The Boss of Little Arcady Part 34

"Be sure I shall not. Sit down."

But she stood still, with an arm extended to the picture, and again implored me: "See--I'm waiting. Where--how--did you get it?"

"Sit down," I said; and this time she obeyed with a little cry of impatience.

"I'll try to bring it back," I said. "It was that day Sheridan hurried back to find his army broken--all but beaten. Just at dark there was a last charge--a charge that was met. I went down in it, hearing yells and a spitting fire, but feeling only numbness. When I woke up the firing was far off. Near me I could hear a voice, the voice of a young man, I thought, wounded like myself. I first took him for one of our men. But his talk undeceived me. It was the talk of your men, and sorrowful talk.

He was badly hurt; he knew that. But he was sure of life. He couldn't die there like a brute. He had to go back and he would go back alive and well; for G.o.d was a gentleman, whatever else He was, and above practical jokes of that sort. Then he seemed to know he was losing strength, and he cried out for a picture, as if he must at least have that before he went. Weak as he was, he tried to turn on his side to search for it. 'It was here a moment ago,' he would say; 'I had it once,' and he tried to turn again, still crying out for it,--he must not die without it. It hurt me to hear his voice break, and I made out to roll near him to help him search. 'We'll find it,' I told him, and he thanked me for my help.

'Look for a square hard case,' he said eagerly. 'It must be here; I had it after I fell down.' Together we searched the rough ground over in the dark as well as we could. I was glad enough to help him. I had a picture like that of my own that I shouldn't have liked to lose. But we were clumsy searchers, and he seemed to lose hope as he lost strength. Again he cried out for that picture, but now it was a despairing cry, and it hurt me. Under the darkness I reached my one good hand up and took my own picture from its place. So many of us carried pictures over our hearts in those days. I pretended then to search once more, telling him to have courage, and then I said, 'Is this it?' He fumbled for it, and his hand caught it quickly up under his chin. He was so glad. He thanked me for finding it, and then he lay still, panting. After a while--we both wanted water--I crawled away to where I heard a running stream. It must have been farther than I thought, and I couldn't be quick because so much of me was numb and had to be dragged. But I reached the water and filled a canteen I had found on the way. As soon as I could manage it I went back to him with the water, but I must have been gone a long time. He wasn't there. But as I crawled near where he had lain, I put my hand on a little square case such as I had given him. I thought it must be mine. I lost consciousness again. When I awoke two hospital stewards carried me on a stretcher, and a field surgeon walked beside us. I still had the picture, and not for many days did I know that it wasn't my own.

After that I forgot it--but I've already told you of that."

Her eyes had not quitted my face while I spoke, though they were glistening; her mouth had weakened more than once, and a piteous little "Oh!" would come from her lips. When I had finished she looked away from me, dropping her eyes to the floor, leaning forward intently, her hands shut between her knees. For a long time she remained so, forgetting me.

But at last I could hear her breathe and could see the increasing rise and fall of it, so that I feared a crisis. But none came. Again she mastered herself and even managed a smile for me, though it was a poor thing.

"I've told you all, Miss Kate."

"Yes--I'm unfair, but you have a right to know. I found that picture--your picture, when they brought him in. His hands were clenched about it. They said he had pleaded to hold it and made them promise not to take it from him--ever. I was left alone, and I dared to take it, just for a moment. Something in the design of the cover puzzled me. I had meant to put it right back, and after I had looked at it there was only one thing to do--to put it back."

"They said you found your own picture, or I might have suspected."

"They had reason to say it--I never told."

"Of course you never told, Miss Kate!" I seemed to learn a great deal of her from that. She had carried her wound secretly through all those years.

"Poor Little Miss!" I said in spite of myself, and at this quite unexpectedly there befell what I had hoped we might both be spared.

I might not soothe her as I would have wished, so I busied myself in the next room until she called to me. She was putting what touches she could to her eyes with a small and sadly bedraggled handkerchief.

"There is a better reason for telling no one now," she said, "so we must destroy this. Mother might see it."

My grate contained its summer acc.u.mulation of waste paper. She laid the picture on this and I lighted the pyre.

"Your mother will see your eyes," I said.

"She has seen them so before." And she gave me her hand, which I kissed.

"Poor Little Miss!" I said, still holding it.

"Not poor now--you have given me back so much. I can believe again--I can believe almost as much as Jim."

But I released her hand. Though her eyes had not quitted mine, their look was one of utter friendliness.

