Part 8

The memory of Susan's words only strengthened his obstinacy. The shield Frances kept about her, thin as gauze, impenetrable as steel, which he had fended aside once and once again, but made his fight the more interesting. He had no fault to find at any point of the situation,--only a wild impatience that he should have been thrust back when he felt attainment within his grasp.

XIV

With the advent of visitors the professor's house became the centre of gayety in the quadrangle. The women of the other households were glad to show friendliness to the young girl, in whom they felt a warm interest, but who had seemed in her content to need no one. Visits and invitations, drives and supper parties transformed the quiet household.

The professor made one stand for himself. Susan had asked for a scullion and named a boy, who was promptly engaged. "And, Susan," the professor had commanded, "see that he keeps a good fire in the parlor; show every one who calls in there. Leave the library undisturbed."

"I must have some peace!" added the professor to himself, who found this whirl a trial, but endured it for Frances' sake. For Frances seemed to thoroughly enjoy this dispensing of hospitality; she planned gayeties far ahead. She accepted and returned the invitations from their neighbors. She spent hours in the kitchen while her guests were dispatched on pleasures, and fought Susan's wrath for each of those hours. There was no idle moment when accusing thoughts might sting, or when some seeker for such opportunity would find her alone.

Lawson, he scarcely knew how, was made the special attendant of the visitors; and though he was restless and chafing, and keenly watchful for his chances, he yet enjoyed the gay expeditions and the presence of the pretty, fun-loving young women.

Montague, when he came, was warmly welcomed and made one of them; but it was a busy season on the farm; he was kept away enough to have something of the feeling of an outsider and to see the things one from the outside sees. He was vaguely conscious of a troubled atmosphere, and he saw, too, what no one else did, that there was a feverish restlessness about Frances and a constant guarded effort at control. His instinctive thought of her warned him that in spite of her apparent blitheness she needed befriending. He was constantly alert for her, constantly watchful. Whenever he was with them Frances felt, somehow, helped and more at peace with herself. So for the allotted time of the visit. The days had nearly sped by when Frances found the professor one morning gathering up his books and papers for the day's lectures.

The contrast between the quiet room, lined with bookshelves, the grave, scholarly man standing there by the paper-littered table, and the room across the hall, from which floated the sound of chatter and laughter, smote the professor's daughter keenly.

"Does all this visiting and calling and confusion bother you?" she asked, as she slipped her hand through his arm and ran her soft palm childishly up and down the heavy wool of his sleeve.

"Not at all!" The professor looked lovingly into the eyes of his daughter, who was as tall as he was.

"Because," she went on whimsically, "they are going to stay longer!" She made a pretence of holding her breath.

The professor thought of the loved quiet of his home and the still more loved comradeship of his daughter, and was silent.

"I don't think it's altogether on my account," added Frances demurely.

The professor chuckled. "I don't think it is!" he replied.

"They _are_ enjoying their visit."

"So it seems!" And then, after a short silence, "Are you enjoying it also?"

"I? Of course!"

"Then it's all right!" He slipped a rubber band about his papers and laid them on his books. "I drove out to young Montague's yesterday," he said to his daughter, standing idly before the fire. Frances had found so few moments alone with her father lately that she was making the most of these.

"It's dreary out there," the professor complained; "these winter days are going to be hard for him."

"Don't worry! I've never seen a man less inclined to be doleful!"

"Do you think so," said the professor eagerly, "now, lately he hasn't seemed so--so bright as he used to be. I thought perhaps he was finding it lonely. He is an excellent farmer, do you know," he said with sudden enthusiasm, "he has sold enough wood off the place to pay half of the cost of it."

"Oh! what a pity!"

"Pity!"

"The hills will look so bare; I shall always remember the beautiful forest sweeping up to the mountain tops."

"Oh! the wood will be cut far up the range and there is enough about there for the country not to suffer for the want of it. We went over it together."

"Then I know it is all right!" teased Frances.

"He's working too hard," the professor went on, keeping to the topic in which he was so keenly interested.

