was
a delight to be near her. For that matter, it is said that no one ever
had enough of the mere looking at her. Also, her talk was enlivening
even to the lively, being spiced with surprising turns and amiably
seasoned with the art of badinage. To use the phrase of the time, she
possessed the accomplishments, an antiquated charm now on the point of
disappearing, so carefully has it been snubbed under whenever exhibited.
The pursuing wraith of the young, it comes to sit, a ghost at every
banquet, driving the flower of our youth to unheard-of exertions in
search of escape, to dubious diplomacy, to dismal inaction, or to wine;
yet time was when they set their hearts on “the accomplishments.”

Miss Betty Carewe at her harp, ah! it was a dainty picture: the clear
profile, with the dark hair low across the temple, silhouetted duskily,
in the cool, shadowy room, against the open window; the slender figure,
one arm curving between you and the strings, the other gleaming behind
them; the delicate little sandal stealing from the white froth of silk
and lace to caress the pedal; the nimble hands fluttering across the
long strands, “Like white blossoms borne on slanting lines of rain;” and
the great gold harp rising to catch a javelin of sunshine that pierced
the vines at the window where the honeysuckles swung their skirts to
the refrain--it was a picture to return many a long year afterward, and
thrill the reveries of old men who were then young. And, following the
light cascading ripples of the harp, when her low contralto lifted
in one of the “old songs,” she often turned inquiringly to see if the
listener liked the music, and her brilliant, dark eyes would rest on
his with an appeal that blinded his entranced soul. She meant it for
the mere indication of a friendly wish to suit his tastes, but it looked
like the divine humility of love. Nobody wondered that General Trumble
should fall to verse-making in his old age.

She sketched magnificently. This is the very strongest support for the
assertion: Frank Chenoweth and Tappingham Marsh agreed, with tears of
enthusiasm, that “magnificently” was the only word. They came to this
conclusion as they sat together at the end of a long dinner (at which
very little had been eaten) after a day's picnic by the river. Miss
Carewe had been of their company, and Tappingham and Chenoweth found
each his opportunity in the afternoon. The party was small, and no one
had been able to effect a total unconsciousness of the maneuvers of the
two gentle-men. Even Fanchon Bareaud comprehended languidly, though she
was more blurred than ever, and her far-away eyes belied the mechanical
vivacity of her manner, for Crailey was thirty miles down the river,
with a fishing-rod neatly packed in a leather case.

Mr. Vanrevel, of course, was not invited; no one would have thought of
asking him to join a small party of which Robert Carewe's daughter was
to be a member. But it was happiness enough for Tom, that night, to lie
hidden in the shrubbery, looking up at the stars between the leaves,
while he listened to her harp, and borne through the open window on
enchanted airs, the voice of Elizabeth Carewe singing “Robin Adair.”

It was now that the town indulged its liveliest spirit; never an evening
lacked its junketing, while the happy folk of Rouen set the early summer
to music. Serenade, dance, and song for them, the light-hearts, young
and old making gay together! It was all laughter, either in sunshine
or by candlelight, undisturbed by the far thunder below the southern
horizon, where Zachary Taylor had pitched his tent, upon the Rio Grande.

One fair evening, soon after that excursion which had proved fatal to
the hopes of the handsome Tappingham and of the youthful Chenoweth, it
was the privilege of Mr. Thomas Vanrevel to assist Miss Carewe and
her chaperon from their carriage, as they drove up to a dance at the
Bareauds'. This good fortune fell only to great deserving, for he had
spent an hour lurking outside the house in the hope of performing such
offices for them.

Heaven was in his soul and the breath departed out of his body, when,
after a moment of hesitation, Miss Betty's little lace-gauntleted glove
was placed in his hand, and her white slipper shimmered out from the
lilac flounces of her dress to fall like a benediction, he thought, on
each of the carriage-steps.

It was the age of garlands; they wreathed the Muses, the Seasons, and
their speech, so the women wore wreaths in their hair, and Miss
Betty's that night was of marguerites. “Read your fortune in them all,”
 whispered Tom's heart, “and of whomsoever you wish to learn, every petal
will say 'He loves you; none declare, He loves you not!'”

