Part 6

“It is a great convenience,” answered Mr. Raoul. “When my father and Colonel Carington had their dispute about the last constitutional convention, both were candidates for the governorship, my father in Tennessee and the colonel in Virginia. The constitution of Tennessee disqualified a man who fought a duel from holding office. So my father stood on the Virginia side of the street and the colonel in Tennessee. The distance between the sidewalks is just about right, as you see. There was a warrant out against my father in Tennessee and the colonel in Virginia.”

“And did they fight?” I asked.

“Oh, yes--and the sheriffs looked on, but they couldn’t cross the street. And the colonel, he allowed he was shot accidentally by a bullet from another State. The case went up to the Supreme Court, but they allowed they couldn’t say any duel was fought in Tennessee, and the Constitution does not disqualify a man for shooting, but only just for duelling.”

At this point a prolonged whistling recalled us to the station. Here we found an elegant Pullman car added to the train for our accommodation, “with the superintendent’s compliments to Mr. Raoul.” The darky porters in it were smiling broadly, and on the table was a huge bouquet of orange-blossoms.

In the morning we woke up--or Raoul woke me up--at the station for White Sulphur. He had a telegram signed “Emily Pennoyer,” which warned him to lose no time, that Kirk Bruce was on the night express.

“May and I have decided to go to the county Judge and get married directly,” said he. Our Pullman car had been shunted on a side track at the little station; the rest of the train had gone on, and the little village was quiet and fragrant as a bank of wild flowers. “Fortunately, he is a friend of my father’s.”

We found the Judge, I think, before his breakfast, smoking on his piazza, which was covered with jasmine and magnolia. He led us directly across the road to a little brick court-house, where he found another couple waiting already, more sheepish than ourselves, who had driven all night in a buggy, with an old white horse. The groom was awkward and embarrassed, with his trousers tucked in his boots; the bride was buxom and blushing, but seemed hardly more than a child.

“First come, first served,” said the Judge, and we all went into the court-house, where the clerk unlocked his register, and the blushing pair stood up before us, the groom having first hitched the old white horse to the fence outside. We four were accommodated with seats upon the bench.

“Do you think she’s twenty-one?” whispered the Judge to Raoul, while the rustic bride shuffled uneasily upon her new shoes.

“Twenty-one? She’s not eighteen,” said Raoul.

“Dear me,” whispered the Judge. “Guess she’ll have to be--reckon I’ll forget to ask her.”

The pair were married with us as witnesses; Jeanie gave the bride her parasol for a wedding present, and the old white horse and buggy scrambled away. “And now,” said the Judge, turning to Jeanie, “how old are you?”

There was a pause of embarrassment; then Raoul spoke up bravely: “It’s not Miss Jeanie--it’s Miss May Bruce, and she’s quite eighteen.”

“Eighteen?” said the Judge. “She must be twenty-one--or have you the parents’ consent?”

“No,” said Raoul. “Eighteen is old enough in Alabama.”

“Twenty-one in Virginia,” said the Judge. “Give me the Code.”

The clerk handed him a musty leather volume from beneath a musty leather Bible. Twenty-one it was, sure enough.

“Why did you say she was only eighteen?” said the Judge, peevishly.

“But you married the others,” answered I.

“True,” said the Judge, “but I’ve had a telegram for you--from a Mr. Kirk Bruce, who, I take it, is a relative of the bride.”

Raoul’s face maintained its customary look of quiet determination. “Where is the nearest State where a lady is free to get married at eighteen?”

“South Carolina,” said the Judge.

“All right,” said Raoul. “I’ve got a car, and I reckon Colonel Carington will give us transportation.”

“I’ll see that he does,” said the Judge, his face brightening. “I guess you’d better go to Charleston.”

“Spartanburg is the nearest point,” said Raoul. “He’ll never think of Spartanburg.”

“True,” said the Judge, “he’ll never think of Spartanburg. Lucky, Colonel Carington is at the Springs.”

In two hours we had borrowed an old freight engine and were off on our way to Spartanburg.

9.