"You know this is a busy season; after a while he can rest. You know what you often say, winter is the farmer's holiday."

"Yes, but shut up out there! I must send him some books." Frances watched in amusement as her father went to the shelves where his light literature was kept. "Pope's Iliad," he said thoughtfully, "read it in the original of course; Herodotus, I wonder how much Greek he knows; Carlyle, hm! Drummond, that will make him think at least--What?" for Frances was leaning against his shoulder and was laughing.

"What do you like yourself when you are idle or half sick, when there's a good hot fire to read and dream before?"

The professor reddened with conscience-stricken remembrance of a pile of paper-bound novels in the attic. "Get him something yourself, then!"

"I will!"

"I dare say he will like it better," retorted her father, who, blind to Lawson's attentions, had begun to suspicion Montague's, and to think with a half-pleased apprehension that it might be a desirable thing for some far-off day.

Frances was about to answer when the bell rang insistently.

"Good Lord!" groaned the professor.

"I don't think it is a visitor," soothed Frances. "What is it, Susan?"

The old woman came briskly into the room. "I dunno! Some sassy niggah jes' poked dis box at me an' run off." Susan was always ready to find fault with the manners of the rising generation; she put the box down gingerly just on the professor's papers.

"Here!" he snatched it up and set it forcibly on the hearth. "Flowers! And the thing is wet!"

Frances, delighted, knelt by the box. "Miss Frances Holloway," she read; "give me your knife! Oh!" for the top wrenched off disclosed a sheaf of chrysanthemums, white and yellow, and a card, "Mr. Frank Lawson."

"They are for all, of course!" she filled her arms with them and got to her feet. "Take this box in the kitchen, Susan."

"Wait!" her father called, "what are you going to do to-day?"

"We are going shopping in the morning, and there is a tally-ho party to Monticello this afternoon."

"You are going?"

"This morning."

"And this afternoon?"

"I scarcely think I shall go. I have been up to Monticello so often, and I think I'll stay at home and make a cake."

"Why don't you go, Frances?" her father protested.

"It will be a chocolate cake," she was laughing at him over the sheaf of chrysanthemums, "and you shall have all you want!" And the professor was disarmed.

Some one else had noticed this same tendency of housekeeping. When Frances was busily beating eggs in the kitchen, the bell rang. She went on with her work without a thought of visitors, for the tally-ho party was large and included all their friends, the younger ones at least. Susan had gone on an errand, and the boy, hurrying carelessly through kitchen and dining-room and library, left each door open as he went through.

"T'aint no one home but Miss Frances," he said to the young man on the door-step, "and she's busy in the kitchen."

The young man went past him into the library; through the doors he glimpsed Frances, back towards him. He stepped out of the line of vision, "Very well!" he said in a low tone to the boy gaping in the doorway, "you need not tell her; I'll announce myself!"

The boy, green, untrained, as Lawson knew him to be, hastened on through the back door of the hall to his work at the woodpile. Lawson trod softly across the rooms. The swift beater in Frances' hands deafened her ears to other sounds. He came close behind her, and spoke her name before she knew the warm sunny kitchen held any but herself.

She went white to the lips with fright. "How dare you?" she cried.

Lawson had thought of some flattering speech to appease her; instead his anger flared as hot as hers. "Did you not know I would dare anything?"

The piteous red flushing over the pallor of cheek and forehead told him the shot had told brutally.

"Did you not know I would dare anything to see you?" He pleaded conscience stricken at his blunder. "I asked you, I told you, the night you came home, to give me an opportunity to--to see you."

"You have!" she flashed, anger once more coming to her aid.

"You know what I meant, not with a crowd about you, but when I--I--you have made a hedge of your visitors," he accused. It was exactly what she had done, and done wilfully. "You knew I longed to see you."

Frances rolled down her shirt-sleeves and buttoned them coolly. "Will you walk into the library?" she asked icily.

"No!"

"I did not know you were fond of the kitchen. Have this chair," pulling Susan's low flag chair beside the window.