CHAPTER XXVII

HOW A TRUCE WAS TROUBLESOME

In the days and nights that followed this interview I a.s.sociated rather more than usual with Jim. It seemed well to do so. I needed to learn once more some of the magnificent belief that I had taught him in days when my own was stronger. Close companions.h.i.+p with a dog of the truly Greek spirit, under circ.u.mstances in which I now found myself, was bound to be of a tonic value. I had seen, almost at the moment of Miss Kate's disclosure, that a change was to come in our relations. Perhaps I was wild enough at the moment to hope that it might be a change for the better; but this was only in the first flush of it--of a moment ill adapted for close reasoning. It took no great while to convince me that the discovery in which we had cooperated was of a character necessarily to put me from her even farther than she had at first chosen to put me--and that was far enough, Heaven knows.

In effect I had given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women.

One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first--would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt her wound--how much less could I be when the hurt was healed? Before she might have been in want. At least that was conceivable. Now her want was met. Not only was there this to fill her heart, but remorse, the tenderest a woman may know, it seems to me--remorse for undeserved suspicion.

In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance, estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation; thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual.

I would have to play out my game full heartedly, nursing my powers of belief back to their one-time vigor; nothing would occur to ease my lot--not even an occasion to pretend that I gave my blessing to a reunited and happy pair. Miss Kate could go on believing. Unwittingly I had given her the stuff for belief. I, too, must go on believing, and providing my own material, as had ever been my lot; all of which was why my dog seemed my most profitable companion at this time. His every bark at a threatening baby-carriage a block away, each fresh time he believed sincerely that a rubber shoe was engaging in deadly struggle with him, taxing all his forces to subdue it, each time he testified with sensitive, twitching nostrils that the earth is good with innumerable scents, each streaking of his glad-tongued white length over yellowing fields designed solely for his recreation held for me a certain soothing value. And when in quiet moments he a.s.sured me with melting gaze that I was a being to challenge the very heart of love--in some measure, at least, did my soul gain strength from his own.

To know as much as I have indicated had been unavoidable for one of any intuitive powers. The change at once to be detected in Miss Kate's manner toward me confirmed my divinations without enlarging them. Miss Katharine Lansdale was gone forever; in her place was a Miss Kate,--even a Little Miss to the eye,--who regarded me at first with an undisguised alarm, then with a curious interfusion of alarm and shyness, a little disguised with not a little effort. This was plain reading. She would at first have distrusted me, apprehending I know not what rashness of ill-timed and forever impossible declarations. As she perceived this alarm to be baseless, for I not only refrained from intruding but I ostentatiously let Miss Kate alone, shyness would creep into her apprehension to make amends for its first crude manifestations.

As the days went by and I displayed still the fine sense to keep myself aloof, to seek Miss Kate only in those ways that I sought her refres.h.i.+ng mother, she let me discern more clearly her faith in my firmness and good sense. To be plain, in reward for letting her alone, she did not let me alone. And this reward I accepted becomingly, with a resolve--the metal of which I hoped she would divine--never to show myself undeserving of its benisons.

When I say that the young woman did not let me alone, I mean that she seemed almost to put herself in my way; not obviously, true enough, but in a degree palpable enough to one who had observed her first almost shrinking alarm. And this behavior of hers went forward, at last, without the slightest leaven of apprehension on her part, but her shyness remained. It was so marked and so novel in her--with reference to myself--that I could not fail to be sensible to it. It was as if she divined that mad notions might still lurk within my untaught mind to be reasons why she should fear me; but that her confidence in my self-mastery could not, at the same time, be too openly shown.

Tacitly, it was as if we had treated together; a treaty that bound me to observe a perpetual truce. My arms were forever laid down, and she, who had once so feared me, was now free to wander when she would within the lines of an honorable enemy. That she should walk there with increasing frequency as the days pa.s.sed was a tribute to my powers of restraint which I was too wise to undervalue. I ignored the shyness of which she seemed unable to divest herself in my presence. It would have been easy not to ignore it, for there were times when, so little careful was she to guard herself, that this shyness suggested, invited, appealed, signalled; times when, without my deeper knowledge of her s.e.x, I could have sworn that the true woman-call rang in my ears. But a treaty is a treaty, on paper or on honor, and ours would never be broken by black treachery of mine, let her eyes fall under my own with never so fluttering an allurement.