She bowed slightly, but did not speak to him, which was perhaps a better
reception than that accorded the young man by her companion. “Oh, it's
you, is it!” was Mrs. Tanberry's courteous observation as she canted the
vehicle in her descent. She looked sharply at Miss Betty, and even
the small glow of the carriage-lamps showed that the girl's cheeks had
flushed very red. Mr. Vanrevel, on the contrary, was pale.

They stood for a moment in awkward silence, while, from the lighted
house where the flying figures circled, came the waltz: “I dreamt that
I dwe-helt in ma-har-ble halls.” Tom's own dreams were much wilder than
the gypsy girl's; he knew that; yet he spoke out bravely:

“Will you dance the two first with me?”

Miss Betty bit her lip, frowned, turned away, and, vouchsafing no reply,
walked toward the house with her eyes fixed on the ground; but just as
they reached the door she flashed over him a look that scorched him from
head to foot, and sent his spirits down through the soles of his boots
to excavate a grotto in the depths of the earth, so charged it was with
wrathful pity and contempt.

“Yes!” she said abruptly, and followed Mrs. Tanberry to the
dressing-room.

The elder lady shook her head solemnly as she emerged from the enormous
folds of a yellow silk cloak. “Ah, Princess,” she said, touching the
girl's shoulder with her jeweled hand, “I told you I was a very foolish
woman, and I am, but not so foolish as to offer advice often. Yet,
believe me, it won't do. I think that is one of the greatest young men I
ever knew, and it's a pity--but it won't do.”

Miss Betty kept her face away from her guardian for a moment. No
inconsiderable amount of information had drifted to her, from here
and there, regarding the career of Crailey Gray, and she thought how
intensely she would have hated any person in the world except Mrs.
Tanberry for presuming to think she needed to be warned against the
charms of this serenading lady-killer, who was the property of another
girl.

“You must keep him away, I think,” ventured Mrs. Tanberry, gently.

At that Betty turned to her and said, sharply:

“I will. After this, please let us never speak of him again.”

A slow nod of the other's turbaned head indicated the gravest
acquiescence. She saw that her companion's cheeks were still crimson. “I
understand,” said she.

A buzz of whispering, like a July beetle, followed Miss Carewe and her
partner about the room during the next dance. How had Tom managed it?
Had her father never told her? Who had dared to introduce them? Fanchon
was the only one who knew, and as she whirled by with Will Cummings,
she raised her absent glance long enough to give Tom an affectionate and
warning shake of the head.

Tom did not see this; Miss Carewe did. Alas! She smiled upon him
instantly and looked deep into his eyes. It was the third time.

She was not afraid of this man-flirt; he was to be settled with once and
forever. She intended to avenge both Fanchon and herself; yet it is a
hazardous game, this piercing of eye with eye, because the point which
seeks to penetrate may soften and melt, leaving one defenseless. For
perhaps ten seconds that straight look lasted, while it seemed to her
that she read clear into the soul of him, and to behold it, through
some befooling magic, as strong, tender, wise, and true, as his outward
appearance would have made an innocent stranger believe him; for he
looked all these things; she admitted that much; and he had an air of
distinction and resource beyond any she had ever known, even in the wild
scramble for her kitten he had not lost it. So, for ten seconds, which
may be a long time, she saw a man such as she had dreamed, and she did
not believe her sight, because she had no desire to be as credulous as
the others, to be as easily cheated as that poor Fanchon!

The luckless Tom found his own feet beautiful on the mountains, and,
treading the heights with airy steps, appeared to himself wonderful and
glorified--he was waltzing with Miss Betty He breathed the entrancing
words to himself, over and over: it was true, he was waltzing with Miss
Betty Carewe! Her glove lay warm and light within his own; his fingers
clasped that ineffable lilac and white brocade waist. Sometimes her hair
came within an inch of his cheek, and then he rose outright from
the hilltops and floated in a golden mist. The glamour of which the
Incroyable had planned to tell her some day, surrounded Tom, and it
seemed to him that the whole world was covered with a beautiful light
like a carpet, which was but the radiance of this adorable girl whom his
gloves and coat-sleeve were permitted to touch. When the music stopped,
they followed in the train of other couples seeking the coolness of
out-of-doors for the interval, and Tom, in his soul, laughed at all
other men with illimitable condescension.