THE freight engine had been loaned us by telegram from Colonel Carington, and we had found our Pullman car pulled up on an old rusty side-track that ran into a bed of wild flowers; on the front platform, half smothered by them, our two darkies were asleep. They wakened, however, to greet us with smiles of such expansive intimacy that I felt bound, when we were safely on the way, to put them _au courant_ of the situation. The solemnity and sympathy their faces at once assumed guaranteed their discretion; though I afterward heard the “conductor” adjuring the engineer from the front platform to “git up that thar burro-engine wif’m bacon-ham.” Whereupon the engineer sanded the track and blew “off brakes.”

The long journey was rather distressing, however. The brave girls did not lose their spirits, but they kept to themselves, resting in the state-room, while Raoul and I sat on the rear platform and watched the dust eddy up from the long single track behind us. We had innumerable waits and sidings; where often the girls and I wandered into the woods after wild flowers, while Raoul stayed behind to pepper Mrs. Judge Pennoyer with telegrams. We were now by the highest mountains of the East; Roan Mountain still, though it was June, was rosy-robed about its shoulders with the laurel.

The day wore on, and I could get no speech with Jeanie. I looked for my _dédommagement_ to the journey home. This I no longer dreaded; it was a rosy hope. But Jeanie was so timid, now--or I was bolder. In the evening we had a long wait for the night express, which rattled by our siding at a wood-and-water station.

“Perhaps Mr. Bruce is on that train,” I laughed.

“No,” said Raoul, gravely (he never had a sense of humor); “I am confident he is not.”

“How do you know?”

“I have had a telegram from Mrs. Judge Pennoyer.”

“Is she his confidante?”

“She says that he has suddenly decided to await your return in Knoxville.”

“Await my return?”

“Certainly--yours and Miss Jeanie’s. I conclude the Judge this morning wired him an answer that it was not Jeanie who was getting married.”

I gasped. “Then it was not you, after all, he was chasing?”

“Why, of course not.”

“Why did you run away so?”

Raoul looked at me as who should say, “Oh, these Northerners!”

“Perhaps it wasn’t necessary,” he added, with that faint tinge of sarcasm which is akin to humor. “Is that your ring you wear upon your finger?”

I know I started; and I felt myself blush. “It--it was given to me to wear,” I gasped.

“Exactly--and by Miss Jeanie Bruce--and Mr. Kirk Bruce gave it to Miss Jeanie. Of course he thought--when he heard a Miss Bruce and a gentleman had gone off to get married----”

“Kirk Bruce gave it to her?” I said. My mind works slowly at such times.

“Certainly. Did she not tell you so?”

“She said a gentleman gave it her----”

“Well, he was the gentleman.”

“Who had shot a schoolmate at boarding-school----”

“Same man, I assure you.”

“For being attentive to a young lady who----”

“Kirk Bruce, to a T.”

“Went out without a revolver----”

“As you did yourself. I think,” concluded Raoul, “you had better give Miss Jeanie her ring back.”

“If I do,” said I, “I’m damned.”

10.

THEY were married the next day in the pretty little Episcopal church in Spartanburg, by the Bishop of Georgia. They left the same afternoon on their wedding journey back to “Old White” and the North. Miss Jeanie Bruce and I accompanied them--or rather, they us--as far as the junction station (I forget its name), where they met the east-bound train, and we were to keep on to Knoxville.

Jeanie’s sweet face was very pale, but her eyes were like deep wells--so deep now that they indeed “unravelled the coiled night and saw the stars by noon.” She had to sit by me now; but her silence appealed even to a blunted Northern sense of chivalry. I foresaw that I, too, should have to keep silence until I had brought her home to Knoxville. But not a day longer! Not an hour, I finally vowed.

But oh, the beauty of that immediate future! The long twenty hours’ journey after they left us at the junction--where she was under my protection, and no Kirk Bruce could say me nay! Even chivalry at such times is like a _sordine_ on one harp-string--heart-string I had almost said. And one’s being is so resonant that the note of speech is hardly missed.

So, I had my two-hours’ day-dream, and then Mrs. Judge Pennoyer turned up on that east-bound train, as chaperone to bring us home.

“You telegraphed for her?” I said to Jeanie.

