CHAPTER XVII.

DREAMS AND PLANS.

Reynolds lingered in the pleasant shadows of the magnolia trees, now slowly walking to and fro, now resting on some one of the old lichen-grown seats, his thoughts oscillating between the past and the future. He was aware, but not vividly, of how aimless and cowardly his life until now had been, and he was not quite sure that, no matter how strong might be his present purpose, the cowardice did not still linger with him. One thing he did realize perfectly: that he had not told the whole truth to Agnes Ransom. He might have avoided killing her husband had he been prompted by the highest moral motives. If before the act he had been as willing to fly from San Antonio and go bury himself in the lonely depths of Sand Mountain as he was after the blood was on his hands, he could to-day look up into the bright sweet sky and feel no load on his heart. But then, Heaven forgive the thought, Agnes could not have been his! It was with a dull, almost stolid sense of the gloom and hopelessness of his situation that he at the same time pondered the possibilities of the future. Throughout his consciousness, too, independent of the past or the future, the present fact of Agnes Ransom's love for him diffused itself with constantly increasing power, warmer, more vitalizing, more glorifying than sunshine and spring-tide and virile health combined. He knew and he did not know that he was trying to deceive himself and the woman he loved. He was aware and he was not aware that all his reasoning regarding the future was sophistry and that the things of the past were not dead. He smiled there under the dusky trees as if he were a guileless youth in the sweet wonder of his first love. He held his head high. Had he not flung all weights of memory behind him and set his eyes on a fair and calm future? Yes, he was going to be happy. He was already happy. He would take Agnes far away, beyond the sea, where no hint of the past could ever come. At length he caught a distant glimpse of Beresford going away, and then a little thrill of pity stole into his bosom. The man looked lonely, even at that distance, and moved as if bearing a burden of trouble, or so at least Reynolds' imagination colored the apparition.

Mrs. Ransom did not come forth immediately. She had borne the interview with firmness, and had tried to soften with such art as she could command the wound she was forced to inflict. Beresford was a gentleman as well as a man, and whilst he had urged his plea with all the passion of a strong nature, he had taken his final dismissal with the dignity of a courageous, if not lofty soul.

When he was gone, the reaction upon Mrs. Ransom's sensitive and already sorely taxed nerves was more than she had expected, and she went to her room and cried. It seemed so bitter a thing to do to one so earnest and honorable and gentle.

Reynolds saw the traces of tears on her face, when at last she did come out to look for him, but he avoided saying anything to call up an explanation. She told him the story, however, in her straightforward, simple way, acknowledging her regret and her tears, and ending with some outright praise of Beresford's worthiness.

"I am sorry he came," said Reynolds. "I felt for him when I saw him going away; but what else could you do?"

"Did he look sad?" she inquired with perfect naïveté, a sweet sorrowfulness in her voice.

"Oh, I couldn't tell, he was too far off," answered Reynolds. "It will all come right. We will not allow our imaginations to follow him. I must tell you my plans. I hope they will be your plans too."

She lifted her eyes to his but did not speak.

"First of all, Agnes," he went on, "will you be my wife?" The words fell dryly, strangely on her ear.

They were standing close to a tree and she was lightly leaning against the bole. She felt a quick but vague sense of fear, or something akin to it, strike coldly into her heart.

It was inexplicable, an almost irresistible impulse toward flight took hold of her. She could not speak. Something forbade it.

"Answer me, Agnes: you will marry me, won't you, love?" His voice was low and appealing.

Her trepidation and weakness were but momentary. She mastered herself by a strong effort, and, with a brave, earnest smile, put both her hands in his.

"Yes, I will marry you," she said.

He lifted the hands swiftly and kissed them, then he led her to one of the seats.

"I have been planning such a delightful life for us," he began, and with passionate eloquence went on to disclose his idea of their going abroad, for a time at least, to live in Italy or Switzerland or France, together, for each other, the blissful life of love.

Her imagination responded readily to his eloquent descriptions, and her face was soon aglow with enthusiastic interest. She had always dreamed of foreign travel, and the subject was one into which she could cast herself with all the abandon of a child. He saw with delight how his proposition pleased her, and he talked with a freedom and earnestness that were irresistible. They were now very happy lovers indeed, and the time sped on golden wings until a servant came to call them to luncheon. They had slipped away from the troubles that had haunted them into the true realm of the young--the rosy region of dreams.