“Stop here,” she said, as they reached the open gate. He was walking out
of it, his head in the air, and Miss Betty on his arm. Apparently, he
would have walked straight across the State. It was the happiest moment
he had ever known.

He wanted to say something wonderful to her; his speech should be like
the music and glory and lire that was in him; therefore he was shocked
to hear himself remarking, with an inanity of utterance that sickened
him:

“Oh, here's the gate, isn't it?”

Her answer was a short laugh. “You mean you wish to persuade me that you
had forgotten it was there?”

“I did not see it,” he protested, lamentably.

“No?”

“I wasn't thinking of it.”

“Indeed! You were 'lost in thoughts of '--”

“Of you!” he said, before he could check himself.

“Yes?” Her tone was as quietly contemptuous as she could make it. “How
very frank of you! May I ask: Are you convinced that speeches of that
sort are always to a lady's liking?”

“No,” he answered humbly, and hung his head. Then she threw the question
at him abruptly:

“Was it you who came to sing in our garden?”

There was a long pause before a profound sigh came tremulously from the
darkness, like a sad and tender confession. “Yes.”

“I thought so!” she exclaimed. “Mrs. Tanberry thought it was someone
else; but I knew that it was you.”

“Yes, you are right,” he said, quietly. “It was I. It was my only way to
tell you what you know now.”

“Of course!” She set it all aside with those two words and the slightest
gesture of her hand. “It was a song made for another girl, I believe?”
 she asked lightly, and with an icy smile, inquired farther: “For the
one--the one before the last, I understand?”

He lifted his head, surprised. “What has that to do with it? The music
was made for you--but then, I think all music was made for you.”

“Leave the music out of it, if you please,” she said, impatiently. “Your
talents make you modest! No doubt you consider it unmaidenly in me to
have referred to the serenade before you spoke of it; but I am not one
to cast down my eyes and let it pass. No, nor one too sweet to face the
truth, either!” she cried with sudden passion. “To sing that song in the
way you did, meant--oh, you thought I would flirt with you! What right
had you to come with such a song to me?”

Tom intended only to disclaim the presumption, so far from his thoughts,
that his song had moved her, for he could see that her attack was
prompted by her inexplicable impression that he had assumed the attitude
of a conqueror, but his explanation began unfortunately.

“Forgive me. I think you have completely misunderstood; you thought it
meant something I did not intend, at all, and--”

“What!” she said, and her eyes blazed, for now she beheld him as the
arrant sneak of the world. He, the lady-killer, with his hypocritical
air of strength and melancholy sweetness, the leader of drunken revels,
and, by reputation, the town Lothario and Light-o'-Love, under promise
of marriage to Fanchon Bareaud, had tried to make love to another girl,
and now his cowardice in trying to disclaim what he had done lent him
the insolence to say to this other: “My child, you are betrayed by your
youth and conceit; you exaggerate my meaning. I had no intention to
distinguish you by coquetting with you!” This was her interpretation of
him; and her indignation was not lessened by the inevitable conclusion
that he, who had been through so many scenes with women, secretly found
her simplicity diverting. Miss Betty had a little of her father in her;
while it was part of her youth, too, that, of all things she could least
endure the shadow of a smile at her own expense.

“Oh, oh!” she cried, her voice shaking with anger. “I suppose your bad
heart is half-choked with your laughter at me.”

She turned from him swiftly, and left him.

Almost running, she entered the house, and hurried to a seat by
Mrs. Tanberry, nestling to her like a young sapling on a hillside.
Instantaneously, several gentlemen, who had hastily acquitted themselves
of various obligations in order to seek her, sprang forward with eager
greetings, so that when the stricken Tom, dazed and confounded by his
evil luck, followed her at about five paces, he found himself confronted
by an impenetrable abbatis formed by the spiked tails of the coats of
General Trumble, Madrillon, Tappingham Marsh, Cummings and Jefferson
Bareaud. Within this fortification rang out laughter and sally from Miss
Carewe; her color was high and her eyes sparkled never more brightly.

