Nevertheless Mr. Ford was far from being satisfied with the issue of his adventure. His relations with Cressy were known to the mother, and although she had not again alluded to them, she would probably inform her husband. Yet he could not help noticing, with a mingling of unreasoning relief and equally unreasoning distrust, that she exhibited a scornful unconcern in the matter, apart from the singular use to which she had put it. He could hardly count upon McKinstry, with his heavy, blind devotion to Cressy, being as indifferent. On the contrary, he had acquired the impression, without caring to examine it closely, that her father would not be displeased at his marrying Cressy, for it would really amount to that. But here again he was forced to contemplate what he had always avoided, the possible meaning and result of their intimacy. In the reckless, thoughtless, extravagant—yet thus far innocent—indulgence of their mutual passion, he had never spoken of marriage, nor—and it struck him now with the same incongruous mingling of relief and uneasiness—had she! Perhaps this might have arisen from some superstitious or sensitive recollection on her part of her previous engagement to Seth, but he remembered now that they had not even exchanged the usual vows of eternal constancy. It may seem strange that, in the half-dozen stolen and rapturous interviews which had taken place between these young lovers, there had been no suggestion of the future, nor any of those glowing projects for a united destiny peculiar to their years and inexperience. They had lived entirely in a blissful present, with no plans beyond their next rendezvous. In that mysterious and sudden absorption of each other, not only the past, but the future seemed to have been forgotten.
These thoughts were passing through his mind the next afternoon to the prejudice of that calm and studious repose which the deserted school-house usually superinduced, and which had been so fondly noted by McKinstry and Uncle Ben. The latter had not arrived for his usual lesson; it was possible that undue attention had been attracted to his movements now that his good fortune was known; and the master was alone save for the occasional swooping incursion of a depredatory jay in search of crumbs from the children’s luncheons, who added apparently querulous insult to the larcenous act. He regretted Uncle Ben’s absence, as he wanted to know more about his connection with the Harrison attack and his eventual intentions. Ever since the master emerged from the barn and regained his hotel under cover of the darkness, he had heard only the vaguest rumors, and he purposely avoided direct inquiry.
He had been quite prepared for Cressy’s absence from school that morning—indeed in his present vacillating mood he had felt that her presence would have been irksome and embarrassing; but it struck him suddenly and unpleasantly that her easy desertion of him at that critical moment in the barn had not since been followed by the least sign of anxiety to know the result of her mother’s interference. What did she imagine had transpired between Mrs. McKinstry and himself? Had she confidently expected her mother’s prompt acceptance of the situation and a reconciliation? Was that the reason why she had treated that interruption as lightly as if she were already his recognized betrothed? Had she even calculated upon it? had she—? He stopped, his cheek glowing from irritation under the suspicion, and shame at the disloyalty of entertaining it.
Opening his desk, he began to arrange his papers mechanically, when he discovered, with a slight feeling of annoyance, that he had placed Cressy’s bouquet—now dried and withered—in the same pigeon-hole with the mysterious letters with which he had so often communed in former days. He at once separated them with a half bitter smile, yet after a moment’s hesitation, and with his old sense of attempting to revive a forgotten association, he tried to re-peruse them. But they did not even restrain his straying thoughts, nor prevent him from detecting a singular occurrence. The nearly level sun was, after its old fashion, already hanging the shadowed tassels of the pine boughs like a garland on the wall. But the shadow seemed to have suddenly grown larger and more compact, and he turned, with a quick consciousness of some interposing figure at the pane. Nothing however was to be seen. Yet so impressed had he been that he walked to the door and stepped from the porch to discover the intruder. The clearing was deserted, there was a slight rustling in the adjacent laurels, but no human being was visible. Nevertheless the old feeling of security and isolation which had never been quite the same since Mr. McKinstry’s confession, seemed now to have fled the sylvan school-house altogether, and he somewhat angrily closed his desk, locked it, and determined to go home.
His way lay through the first belt of pines towards the mining-flat, but to-day from some vague impulse he turned and followed the ridge. He had not proceeded far when he perceived Rupert Filgee lounging before him on the trail, and at a little distance further on his brother Johnny. At the sight of these two favorite pupils Mr. Ford’s heart smote him with a consciousness that he had of late neglected them, possibly because Rupert’s lofty scorn of the “silly” sex was not as amusing to him as formerly, and possibly because Johnny’s curiosity had been at times obtrusive. He however quickened his pace and joined Rupert, laying his hand familiarly as of old on his shoulder. To his surprise the boy received his advances with some constraint and awkwardness, glancing uneasily in the direction of Johnny. A sudden idea crossed Mr. Ford’s mind.