The mid-day meal at the DeKay place was not, as is, perhaps, the prevailing custom on plantations, the principal one. Dinner came on early in the evening and was all the more enjoyable on account of the delightful temperature of the hour throughout most of the year.

Late in the afternoon a young gentleman from an adjoining plantation came down the river in a little boat to make a friendly visit. He had been one of the guests on the day of the shoot, a dapper, talkative youth whose fund of good spirits made him welcome at all times. He liked wine and tobacco, was somewhat of a horseman and never tired of discussing questions of angling and field sports. Of course General DeKay, who cared for nothing so much as such companionship, would not let him return until after dinner. His name was Lapham. The Laphams were a fine old family--nearly all the Alabama families below the mountains are reported to be fine and old--and he retained in his speech and manner much that was ultra old and Southern, along with certain strong traces of quite modern "slang and snap," as it is called.

He sat next to Mrs. Ransom at table, entertaining her and the rest with an account of some recent races at New Orleans, or Tuscaloosa, or somewhere, that he had been to see. There had been a row among some sports ending in one being killed.

"It was a mean murder," he remarked, "the man was given no show. I hope the law will be swift, as in the case of your man, Colonel Reynolds."

Reynolds looked at him with quick inquiry and Mrs. Ransom's face showed the shrinking of her feelings.

"Oh, they got him below Selma and hanged him," added Lapham in answer to the question in Reynolds' eyes. "They made short work of it: caught him and strung him up to the first tree."

"I haven't read the papers for several days," said General DeKay. "They lynched him, did they? Hanging is the popular thing now."

"Yes," answered Lapham. "He deserved it, I believe. It was a bad case. Killed a young fellow who had just been married. Loved the girl himself, it is said, and did the deed out of sheer revenge, because she took the young man in preference to himself. The circumstances were atrocious. The young wife is reported to have lost her reason on account of the affair."

There came a depressing silence over the little group at the table. Mrs. DeKay made haste to change the topic of conversation to one she was sure would interest the gentlemen.

"Have you tried the trout since this fine weather has come?" she asked, addressing Lapham. "I should think the angling might be good now."

The mention of trout (bass are called trout in the South) set the young man in the midst of one of his favorite elements. He began at once to tell how he had killed a four-pounder that very morning. He always killed four-pounders. "It was the gamiest fish I ever hooked, I think,--a regular savage. I toiled with it a full half hour before I could land it. At one time it had out nearly a hundred yards of line and I thought I never should get it checked up. If it had gone a little further my rod or my line--one would have suffered. It was jolly sport."

"I must rig up my tackle and try the river to-morrow," said the General. "Are you strong enough to join me, Colonel Reynolds? Of course you will come down, Mr. Lapham?"

"I am sorry," answered Reynolds, "but I fear my shoulder is too tender. I am quite anxious to get well, and to that end must heed my doctor's advice."

"I will join you, General," said Lapham with eager readiness. "This morning's taste has made me ravenous for another round with the finny beauties."

"What flies are best here?" inquired Reynolds, thinking of something else.

"Oh, we use minnows," said Lapham, "though I have had success with a bob of deer-tail hairs and red feathers. The trout won't rise to a regular fly."

"Up in the mountains I find the 'Doctor' and the brown hackle very killing," said Reynolds. "I have had rare sport in the smaller streams. The bass there are quite as game as brook trout."

"The mountain fish are like the mountain crackers: game but not over wise," Lapham quickly responded, with an intonation meant as a guaranty of the originality of his humor.

"Neither would be easily handled by a novice, I grant you," said Reynolds with a peculiar smile.

Lapham laughed merrily. The retort pleased him better than his own venture.

"I was up in the mountains last winter deer hunting," he said, "and there's one thing I can testify to in behalf of those crackers: they are very hospitable and obliging; they seem to think they can't do too much for one. But the women! It kept me in a state of chronic melancholy to see the poor things."

"Their life is a lonely, dreary, hopeless one," replied Reynolds, "but they are good, and as true as steel."