Flourish and alarums sounded for a quadrille. Each of the semi-circle,
firmly elbowing his neighbor, begged the dance of Miss Betty; but Tom
was himself again, and laid a long, strong hand on Madrillon's shoulder,
pressed him gently aside, and said:

“Forgive me; Miss Carewe has honored me by the promise of this
quadrille.”

He bowed, offering his arm, and none of them was too vain to envy that
bow and gesture.

For a moment he remained waiting. Miss Carewe rose slowly, and, directly
facing him, said in composed and even voice: “You force me to beg you
never to address me again.”

She placed her hand on the General's arm, turning her back squarely upon
Tom.

In addition to those who heard, many persons in that part of the room
saw the affront and paused in arrested attitudes; others, observing
these, turned inquiringly, so that sudden silence fell, broken only
by the voice of Miss Betty as she moved away, talking cheerily to the
General. Tom was left standing alone in the broken semicircle.

All the eyes swept from her to him and back; then everyone began to talk
hastily about nothing. The young man's humiliation was public.

He went to the door under cover of the movement of the various couples
to find places in the quadrille, yet every sidelong glance in the room
still rested upon him, and he knew it. He remained in the ball, alone,
through that dance, and at its conclusion, walked slowly through
the rooms, speaking to people, here and there, as though nothing
had happened, but when the music sounded again, he went to the
dressing-room, found his hat and cloak, and left the house. For a
while he stood on the opposite side of the street, watching the lighted
windows, and twice he caught sight of the lilac and white brocade, the
dark hair, and the wreath of marguerites. Then, with a hot pain in his
breast, and the step of a Grenadier, he marched down the street.

In the carriage Mrs. Tanberry took Betty's hand in hers. “I'll do as you
wish, child,” she said, “and never speak to you of him again as long as
I live, except this once. I think it was best for his own sake as well
as yours, but--”

“He needed a lesson,” interrupted Miss Betty, wearily. She had danced
long and hard, and she was very tired.

Mrs. Tanberry's staccato laugh came out irrepressibly. “All the
vagabonds do, Princess!” she cried. “And I think they are getting it.”

“No, no, I don't mean--”

“We've turned their heads, my dear, between us, you and I; and we'll
have to turn 'em again, or they'll break their necks looking over their
shoulders at us, the owls!” She pressed the girl's hand affectionately.
“But you'll let me say something just once, and forgive me because we're
the same foolish age, you know. It's only this: The next young man you
suppress, take him off in a corner! Lead him away from the crowd where
he won't have to stand and let them look at him afterward. That's all,
my dear, and you mustn't mind.”

“I'm not sorry!” said Miss Betty hotly. “I'm not sorry!”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Tanberry, soothingly. “It was better this time to do
just what you did. I'd have done it myself, to make quite sure he would
keep away--because I like him.”

“I'm not sorry!” said Miss Betty again.

“I'm not sorry!” she repeated and reiterated to herself after Mrs.
Tanberry had gone to bed. She had sunk into a chair in the library
with a book, and “I'm not sorry!” she whispered as the open unread page
blurred before her, “I'm not sorry!” He had needed his lesson; but she
had to bear the recollection of how white his face went when he received
it. Her affront had put about him a strange loneliness: the one figure
with the stilled crowd staring; it had made a picture from which her
mind's eye had been unable to escape, danced she never so hard and late.
Unconsciously, Robert Carewe's daughter had avenged the other figure
which had stood in lonely humiliation before the staring eyes.

“I'm not sorry!” Ah, did they think it was in her to hurt any living
thing in the world? The book dropped from her lap, and she bowed her
head upon her hands. “I'm not sorry! “--and tears upon the small lace
gauntlets!

She saw them, and with an incoherent exclamation, half self-pitying,
half impatient, ran out to the stars above her garden.

She was there for perhaps half an hour, and just before she returned to
the house she did a singular thing.

Standing where all was clear to the sky, where she had stood after her
talk with the Incroyable, when he had bid her look to the stars, she
raised her arms to them again, her face, pale with a great tenderness,
uplifted.

“You, you, you!” she whispered. “I love you!”