“Were you looking for me at the schoolroom just now?”
“No, sir.”
“You didn’t look in at the window to see if I was there?” continued the master.
“No, sir.”
The master glanced at Rupert. Truth-telling was a part of Rupert’s truculent temper, although, as the boy had often bitterly remarked, it had always “told agin’ him.”
“All right,” said the master, perfectly convinced. “It must have been my fancy; but I thought somebody looked in—or passed by the window.”
But here Johnny, who had overheard the dialogue and approached them, suddenly threw himself upon his brother’s unoffending legs and commenced to beat and pull them about with unintelligible protests. Rupert, without looking down, said quietly, “Quit that now—I won’t, I tell ye,” and went through certain automatic movements of dislodging Johnny as if he were a mere impeding puppy.
“What’s the matter, Johnny?” said the master, to whom these gyrations were not unfamiliar.
Johnny only replied by a new grip of his brother’s trousers.
“Well, sir,” said Rupert, slightly recovering his dimples and his readiness, “Johnny, yer, wants me to tell ye something. Ef he wasn’t the most original self-cocking, God-forsaken liar in Injin Spring—ef he didn’t lie awake in his crib mornin’s to invent lies fer the day, I wouldn’t mind tellin’ ye, and would hev told you before. However, since you ask, and since you think you saw somebody around the school-house, Johnny yer allows that Seth Davis is spyin’ round and followin’ ye wherever you go, and he dragged me down yer to see it. He says he saw him doggin’ ye.”
“With a knife and pithtolth,” added Johnny’s boundless imagination, to the detriment of his limited facts.
Mr. Ford looked keenly from the one to the other, but rather with a suspicion that they were cognizant of his late fracas than belief in the truth of Johnny’s statement.
“And what do you think of it, Rupert?” he asked carelessly.
“I think, sir,” said Rupert, “that allowin’—for onct—that Johnny ain’t lying, mebbee it’s Cressy McKinstry that Seth’s huntin’ round, and knowin’ that she’s always runnin’ after you”—he stopped, and reddening with a newborn sense that his fatal truthfulness had led him into a glaring indelicacy towards the master, hurriedly added: “I mean, sir, that mebbee it’s Uncle Ben he’s jealous of, now that he’s got rich enough for Cressy to hev him, and knowin’ he comes to school in the afternoon perhaps”—
“’Tain’t either!” broke in Johnny promptly. “Theth’s over ther beyond the thchool, and Crethy’s eatin’ ithecream at the bakerth with Uncle Ben.”
“Well, suppose she is, Seth don’t know it, silly!” answered Rupert, sharply. Then more politely to the master: “That’s it! Seth has seen Uncle Ben gallivanting with Cressy and thinks he’s bringing her over yer. Don’t you see?”
The master however did not see but one thing. The girl who had only two days ago carelessly left it to him to explain a compromising situation to her mother—this girl who had precipitated him into a frontier fight to the peril of his position and her good name, was calmly eating ices with an available suitor without the least concern of the past! The connection was perhaps illogical, but it was unpleasant. It was the more awkward from the fact that he fancied that not only Rupert’s beautiful eyes, but even the infant Johnny’s round ones, were fixed upon him with an embarrassed expression of hesitating and foreboding sympathy.
“I think Johnny believes what he says—don’t you, Johnny?” he smiled with an assumption of cheerful ease, “but I see no necessity just yet for binding Seth Davis over to keep the peace. Tell me about yourself, Rupe. I hope Uncle Ben doesn’t think of changing his young tutor with his good fortune?”
“No, sir,” returned Rupert brightening; “he promises to take me to Sacramento with him as his private secretary or confidential clerk, you know, ef—ef”—he hesitated again with very un-Rupert-like caution, “ef things go as he wants ’em.” He stopped awkwardly and his brown eyes became clouded. “Like ez not, Mr. Ford, he’s only foolin’ me—and—himself.” The boy’s eyes sought the master’s curiously.
“I don’t know about that,” returned Mr. Ford uneasily, with a certain recollection of Uncle Ben’s triumph over his own incredulity; “he surely hasn’t shown himself a fool or a boaster so far. I consider your prospect a very fair one, and I wish you joy of it, my boy.” He ran his fingers through Rupert’s curls in his old caressing fashion, the more tenderly perhaps that he fancied he still saw symptoms of stormy and wet weather in the boy’s brown eyes. “Run along home, both of you, and don’t worry yourselves about me.”
