Part 8

How he had first gained courage to put himself before the public as a poet is a mystery. Possibly he had hopes of making his name illustrious in little Nellie's eyes. It is certain that a copy of the _Purcellville Banner_ with heavy lines in red ink drawn around a sonnet addressed to "A Sweetbriar Rose," and signed "Heinrichs," had reached Benvenew the day after being issued. Since then the poet had branched out in other directions and the _Banner's_ columns were enriched with an amount of original matter that led the editor seriously to contemplate the possibility of abandoning a "patent outside," and depending upon home talent to fill his space. Eventually, the disguise maintained by "Heinrichs" was penetrated by his neighbors and Peter was made the recipient of attentions varying from invitations to dine and display his talent for versification at the Gordons, all the way down to lampoons in chalk upon his barn-door, and hootings from the six red-haired little Clapsaddles.

Pendleton Haywood, riding by one morning, espied the sturdy poet with his sleeves rolled up, deep in molasses-making; and thought it opportune to call out:

"Peter, make me a rhyme!"

With extraordinary quickness this rejoinder was thundered back:

"I'm busy just now, Stirring my molasses, I've no time To make a rhyme For every fool that passes."

And Pendleton went on his way a sadder man; for the six red-haired little Clapsaddles were as usual hanging about the goose-pond, and had made themselves masters of this colloquy; which, consequently, spread with the rapidity of a Virginia creeper, from Rocky Point to Purcellville.

There is no doubt that Peter's gift was a great comfort to him, and, modest as he was, he accepted the inevitable fame growing out of his contributions to the _Banner_ with a certain degree of complacency. The power of looking at the events of life with a view to turning them into poetry invests even common subjects with interest, and when any really exciting thing happens the gifted mind is conscious of a wonderfully uplifting feeling, such as the admiral of a fleet may experience when an enemy's ironclad opens fire. Opportunity is the spur that starts genius into a canter.

Peter sat smoking, and thinking how to turn the fight between himself and Funkhausen into a poem which should arouse the enthusiastic admiration of all readers of the _Banner_; including Mistress Amanda and perhaps Nellie.

When Funkhausen had set his hirelings upon the stalwart Peter he had not taken into account two things: one was that there was not a darkey in the county without a feeling of personal liking for the kind-hearted poet, and the other, that negroes are cowardly except under the influence of excitement. The foremost man in the group happened to be one to whose family Peter had rendered many kindnesses. When the blue eyes of his master's victim looked steadily into his own, Jake felt a curious tremor of mingled superstition and perplexity, which caused him to fall back on his comrades instead of advancing to the attack Funkhausen was doing his best to urge on. Peter's raised fist conveyed reminder as well as menace. That hand had been ready to extend help to those in need, but it was equally ready to strike down an offender. And the negroes did not like the looks of the strong, resolute white man standing upon the defensive, alone, but with right upon his side. They began to mutter and to fall back, until the whole mass had melted away; in some way bearing Funkhausen along with them. Whereupon Peter mounted his horse and quietly rode home.

But the county rang with the affair. As much to vindicate himself as for vengeance, Funkhausen had Peter up before the church for discipline. But to his disgust, and to the delight of everybody else, Deacon Greene declared that Peter had done nothing to be disciplined for; but that "if he hadn't fought Funkhausen the church would have turned him out!"

Mistress Amanda gave a dinner party and made Peter the guest of the occasion. It happened upon Michaelmas and old Aunt Viny insisted, for luck's sake, upon dressing a pair of her master's geese, and sending them to Benvenew. So that Peter had the pleasure of seeing pretty Nellie blush under the sly allusion made by one of the guests to the old proverb about "the maid that eats of the bachelor's goose." But on the other hand, common sense told him that blushing was with Nellie no sign of especial embarrassment. Indeed, it was probable that the proverb was unknown to her. She was much occupied, all dinner-time, with the account young Armstrong--now ordained and installed as the regular preacher for Sneaking Creek church--was giving her of a bush-meeting in the woods back of Purcellville. He was anxious for her mother to take her to the meetings, but Mistress Amanda did not like bush-meetings; and she was not inclined to encourage any species of religious excitement in Nellie. Peter would gladly have offered to drive her but he could not venture to do so in the face of her mother's disapproval. It seemed a little hard to him that he should not be able to avail himself of this little opportunity to please the young girl. And if jealousy had been possible to him he must have felt a twinge of it in seeing how absorbed Nellie was in the talk Armstrong was pouring into her ears. But the time had not yet come for him to recognize the significance of what was going on under his eye. The happenings of our daily life are like the characters at a masked ball. Capering before us, they seem entirely unrelated to ourselves in any particular, and it is only when they unmask that we know them for what they are.

Peter, the dreamer, wove some new fancies about his dainty love as he sat with a writing pad upon his knee, and his short pipe between his lips. The world was very beautiful to him. And to-morrow would be Sunday; the happiest day of all the good week; for he would see Nellie at church.

The collie dog at his feet jumped up and ran down the walk. At the gate stood a shabby phaeton made distinguished by carrying Mistress Amanda. As he hastened out she called in a loud, clear tone:

"Good morning, Mr. Weaver, have you any turkey eggs to spare?"

Her hand, in its old gray gauntlet, was extended, and as he took it for a second in his own she added, lower,

"So much as a concession to our neighbor's greed, yonder!"