And yet it was to nothing definite, to no man, nor outline of a man,
to no phantom nor dream-lover, that she spoke; neither to him she had
affronted, nor to him who had bidden her look to the stars. Nor was it
to the stars themselves.

She returned slowly and thoughtfully to the house, wondering what she
had meant.



CHAPTER XI. A Voice in a Garden

Crailey came home the next day with a new poem, but no fish. He lounged
up the stairs, late in the afternoon, humming cheerfully to himself,
and, dropping his rod in a corner of Tom's office, laid the poem on
the desk before his partner, produced a large, newly-replenished flask,
opened it, stretched himself comfortably upon a capacious horse-hair
sofa, drank a deep draught, chuckled softly, and requested Mr. Vanrevel
to set the rhymes to music immediately.

“Try it on your instrument,” he said. “It's a simple verse about nothing
but stars, and you can work it out in twenty minutes with the guitar.”

“It is broken,” said Tom, not looking up from his work.

“Broken! When?”

“Last night.”

“Who broke it?”

“It fell from the table in my room.”

“How? Easily mended, isn't it?”

“I think I shall not play it soon again.”

Crailey swung his long legs off the sofa and abruptly sat upright.
“What's this?” he asked gravely.

Tom pushed his papers away from him, rose and went to the dusty window
that looked to the west, where, at the end of the long street, the
sun was setting behind the ruin of charred timbers on the bank of the
shining river.

“It seems that I played once too often,” he said.

Crailey was thoroughly astonished. He took a long, affectionate pull at
the flask and offered it to his partner.

“No,” said Tom, turning to him with a troubled face, “and if I were you,
I wouldn't either. These fishing trips of yours--”

“Fishing!” Crailey laughed. “Trips of a poetaster! It's then I write
best, and write I will! There's a poem, and a damned good one, too, old
preacher, in every gill of whiskey, and I'm the lad that can extract it!
Lord! what's better than to be out in the open, all by yourself in the
woods, or on the river? Think of the long nights alone with the glory
of heaven and a good demijohn. Why, a man's thoughts are like actors
performing in the air and all the crowding stars for audience! You know
in your soul you'd rather have me out there, going it all by myself,
than raising thunder over town. And you know, too, it doesn't tell on
me; it doesn't show! You couldn't guess, to save your life, how much
I've had to-day, now, could you?”

“Yes,” returned the other, “I could.”

“Well, well,” said Crailey, good-naturedly, “we weren't talking of me.”
 He set down the flask, went to his friend and dropped a hand lightly on
his shoulder. “What made you break the guitar? Tell me.”

“What makes you think I broke it?” asked his partner sharply.

“Tell me why you did it,” said Crailey.

And Tom, pacing the room, told him, while Crailey stood in silence,
looking him eagerly in the eye whenever Tom turned his way. The listener
interrupted seldom; once it was to exclaim: “But you haven't said why
you broke the guitar?”

“'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!' I ought to have cut off the
hands that played to her.”

“And cut your throat for singing to her?”

“She was right!” the other answered, striding up and down the room.
“Right--a thousand times! in everything she did. That I should even
ap-proach her, was an unspeakable insolence. I had forgotten, and so,
possibly, had she, but I had not even been properly introduced to her.”

“No, you hadn't, that's true,” observed Crailey, reflectively. “You
don't seem to have much to reproach her with, Tom.”

“Reproach her!” cried the other. “That I should dream she would speak to
me or have anything to do with me, was to cast a doubt upon her loyalty
as a daughter. She was right, I say! And she did the only thing she
could do: rebuked me before them all. No one ever merited what he got
more roundly than I deserved that. Who was I, in her eyes, that I should
besiege her with my importunities, who but her father's worst enemy?”

Deep anxiety knitted Crailey's brow. “I understood she knew of the
quarrel,” he said, thoughtfully. “I saw that, the other evening when
I helped her out of the crowd. She spoke of it on the way home, I
remember; but how did she know that you were Vanrevel? No one in town
would be apt to mention you to her.”

“No, but she did know, you see.”

“Yes,” returned Mr. Gray slowly. “So it seems! Probably her father told
her to avoid you, and described you so that she recognized you as the
man who caught the kitten.”