He turned away, but had scarcely proceeded half a dozen yards before he felt a tug at his coat. Looking down he saw the diminutive Johnny. “They’ll be comin’ home thith way,” he said, reaching up in a hoarse confidential whisper.
“Who?”
“Crethy and ’im.”
But before the master could make any response to this presumably gratifying information, Johnny had rejoined his brother. The two boys waved their hands towards him with the same diffident and mysterious sympathy that left him hesitating between a smile and a frown. Then he proceeded on his way. Nevertheless, for no other reason than that he felt a sudden distaste to meeting any one, when he reached the point where the trail descended directly to the settlement, he turned into a longer and more solitary detour by the woods.
The sun was already so low that its long rays pierced the forest from beneath, and suffused the dim colonnade of straight pine shafts with a golden haze, while it left the dense intercrossed branches fifty feet above in deeper shadow. Walking in this yellow twilight, with his feet noiselessly treading down the yielding carpet of pine needles, it seemed to the master that he was passing through the woods in a dream. There was no sound but the dull intermittent double knock of the wood-pecker, or the drowsy croak of some early roosting bird; all suggestion of the settlement, with all traces of human contiguity, were left far behind. It was therefore with a strange and nervous sense of being softly hailed by some woodland sprite that he seemed to hear his own name faintly wafted upon the air. He turned quickly; it was Cressy, panting behind him! Even then, in her white closely gathered skirts, her bared head and graceful arching neck bent forward, her flying braids freed from the straw hat which she had swung from her arm so as not to impede her flight, there was so much of the following Maenad about her that he was for an instant startled.
He stopped; she bounded to him, and throwing her arms around his neck with a light laugh, let herself hang for a moment breathless on his breast. Then recovering her speech she said slowly:—
“I started on an Injin trot after you, just as you turned off the trail, but you’d got so far ahead while I was shaking myself clear of Uncle Ben that I had to jist lope the whole way through the woods to catch up.” She stopped, and looking up into his troubled face caught his cheeks between her hands, and bringing his knit brows down to the level of her humid blue eyes said, “You haven’t kissed me yet. What’s the matter?”
“Doesn’t it strike you that I might ask that question, considering that it’s three days since I’ve seen you, and that you left me, in a rather awkward position, to explain matters to your mother?” he said coldly. He had formulated the sentence in his mind some moments before, but now that it was uttered, it appeared singularly weak and impotent.
“That’s so,” she said with a frank laugh, burying her face in his waistcoat. “You see, dandy boy”—his pet name—“I reckoned for that reason we’d better lie low for a day or two. Well,” she continued, untying his cravat and retying it again, “how did you crawl out of it?”
“Do you mean to say your mother did not tell you?” he asked indignantly.
“Why should she?” returned Cressy lazily. “She never talks to me of these things, honey.”
“And you knew nothing about it?”
Cressy shook her head, and then winding one of her long braids around the young man’s neck, offered the end of it to his mouth, and on his sternly declining it, took it in her own.
Yet even her ignorance of what had really happened did not account to the master for the indifference of her long silence, and albeit conscious of some inefficiency in his present unheroic attitude, he continued sarcastically, “May I ask what you imagined would happen when you left me?”
“Well,” said Cressy confidently, “I reckoned, chile, you could lie as well as the next man, and that, being gifted, you’d sling Maw something new and purty. Why, I ain’t got no fancy, but I fixed up something against Paw’s questioning me. I made that conceited Masters promise to swear that he was in the barn with me. Then I calculated to tell Paw that you came meandering along just before Maw popped in, and that I skedaddled to join Masters. Of course,” she added quickly, tightening her hold of the master as he made a sudden attempt at withdrawal, “I didn’t let on to Masters why I wanted him to promise, or that you were there.”
“Cressy,” said Ford, irritated beyond measure, “are you mad, or do you think I am?”
The girl’s face changed. She cast a half frightened, half questioning glance at his eyes and then around the darkening aisle. “If we’re going to quarrel, Jack,” she said hurriedly, “don’t let’s do it before folks.”
“In the name of Heaven,” he said, following her eyes indignantly, “what do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, with a slight shiver of resignation and scorn, “if you—oh dear! if it’s all going to be like them, let’s keep it to ourselves.”
He gazed at her in hopeless bewilderment. Did she really mean that she was more frightened at the possible revelation of their disagreement than of their intimacy?