Lawson took it from her. His eyes were red with wrath, but Frances took no heed.

"Does it remind you of home?" went on the young woman sarcastically.

"God forbid!" he blurted, with a flashing memory of the chef presiding there in the kitchen.

The calm was coming back to Frances' manner; she felt herself yet mistress. "Sit down; I will show you what a Virginia kitchen is like. I'll bake you a cake," she added, with a saucy air, for all the fear that was tugging at her heart, "if you are a good boy."

"I was never good!" he blazed.

"No," thoughtfully; "well, it's good to be truthful. I'll give you a cake for that."

"I want none of your cakes!"

Frances opened wide her innocent-seeming eyes, though her lip trembled.

"I want you!"

She leaned back against the table's edge as he came close to her. She clenched her hands, striving for the hot words she wanted, which would not come.

"I love you; you know it--"

Her eyes flashed blazing denial.

"Will you marry me?"

For one instant heart and pulse stopped. "Marry him--marry him--" All her fancies and conclusions were whirling in her brain; flirtations, of which she had accused him, were not apt to go so far.

"You know how I love you, long for you. Why have you kept this distance between us, Frances?" He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her drooping face. "You will be my wife?" but at that word a sudden swift memory smote him icy cold and speechless. Frances looking shyly up thought it anxiety for her answer. Into the gray eyes came stealing, flashing, the look he had dreamed of, had resolved to kindle there and read, himself glorified as he read. With a sob in his breath he caught her to him. "Frances," he began hurriedly, soon as speech would come, "there is something I must tell you now, you must know--" but Frances, covered with confusion, was pulling away from him. She had heard Susan's step outside, "Susan is coming," she panted.

Lawson gave her one passionate look, that hardened into triumphant love as he gazed deep into her eyes. "So be it," he said within himself; "I accept!"

He slipped through the doors, closing them as he went. When Susan came into the kitchen he was softly shutting the outer one. He went triumphant. For one instant the joy of possession had fought with a deeper and higher love, but desire had won.

XV

Through the hours of that night Frances heard the strong north wind about the house, singing the song of vibrant trees on the mountain-tops or the low tones of the rolling hills and narrow valleys. All night she knew the world outside grew cold and colder, while the mist clouds which had condensed into rain in the early evening were swept from the sky. As the fire in her grate burned low and the insistent wind rattled at window and door and blew in gusty breaths down the chimney's mouth, the furniture contracting and snapping, made weird noises which mingled with the clashings of the maples on the quadrangle.

Whether she slept or whether she waked, it was the same mood of restless excited happiness. It seemed but a reflection of it from the world outside when she flung open her heavy shutters in the morning and saw the sky clear as crystal, bluish green at its zenith and, over above the houses opposite, flushed red as a rose. The maples rocked in the wind, along the corridor across the way the shallow rain pools in the worn pavement had turned to ice, making shimmer and shine but perilous footing. The wind and the rocking and the singing were her own restless mood, which made her vibrant to a song which she knew not for joy or for some feeling yet unnamable.

It was not wholly joy, for her first thought of others struck her with dismay. Susan, before she had dressed, came into the room, a great box in her hands.

"Dat boy done said p'intidly dis time 'twas for yuh. He 'low dat Mr. Lawson call Mr. Cook up to de 'phone las' night an' said as how dey was to be hyar befor' sun up dis mornin'."

"Oh!" cried Frances with a long ecstatic sigh, as she uncovered the sweet red roses and buried her blushing face in their fragrant hearts, "how beautiful, how sweet, how--"--"thoughtful" she was about to add, when she remembered Susan and her secret.

But Susan could read the tale of that shy, sweet delight in Frances' face and her own grew more anxious and wrinkled.

"Yuh'd bettah hurry up an' dress," she said, grumpily. "'Tis nigh upon eight o'clock and yo' pa won't eben think his breakfast taste good if yuh isn't there." It was the first shot she could think of, but it told.

Frances laid down the great handful of beauties she had been holding ecstatically close to her face. "I will be down in a moment," she said soberly, and, then, as Susan still lingered, "you had better hurry yourself and see that everything is ready."