He paused, picked up the flask, and again applied himself to its
contents, his eyes peering over the up-tilted vessel at Tom, who
continued to pace up and down the length of the office. After a time,
Crailey, fumbling in his coat, found a long cheroot, and, as he lit it,
inquired casually:

“Do you remember if she addressed you by name?”

“I think not,” Tom answered, halting. “What does it matter?”

Crailey drew a deep breath.

“It doesn't,” he returned.

“She knew me well enough,” said Tom, sadly, as he resumed his sentry-go.

“Yes,” repeated Crailey, deliberately. “So it seems; so it seems!” He
blew a long stream of smoke out into the air before him, and softly
mur-mured again: “So it seems, so it seems.”

Silence fell, broken only by the sound of Tom's footsteps, until,
presently, some one informally shouted his name from the street below.
It was only Will Cummings, passing the time of day, but when Tom turned
from the window after answering him, Crailey, his poem, and his flask
were gone.

That evening Vanrevel sat in the dusty office, driving himself to his
work with a sharp goad, for there was a face that came between him and
all else in the world, and a voice that sounded always in his ears.
But the work was done before he rose from his chair, though he showed a
haggard visage as he bent above his candles to blow them out.

It was eleven o'clock; Crailey had not come back, and Tom knew that his
light-hearted friend would not return for many hours; and so, having no
mind to read, and no belief that he could if he tried, he went out
to walk the streets. He went down to the river first, and stood for a
little while gazing at the ruins of the two warehouses, and that was
like a man with a headache beating his skull against a wall. As he stood
on the blackened wharf, he saw how the charred beams rose above him
against the sky like a gallows, and it seemed to him that nothing could
have been a better symbol, for here he had hanged his self-respect.
“Reproach her!” He, who had so displayed his imbecility before her! Had
he been her father's best friend, he should have had too great a
sense of shame to dare to speak to her after that night when her quiet
intelligence had exhibited him to himself, and to all the world, as
nought else than a fool--and a noisy one at that!

Suddenly a shudder convulsed him; he struck his open palm across his
forehead and spoke aloud, while, from horizon to horizon, the night air
grew thick with the whispered laughter of observing hobgoblins:

“And even if there had been no stairway, we could have slid down the
hose-line!”

He retraced his steps, a tall, gray figure moving slowly through the
blue darkness, and his lips formed the heart-sick shadow of a smile when
he found that he had unconsciously turned into Carewe Street. Presently
he came to a gap in a hedge, through which he had sometimes stolen to
hear the sound of a harp and a girl's voice singing; but he did not
enter there tonight, though he paused a moment, his head bowed on his
breast.

There came a sound of voices; they seemed to be moving toward the
hedge, toward the gap where he stood; one a man's eager, quick, but very
musical; the other, a girl's, a rich and clear contralto that passed
into Tom's soul like a psalm of rejoicing and like a scimitar of flame.
He shivered, and moved away quickly, but not before the man's voice,
somewhat louder for the moment, came distinctly from the other side of
the hedge:

“After all,” said the voice, with a ripple of laughter, “after all,
weren't you a little hard on that poor Mr. Gray?”

Tom did not understand, but he knew the voice. It was that of Crailey
Gray.

He heard the same voice again that night, and again stood unseen. Long
after midnight he was still tramping the streets on his lonely rounds,
when he chanced to pass the Rouen House, which hostelry bore, to the
uninitiated eye, the appearance of having closed its doors upon all
hospitalities for the night, in strict compliance with the law of the
city fathers, yet a slender wand of bright light might be discovered
underneath the street door of the bar-room.

From within the merry retreat issued an uproar of shouting, raucous
laughter and the pounding of glasses on tables, heralding all too
plainly the hypocrisy of the landlord, and possibly that of the city
fathers also. Tom knew what company was gathered there: gamblers,
truckmen, drunken farmers, men from the river steamers making riot
while their boats lay at the wharf, with a motley gathering of
good-for-nothings of the back-alleys, and tippling clerks from the Main
Street stores. There came loud cries for a song, and, in answer, the
voice of Crailey rose over the general din, somewhat hoarse, and
never so musical when he sang as when he spoke, yet so touching in its
dramatic tenderness that soon the noise fell away, and

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