She did not deny it; and I thought Mrs. Pennoyer cast one look at me as of contempt.

Then I saw her see the ring upon my finger, and her expression seemed to change.

We saw the happy pair go off, and we went back to our seats in the returning train. We three; and one of us most miserable, and that was I.

I had given up all hope of talking with Jeanie any more. She went off with Mrs. Pennoyer to a front seat, where I saw them in earnest consultation; and that ancient relict of justice tempered by mercy appeared to be speaking of me. I watched them; and I heard the words “Mr. Bruce” and “the ring;” and I saw Jeanie grow still more pale.

Finally, to my glad astonishment, she rose, and like a brave lady--not like those Northern girls I knew in Salem, who would not dare throw a man a life preserver to save him from drowning--sweet and gracious, she came back to me.

“Mr. Higginbotham” (what a name to set by Raoul, or even Bruce), “I must have my ring again,” said she.

“Never,” I answered. “It is not your ring, but mine.”

“I only lent it to you. I did not give it.”

“Then lend it to me a little longer--till I have seen you home,” I said.

Her eyes filled with tears, and my heart was drowned in them.

“But Mrs. Pennoyer says Cousin Kirk is waiting for us there. Oh, please.”

“Let him wait,” I said.

“But, please. I implore you--as you----”

“As I love you,” I said. “As I love you, I shall keep it. Will you marry me?”

“I--I do not love you,” she answered, almost in a whisper. “Now, will you give it back?”

“No,” I said.

I saw her tears. “He will kill you;” and she left me, sobbing.

“Then, you can take it,” I called out, after her.

Man can be brutal at such times.

Mrs. Pennoyer came back and tried to move me. Who could, after Jeanie Bruce had failed? Moreover, I thought she thought she would have done like me.

I fear Jeanie cried most of that journey home. But I, as is the way of man, was happy.

We got back to Knoxville in the early morning. They did not wish me to go home with them from the station; so I put them in a carriage, and sat upon the box. We drove up to the piazza of the little house upon which sat a man in a black frock-coat, smoking a cigar. He threw it away, and took off his hat to the ladies. We both assisted them out; and Jeanie ran quickly into the house, Mrs. Judge Pennoyer following. I paid the carriage, and it drove away.

“Now, sir,” said Mr. Kirk Bruce.

“Now, sir,” said I.

“I will request you, sir, for to give me that ring that is on your finger.”

“That ring does not belong to me.”

“That is why, sir, I ask you as a gentleman, fo’ to give it up.”

“That is why, sir, I am compelled as a gentleman, fo’ to refuse.”

Insults to one’s diction come next to those that touch the heart. Mr. Bruce had me, forthwith, “covered” with his revolver.

“Are you engaged to Miss Jeanie Bruce?”

“I am not.”

“Then, sir, as a gentleman, you have no right to wear that ring.”

I had heard vague stories of firing through one’s coat pocket; and I felt in mine for the little revolver Jeanie had given me. But the miserable little toy was turned the wrong way, and I could not twist it about.

“He is engaged to me--he is,” cried Jeanie, bursting out from the front door. “He asked me on the train.”

“And you refused me,” I said, turning my eyes for one moment away from Bruce to look at her.

“I did not--I only----”

How it happened, I do not know; but at that instant the confounded revolver went off in my pocket. With a cry, Jeanie threw up her arms and fell upon the floor of the piazza. Bruce and I were at her feet instantly. Mrs. Pennoyer rushed out. The neighbors rushed across from over the way.

“Is she killed?” said Bruce and I, together.

As we spoke Jeanie made a dart, and picking up Bruce’s revolver, which he had dropped upon the grass, threw it over a high board fence into the neighboring lot. Then turning, “Give me your ring,” said she.

I gave it to her.

“And now,” she said, replacing it on another finger, “Cousin Kirk, let me introduce to you the gentleman to whom I am to be married--Mr. Higginbotham, of Boston.”

“Salem,” I corrected, in a dazed way.

“Of Salem. Cousin Kirk--congratulate him.”

Cousin Kirk looked at her, at me, and at the board fence.

“As a gentleman, sir, I have no other thing to do. Of course--if my cousin loves you--you may keep the ring. Though I must allow, sir, you shoot rather late.”