As she brushed the rebellious dark hair into the waves above her forehead she saw her reflected face through a mist of tears; once, twice, in the happy evening before, the thought of her father had come like a stab through the joy still only half believed in and shyly dreamed of. She had not dared follow that thought to the end. It would show her the deep sorrow of her own heart were she to leave him to live her life many hundred miles away amongst people and surroundings not of his kind and beyond his ken; it would show her, what was harder still, the desolation of his loneliness without her. She could not face it yet, but must put it away from her with all the tremulous uncertainties quivering into life in her heart, and must live in the moment.

She fastened a great red rose in her dainty waist and then picked up a smaller bud. "This is for you," she declared, as she hastened into the library before the breakfast bell had rung, and found her father waiting a trifle impatiently before the fire.

So it was that a young man, hurrying across the campus in gay mood, gave a start of astonishment when he met the professor, and guessed the rose in his coat to be one of those he had dedicated to this first happy day of a love striven for against long odds and won.

It was not the better part of him that had triumphed the day before, and it may have been the fight within which made him so readily resentful and so quick to show it, when he paused at the window of the professor's house to greet the gay trio there. And it was some baser part of him which, when he read Frances' tell-tale face, the faint flush, the droop of the lids, while he talked gayly with Elizabeth Martin, urged him to see how far he might torment her. Having played the daring game once, he must play it again and again in the few short stormy days which followed. Prompted by some unknown devil within him, bred of the fight which he lacked the courage to face and to decide, he must watch her tell-tale face to see how he had aroused feelings Frances had never dreamed of and hated while she suffered them--must laugh and talk with Elizabeth Martin with admiration in his eyes and flattery on his lips, and to see, meanwhile, the wonder in Frances' eyes, and the pride which in the end concealed it--must seek, at last, some hour alone with her, manoeuvre for that hour, and watch the resentment she disdained to name, die away beneath the magnetism of his love-making.

Even then a fierce joy ruled him, prompting him to a lavish generosity in which the whole household shared.

"Ise done sick o' seein' dat flower boy," declared Susan, savagely, to Frances, in a kitchen interview. "Sho' as de brekkus bell rings, he rings de nex', an' he's gettin' sassy as if he run de whole business an' brung 'em heself."

Frances only laughed.

"An' if yuh eats much mo' dat candy layin' erroun', I'll be plumb scared o' yuh eatin' yo' vittles."

"You shall have a box for yourself," teased Frances.

"Me! De Lawd knows I don't want none! I'd ruther hab one o' dem plump partridges Marse Edward brought yestiddy dan all de choclits yuh can rake and scrape."

"You shall have that, too; broil them for supper."

"Who's gwine be hyar?"

"No one but us."

"Humph! dyar'll be jes' ernuff." Susan was not going to serve the game one young man had taken a long tramp to shoot, for another who did not stand so high in her graces. Young Montague had been in the day before.

With some intuitive understanding of Frances, her excited mood and Lawson's manner, when he saw them together, left him desperately anxious and heart-sick. It was a story he could not read, nor the actors themselves. But he divined that, in spite of the brilliancy he had never seen so great in her before, Frances was unhappy. He saw enough, also, to fear the drift of her life was to a love which would not bring her peace, and which would leave him desolate. He saw that the professor was just beginning to wake to a vague uneasiness, and his resolve to befriend her, no matter at what cost to himself, was strengthened.

The next day he came in for the observatory party, which was to be the last gayety of the visitors, who were going on the early train of the morning following. Lawson had arranged the expedition, and had ordered the big drag from the stables for the ride up the mountain in the moonlight just beginning to tinge the highest peaks. A whispered word placed Elizabeth Martin on the driver's seat beside him; Montague was quick to seize the opportunity of seating himself by Frances' side, and was thankful for the chance. Frances, herself, was wrapt in the beautiful moonlit world through which they rode. Her dreamy eyes saw the rolling hills and the distant lights bespeaking home; her fine listening heard the song of the night winds in the oaks, as they wound up the mountain side, and the music of the rustling leaves under wheel and hoof-beats. As the road mounted higher she turned to watch the lights in the valley, the clustering sparkle of them in the town, and, above the crests of the Ragged Mountains, the moon, swinging over all and flooding the world with mystic light.