"Yes, no doubt they are good. I know they are kind, and all that. They asked me to smoke with them and called me sonny!"

"Did you go when they called you?" the General asked, with the ready familiarity of old acquaintance.

"Yes," said Lapham, "I recognize the fitness of the appellation."

Reynolds was thinking of Milly White. She was, in his mind, unseparable from any idea of the mountains and their people. He felt an impulse to resent, as personal to her, every suggestion made at the expense of the mountaineers. He could see her now, standing by the little gate gazing down the crooked, stony road, patiently watching for his return. He strove to brush aside the reflections that began to crowd into his brain, and with the help of Lapham's skipping levity and the unusual volubility of General DeKay's talk, he at last succeeded in hiding his uneasiness and lack of sympathy with the quiet merriment of the occasion.

Mrs. Ransom appeared to be lighter-hearted than at any other time since the adventure at the ruin. Her face was touched with a charming color and she followed Lapham's shallow chatter with smiling attention. It was from her that Reynolds finally caught the ability to forget himself and to fall into the spirit that ruled the rest of the company. Once engaged, he put forth his powers with good effect. For Lapham's benefit he described the Derby and the _Grand Prix_, a pigeon shoot in England where the stake was a thousand pounds, angling in Scotland and some hunting adventures in Algiers. From sport he easily drifted to art and from art into the ever wonderful and fascinating scenery of Switzerland and Italy. It was Agnes who led him on to speak of Paris and Rome, the two cities of every young woman's dream. She was full of the thought of going with him to the old world. It was intoxicating her. How far away it would be--that life beyond the sea--from the dreary, sorrowful pool of her narrow and bitter experience! That night in the quiet of her chamber she thought it all over, and she was dreaming of it when next morning the mocking-birds awoke her. Reynolds, too, went to his room with an almost light heart. From his window he saw Lapham, with a little sail set, go up the river before the night breeze, in the light of a crescent moon that hung over in the west.

"I will return to Birmingham to-morrow," he thought. He was in haste to get his affairs all arranged and then come back and persuade Agnes to name the earliest day possible for their marriage. He felt a mighty impatience, as if each moment endangered the cup of happiness now bubbling at his lips.

But the thought of going back to the mountains chilled him. Why need he go at all? Why should any sordid consideration enter into the discussion of his plans? Had he not already shut out of his life the dreamy hermitage and all that pertained to it? He tried to imagine a line drawn across the past at a point on this side of all his unprofitable experiences, a line over which he would teach his memory not to cross. Could he not, by a supreme effort of will, tear wholly away from his old self, as from a chrysalis sheath, purify himself and spend the rest of his days in the summer atmosphere of a calm and peaceful life? How it tormented him to perceive his lack of genuine courage and sincerity in this exacting crisis! He tried not to know that his new hopes and desires were not borne up by an underswell of true repentance. The selfishness of mere regret and remorse taunted him insidiously, whilst the happiness that beckoned him on was tricked in sensuous tinsel-tints, the exponents of a very low power of good. He struggled fiercely, silently, fighting down in detail the troops of phantoms that beset him. Finally he cheated himself into believing, or feigning to believe, that he had gained the victory. The field is clear, he thought, I am a man once more.

Strangely enough his mental struggle ended in confirming instead of rejecting the thought of returning to Birmingham at once and closing out his interests there. After all, why should he hesitate? What possible objection existed? How could he be affected? He brushed it all aside as sheer sentimentality unworthy of consideration. He could not assume to be responsible for every body who had chanced to come within the radius of his life. What is a man here for, save to forge his own way to happiness?

And so he rushed from one extreme to the other, wholly unable to see the fine straight line of right, wholly unwilling bravely to assume the responsibility of lifting the burden his own hands had packed and bound. Not see the right! Yes, he saw it at last, clearly enough he thought. Reparation, reparation. He would right all the wrongs he had done. He would do good all the rest of his life. Kindliness, charity, blessings. He would leave a trail of good deeds behind him wherever he should go. The poor should remember him and the afflicted should feel the touch of his tenderness. With Agnes beside him, with her pure soul to influence and encourage him, to what a height of unselfishness he might rise. He smiled and felt reassured. All was well.