“Come,” she continued tenderly, still glancing, however, uneasily around her, “come! We’ll be more comfortable in the hollow. It’s only a step.” Still holding him by her braid she half led, half dragged him away. To the right was one of those sudden depressions in the ground caused by the subsidence of the earth from hidden springs and the uprooting of one or two of the larger trees. When she had forced him down this declivity below the level of the needle-strewn forest floor, she seated him upon a mossy root, and shaking out her skirts in a half childlike, half coquettish way, comfortably seated herself in his lap, with her arm supplementing the clinging braid around his neck.
“Now hark to me, and don’t holler so loud,” she said turning his face to her questioning eyes. “What’s gone of you anyway, nigger boy?” It should be premised that Cressy’s terms of endearment were mainly negro-dialectical, reminiscences of her brief babyhood, her slave-nurse, and the only playmates she had ever known.
Still implacable, the master coldly repeated the counts of his indictment against the girl’s strange indifference and still stranger entanglements, winding up by setting forth the whole story of his interview with her mother, his forced defence of the barn, Seth’s outspoken accusation, and their silent and furious struggle in the loft. But if he had expected that this daughter of a Southwestern fighter would betray any enthusiasm over her lover’s participation in one of their characteristic feuds—if he looked for any fond praise for his own prowess, he was bitterly mistaken. She loosened her arm from his neck of her own accord, unwound the braid, and putting her two little hands clasped between her knees, crossed her small feet before her, and, albeit still in his lap, looked the picture of languid dejection.
“Maw ought to have more sense, and you ought to have lit out of the window after me,” she said with a lazy sigh. “Fightin’ ain’t in your line—it’s too much like them. That Seth’s sure to get even with you.”
“I can protect myself,” he said haughtily. Nevertheless he had a depressing consciousness that his lithe and graceful burden was somewhat in the way of any heroic expression.
“Seth can lick you out of your boots, chile,” she said with naive abstraction. Then, as he struggled to secure an upright position, “Don’t git riled, honey. Of course you’d let them kill you before you’d give in. But that’s their best holt—that’s their trade! That’s all they can do—don’t you see? That’s where you’re not like them—that’s why you’re not their low down kind! That’s why you’re my boy—that’s why I love you!”
She had thrown her whole weight again upon his shoulders until she had forced him back to his seat. Then, with her locked hands again around his neck, she looked intently into his face. The varying color dropped from her cheeks, her eyes seemed to grow larger, the same look of rapt absorption and possession that had so transfigured her young face at the ball was fixed upon it now. Her lips parted slightly, she seemed to murmur rather than speak:—
“What are these people to us? What are Seth’s jealousies, Uncle Ben’s and Masters’s foolishness, Paw and Maw’s quarr’ls and tantrums to you and me, dear? What is it what they think, what they reckon, what they plan out, and what they set themselves against—to us? We love each other, we belong to each other, without their help or their hindrance. From the time we first saw each other it was so, and from that time Paw and Maw, and Seth and Masters, and even you and me, dear, had nothing else to do. That was love as I know it; not Seth’s sneaking rages, and Uncle Ben’s sneaking fooleries, and Masters’s sneaking conceit, but only love. And knowing that, I let Seth rage, and Uncle Ben dawdle, and Masters trifle—and for what? To keep them from me and my boy. They were satisfied, and we were happy.”
Vague and unreasoning as he knew her speech to be, the rapt and perfect conviction with which it was uttered staggered him.
“But how is this to end, Cressy?” he said passionately.
The abstracted look passed, and the slight color and delicate mobility of her face returned. “To end, dandy boy?” she repeated lazily. “You didn’t think of marrying me—did you?”
He blushed, stammered, and said “Yes,” albeit with all his past vacillation and his present distrust of her, transparent on his cheek and audible in his voice.
“No, dear,” she said quietly, reaching down, untying her little shoe and shaking the dust and pine needles from its recesses, “no! I don’t know enough to be a wife to you, just now, and you know it. And I couldn’t keep a house fit for you, and you couldn’t afford to keep me without it. And then it would be all known, and it wouldn’t be us two, dear, and our lonely meetings any more. And we couldn’t be engaged—that would be too much like me and Seth over again. That’s what you mean, dandy boy—for you’re only a dandy boy, you know, and they don’t get married to backwood Southern girls who haven’t a nigger to bless themselves with since the war! No,” she continued, lifting her proud little head so promptly after Ford had recovered from his surprise as to make the ruse of emptying her shoe perfectly palpable, “no, that’s what we’ve both allowed, dear, all along. And now, honey, it’s near time for me to go. Tell me something good—before I go. Tell me that you love me as you used to—tell me how you felt that night at the ball when you first knew we loved each other. But stop—kiss me first—there, once more—for keeps.”