With this one simple sarcasm he departed. Jeanie and I watched him groping in the long grass of the next lot for his revolver and then go slouching down the road. We turned and our eyes met. I tried to take her hand; but suddenly her face grew scarlet. “Oh, what have I done?” and she rushed into the house.

I went back to Salem.

* * * * *

I stayed there just four days. In New York I met Jerry Sullivan and had a talk with him. He will, in future, suppress his sense of humor when inditing telegrams.

Then I wrote and asked Jeanie if she would accept me, save at the pistol’s mouth.

Mr. and Mrs. Raoul accompanied us on our wedding journey; and we were married at White Sulphur by the genial justice _de céans_.

LOS CARAQUEÑOS

BEING THE LIFE HISTORY OF DON SEBASTIAN MARQUES DEL TORRE AND OF DOLORES, HIS WIFE, CONDESA DE LUNA

I.

PAGANISM was the avowal of life; Christianity the sacrifice of it. So the world civilized has always separated at the two diverging roads, according as brain or blood has ruled their lives; the Turanian races, and after them the Latins, to assert life; the Semitic races, and after them the Teutons, to deny it. So the Church of Rome, as nearest in time to Paganism, has been nearer the avowal of life, has recognized, through all its inquisitions, human hearts; the Sects have sought to stifle them; the Puritans have posed to ignore them. Thus cruelty may be the crime of priests; hypocrisy has been the vice of preachers.

Hence my poor friend Tetherby, spinning his affections from his brain, tired with a mesh of head-wrought duties, died, or rather ceased to live, of a moral heart-failure. His heart was too good to be made out of brains alone; and his life was ended with the loss of that girl of his--what was her name, Myra, Marcia?--born, in the Northland, of a warmer blood, who fell a victim there, as the rose-tree does in too cold a climate, to the creeping things of earth. Now it happened that that same year I was told the story of Dolores, Marquesa del Torre y Luna, almost the last of the old Spanish nobility of Carácas, called la doña sola de la casa del Rey--as we should say, the lonely lady of the house of the King--for she lived there, married and widow, fifty years, and left no child to inherit the thick-walled city house, four square about its garden, and the provinces of coffee-trees, and, what she prized more and we prize less, the noble blood of Torre and of Luna, now run dry.

There are two things in the little city of Carácas that go back to the time when the Spanish empire made a simulacrum of the Roman round the world--one is the great round-arched Spanish bridge, spanning the deep arroyo on the mountain slope above the present town--useless now, for the earthquake clefts are deeper on either side than this gorge of the ancient river of the city, and have drained its stream away--and the other this great stone fortress in the centre of the present town, with walls eight feet thick, its windows like tunnels cut through to the iron unglazed casement--for this was the only house that was left standing on the evening of the great earthquake; and so the modern city clusters timidly about it, its houses a modest one- or double-story, and, on the clay slope where the older city was, the cactus grows, and the zenith sun burns the clay banks red, and the old “gold-dust road,” over the Cordillera to the sea, now but a mule-path of scattered cobble-stone, winds lonely and narrow across the splendid bridge, among the great fissures that the earthquake left. And both bridge and house still bear the sculptured blazonry, the lions and the castles, and the pious inscription to the greater glory of the Virgin.