They were not bad days, as days go in this earth-life of too much exact knowledge. Miss Kate rowed me over still waters and walked beside me in green pastures. At times like these she might even seem to forget. She would even become, I must affirm, more nearly Peavey than was strictly her right; for it was plain that our treaty, must involve certain stipulations of restraint on her part as well as on my own. The burden was not all to be mine. But these moments I learned to withstand, remembering that she was a woman. That was a circ.u.mstance not hard to remember when she was by. It is probable that my heart could not have forgotten it, even had my trained head learned blandly to ignore it.

Further to enliven those days, I permitted Jim to give her lessons in believing everything. When I told her of this, she said, "I need them, I'm so out of practice." That was the nearest we had come to touching upon the interview of a certain afternoon. I should not have considered this a forbidden topic, but her shyness became pitiful at any seeming approach to it. "Jim will put you right again," I a.s.sured her. And I believe he did, though it was not easy to persuade him that she could be morally recognized when I was by. The occasion on which he first remained crouching at her feet while I walked away was regarded by Miss Kate as a personal triumph. She was so childishly open of her pleasure at this that I did not tell her it was a mere trick of mine; that I had told him to charge when he sprang up. She knew his eyes so little as to think he displayed regard for rather than respect for my command. She could not see that he begged me piteously to know _why_ he must crouch there at a couple of strange inconsequential feet and see the good world go suddenly wrong.

Still further, to make those days not bad days, Miss Kate would cross our little common ground of an early evening to where I played the game on my porch. Often I did this until dusk obscured the faces of the cards. I faintly suspected in the course of these bird-like visits a caprice in Miss Kate to know what it might be that I preferred to the society of her mother on her own porch. She appeared to be more curious than interested. She promptly made those observations which the unillumined have ever considered it witty to make concerning those who play at solitaire. But, finding that I had long ceased to be moved by these, she was friendly enough to judge the game upon its merits. That she judged it to be stupid was neither strange nor any reflection upon the fairness of her mind. The game--in those profounder, rarer aspects which alone dignify it--is not for women. I believe that the game of cards to teach them philosophy under defeat, respect for the inevitable and a cheerful manipulation of such trifling good fortune as may befall--instead of that wild, womanish demand for all or nothing--has yet to be invented. I predict of this game, moreover, if ever it be found, that it will be a game at which two, at least, must play. Rarely have I known a woman, however rigid her integrity otherwise, who would not brazenly amend or even repeal utterly those decrees of Fate which are symbolized by the game. She desires intensely to win, and she will not be above s.h.i.+fting a card or two in contravention of the known rules.

Far am I from intimating that this puts upon her the stigma of moral delinquency. It is mere testimony, rather, to her astounding capacity for self-deception. And this I cannot believe to be other than gracious of influence upon the intricate muddle of human a.s.sociation.

Miss Kate was finely the woman at those times when she deigned for a ten minutes to overlook my playing of the game. Before I had half finished, on the first occasion, she had mastered its simple mechanism; and before I had quite finished she sought to practise upon it those methods of the world woman in games of solitaire. She would calmly have placed a black nine on a black ten.

"But the colors must alternate," I protested, thinking she had forgotten this important rule.

"Of course--I know that perfectly well--but look what a fine lot of cards that would give you. There's a deuce of hearts you could play up and a three of spades, and then you could go back to crossing the colors again, right away, you know, and you'd have that whole line running up to the king ready to put into that s.p.a.ce."

I looked at her, as she would have glided brazenly over that false play to rejoice in the true plays it permitted. But I did not speak. There are times, indeed, when we most honor the tongue of Shakspere by silence; emergencies to which words are so inadequate that to attempt to use them were to degrade the whole language.

At the last I was brought face to face with a most intricately planned defeat; a defeat insured by one spot on a card. Had the obstructive card been a six-spot of clubs instead of a seven-spot, victory was mine. I pointed this out to Miss Kate, who had declined a chair at the table and had chosen to stand beside my own. I showed her the series of plays which, but for that seven-spot, would put the kings in their places at the top and let me win. And I was beaten for lack of a six.

That she had grasped my explanation was quickly made plain. Actually with some enthusiasm she showed me that the much-desired six of clubs lay directly under the fatal seven.

"Just lay the seven over here," she began eagerly, "and there's your black six ready for that horrid red five that's in the way--"

"But there isn't any 'over here,'" I exclaimed in some irritation.

"There can only be eight cards in a row--that would make nine."

"Yes, but then you could play up all the others so beautifully--just see!"

"Is this a game," I asked, "or a child's crazy play?"

"Then it's an exceedingly stupid game if you can't do a little thing like that when it's absolutely necessary. What is the _sense_ of it?"

Her eyes actually flashed into mine as she leaned at my side pointing out this simple way to victory.