On the mountain crest the world seemed strangely hushed. The observatory gleamed ghostly in the shadowings of the oaks; the red light shining from the window of the work-room and the young man it shone on inside were a human touch distinctly needed. His welcome, the glowing stove in the room, the bright lamp-light shining on book-shelves and easy chairs and tables, were a cheer for which the chilled visitors were grateful.

"You had better keep your wraps on," he cautioned them, as the women began to unfasten furs and coats, "I think it is a little colder in the observatory than outside."

An icy blast through the door he opened confirmed him. The metallic sides of the great telescope gleamed in the cold white light as they entered. Frances waited as her visitors mounted the frail-looking stairs and peered through the great instrument at the moon they had seen rising over the mountain, so small, so far away, now, through this medium, swinging in space a great globe of light.

She herself was never tired of the marvel, nor of the long look through the huge telescope at the circling rim of the luminary, broken with deep craters and wrapped in luminous mists.

The student, seeing her enthusiasm, dropped his alphabetic talk, and began telling of some juxtaposition of the stars they were watching.

"Would you care to see it?" he asked, as he commenced to swing the top of the great dome about and the telescope with it.

"You are not going to stay long?" questioned one of the young women.

"It's so cold, Frances, we'll wait in the other room by the fire."

Frances, deeply interested, scarcely knew when they were gone or how long she lingered; for there were other things to be shown eager eyes, writ in such entrancing language on the heavens, that the young man whose duty it was to keep watch of them was glad to show the manner of their writing.

When, half frozen, they hurried back to the working-room, they found a comfortable group waiting them. Mary Rowan and Edward Montague and one other man were huddled together about the stove. Further away, apart, by one of the tables were Elizabeth Martin and Lawson. The lamp-light shone full on her face. She was looking up at him. It might have been coquetry that brought the expression Frances saw as she opened the door, but at least it was in response to something of language or look in the man who leaned over her. So much Frances told herself instantly. The thought sent a sickening feeling from head to foot. She reeled slightly; Montague, watching her, sprang to her assistance.

"How cold you are! You can hardly walk! Sit here!" as he pulled forward an easy chair. "Take off your wraps as soon as you are warm," he cautioned, "or you will not feel them when you go out."

Lawson, hearing the solicitous speech, frowned and turned so as he could see them; but he saw only a supple figure cuddled in the depths of a chair, the face turned from him. He came up to the fire. "It's beastly cold," he declared, "I don't see how you stood it so long."

Frances never lifted her lids. She was absorbed in warming her icy, trembling fingers. Once and again he strove for a word with her, but she was coldly indifferent. At the side of the drag he took matters in his own hands. "You are going to drive down with me," he declared.

"No!" said Frances, coldly.

"But there is something I want to say to you; Miss Martin, Miss Frances is going to drive back on the seat with me." He was frightened, and anxious to make his peace; there was something he had just settled with Elizabeth, and she was frightened too.

"Of course," she assented quickly; "Mr. Montague, I am going back with you." She gave Frances no time for remonstrance, as she claimed Montague's help at once and sprang into the drag. The others were already seated. Frances must go as Lawson demanded, perforce. She was angered at the scene she had come upon and angered at being so managed.

The young man beside her found her simply and icily civil, and that the words he must say to her were most difficult to frame; but well down the mountain-side, the rest talking gayly, he felt he must seize his chance. With his free hand he felt for hers under the buffalo robe, and found it. Frances did not withdraw it, nor was there a thrill of life or love in its touch.

He was manly enough to be quite open as to what he had to say. "I am going to Richmond to-morrow." The fingers quivered slightly; from the lips came no sound.

"Do you know how near Christmas it is?" he questioned.