Carácas lies in a plain, like the Vega of Granada, only green with palms as well as poplars; but through its rich meadows a turbid mountain torrent runs, and south, and west, and east are mountains; and north the mighty Silla lifts almost to the snows, half breaking the ceaseless east wind of the sea; trade-wind, it has been called in history; slave-wind were better. And by the little city is the palm-clad Calvareo, the little hill gay with orchids and shaded by tree-ferns, in whose pleasant paths the city people still take their pleasure (for the name of Calvary but means the view, not any sadness), and took their pleasure, eighty years since, when this story begins. And one evening, in the early years of the century, there walked alone, or with but a nurse for her dueña, a girl whose beauty still smiles down through sad tradition and through evil story, to lighten the dark streets of the old Spanish town, whose stones for many years her feet have ceased to press. And the memory of the old Casa Rey, the castle, all is hers; and the people of the town, the Caraqueños, still see her lovely face at the window; first at one, and then at the other, but mostly at the grated window in the round tower of the corner, that projects and commands the two streets; for there her sweet, pale face used to show itself, between the bars, and watch for the cavalry her noble husband led, returning from the wars. For then were wars of liberation, when freedom was fought for, not possession and estates; and the Marquis Sebastian Ruy del Torre led in all. And days and days she would watch for him returning, after battles won, she sitting with her golden needle-work at the corner window, her night-black hair against the iron bar (for there are no glass window-panes in Carácas), her strange blue eyes still watching down the street. So she sat there, and broidered chasuble or altar-cloth for the holy church of Santa Maria de las Mercedes, where she prayed each dawn and evening, yet cast her eyes down either street between each stitch, to watch the coming of him she loved on earth. And the people of Carácas used to gather her glances to their hearts, like blue flowers, for of herself they saw no more than this.

But her husband, from their wedding-day, never saw her more. For fifty years she sat at this window, working chasuble and stole, and always, when the distant trumpet sounded, or the first gold-and-scarlet pennon fluttered far down the street, she would drop her work and rise. And then she would wave her hand, and her husband would wave his hand, at the head of his column far away. This was for the populace. But then she would go from the window; and be seen there no more while he stayed at Carácas.... But those that were beneath the window used to say (for the husband was too far off then to see) that before she left the window, she would cast a long look down the street to that distance where he rode, and those that saw this glance say that for sweetness no eye of mortal saw its equal, and the story is, it made little children smile, and turned old bad men good, and even women loved her face.

Then she vanished from the tower, and they saw her no more. During all the time that might be the Marquis’s stay, no more she came to the window, no more to the door. State dinners were given there in the King’s house; banquets, aye, and balls, where all that was Castilian in Carácas came; but the custom was well known, and no one marvelled that the châtelaine came not to meet them; the lovely Lady Dolores, whom no one ever spoke to or saw. Some dueña, some relation, some young niece or noble lady, cousin of either the del Torre, was there and did the honors. And of the Marquesa no one ever spoke, for it was understood that, though not in a convent, she was no longer in the world--even to her husband, it was said, at first with bated breath, then openly.

For the servants told, and the family, and it was no secret, how days and weeks before her lord returned the lady would busy herself with preparations. And their state suite of rooms, and their nuptial-chamber (into which, alas! she else had never come!) were prepared by her, and made bright and joyous with rich flowers, and sweet to his heart by the knowledge of her presence, and the touch of her dear hand. Then, when all was done, and one white rose from her bosom in a single vase (and in a score of years this white rose never failed), she darkened the rooms and left them for his coming, and went back to her seat in the stone-floored tower room, and sat there with her gold and silver embroidery, and so watched for him. And while he stayed in his palace, she lived in those cold, bare rooms; for they alone had not been changed when they were married, but had been kept as they had been a prison, and my lady Dolores loved them best; but she came not now to the window, lest their eyes might meet.

II.

SO fifty years she lived there; and that is why the old Spaniard of Carácas still points out the house, and young men and maidens like to make their trysting-places of its gardens, which are public and where the band plays evenings--if that can be called trysting to our northern notions, which is but a stolen mutual glance in passing. But hearts are warm in Catholic Spain, and they dare not more; right hard they throb and burn for just so much as this--aye, and break for the lack of it. I say, fifty years--fifty years she lived there, but forty she lived alone, for at the end of ten years he died; and the manner of her living and his dying is what I have to tell.

But after that still forty years she lived on alone. Now she no longer worked at the window, and she came there but rarely. It seemed she came there for compassion, that the people, whom she felt so loving, might see her smile. For her smile was sweet as ever, only now it bore the peace of heaven, not the yearning love of earth. Yet never went she out her doors. And when she died--it is only some years since--they buried her upon Good Friday, and she sleeps in her own church, beneath the great gold shrine she loved and wrought for, of Mary, Mother of the Pities. And all the people of the city saw her funeral; and there is, in the church, a picture of the Virgin, that is really her, painted by a dying artist that had seen her face at the window many years before.