Peter looked and saw Elmer Hall approaching, driving a pair of hogs before him. Taking the cue, he talked about turkey eggs until the grunts had died away in the distance.

Then said madam--"I didn't come to talk about turkey eggs."

Peter drew a hand through his handsome hair; looked down reflectively and looked up smiling. "Will you come in?" he suggested. A decided shake of the head answered that. "My five years' seniority wouldn't excuse it--to the Greenes and Aylors! I doubt if even my mother could venture it. We may risk ten minutes here at the gate."

Mistress Amanda began flicking her whip at a thistle; her forehead gathering lines. Suddenly the words shot from her:

"You are a patient man!"

"Well! You haven't come two miles to tell me that?"

"But I have. Patience is a most unusual virtue--in a man, but there is such a thing as having too much of it. Do you remember the story of the fox and the wolf?"

"The nursery tale? Let me see. I think my grandmother used to tell it to me, but that was long ago. I forget the point."

"The wolf bit him--put out his eyes, and so on, the fox simply saying all the time, 'patience!' Till finally the enemy tore his heart out, and the fox found, too late, that patience is the most dangerous of all virtues."

Peter gazed at the narrator of this fable in amazement. For the first time in his life the idea that women are incomprehensible found lodgment in his mind.

"Ah, I see you think me daft," said his friend. And not for the first time in her life, by any means, she found a man dense.

"In so many plain words, then, are you not in love?"

The blood seemed on the point of bursting through Peter's skin; his head weighed a ton; his legs became pipe-stems. He gasped something inarticulately. Then, manly sense asserted itself. His look grew steady and grave and nobody could have found fault with his manner, as he said:

"You know I love your daughter. I reckon everybody knows that."

Mistress Amanda turned impulsively. Her face had been carefully averted during this conversation, but now she let her eyes meet his. There was the emphasis of a kept-down excitement in her tone:

"Everybody except the one person who ought to know it. It is a well-kept secret so far as she's concerned."

"I've only been waiting for the right time--she's so young--such a child!" Things danced in the sunshine before the man's eyes. His long, lovely dream!--this was so sudden a call to hard reality; he could not waken in a minute.

"Nellie is not a girl to be won by accumulated acts of worship," said Mistress Amanda tersely. "Some girls can be won in that way; romantic girls. They would be flattered at being made the subject of verses; would like to feel that a great, powerful creature trembled before them. But Nellie is wonderfully free from that sort of vanity. So far from understanding the real feeling that is at the bottom of all the favors you show her she looks upon you as a sort of good godfather who has a fanciful, half-playful preference for her. You have never come near enough to her to touch the ruling motive of her character."

It sprang to Peter's lips to ask what that was; but he forbore the question. There seemed to him an indelicacy in arriving at a comprehension of his love through another person's perceptions, even if that person was her mother. Mistress Amanda, however, was no muddy stream whence truth must be laboriously filtered out, but a clear fountain, throwing facts high and rapidly in the air for the dullest seer to take in.

"She has a large vein of the practical in her. Probably you think--all you men think--that, with that soaring look, her feet never touch the ground. But you may take sentimental flights into the region of romance for the next ten years without interesting her enough to make her even look to see where you are. Don't woo her with poetry, my friend. She never reads it. I never saw her with any book of verse in her hand except a hymn-book."

A wild idea of putting his talent to this use came to Peter. After a moment's reflection he turned it out, as he would have locked his barn door against a suspicious steed bearing about him marks of gipsy ownership. And herein did my honest hero show his Dutch descent in his characteristic rejection of schemes out of the range of his natural inclination.

"I'm not much of a poet," he said, with an effort at a laugh.

"You look at things rather too much from a sentimental standpoint," observed Mistress Amanda. She had beaten the thistle quite to powder, and, laying down her whip, adjusted her gauntlets and gathered the reins into a firm grasp. Her fine black eyes had a singular expression.

"Not too much for _some_ women. The kind of sentiment there is in you is the kind that makes a man loyal, tender, and--of all things the rarest!--appreciative toward the woman you may marry. I wish girls were able to discriminate between the shepherding qualities in men and the huntsman's qualities. But they like the sound of the horn and the dash of the horses--the fiery eye and the masterful grip! Only after their gallants have thrown aside all their pretty trappings and come down to the plain garb of the household boss do they learn that a little kindness and consideration in a husband outranks all the more showy qualities."

"Nellie certainly ain't one to be taken in by a glittering outside--I sh'd think," Peter remarked.

"Not of the kind you have in your mind. But she is peculiarly constituted--extremely susceptible to anything like an appearance of superiority of the moral sort; or, not so much moral--I wish it was that!--but spiritual sort. Some girls pine for a man to take them in hand and lead them along the straight and narrow path; and a thorny path their saintly director generally manages to make it for them. Bah, I've no patience with the 'Queechy' species of hero!" exclaimed Mistress Amanda, lashing her whip in the air. Her horse, however, had sensibilities of his own, and taking this as a definite appeal to his own intelligence he started down the road at a pretty brisk pace, carrying his mistress off with excellent stage effect, her exit speech vibrating in Peter's astonished ears.

He stood leaning upon the gate, after she had turned the corner of the lane, for fifteen minutes; his cheerful face clouded slightly as he chewed the cud his friend had shown him, gazing, ox-like, at the present surroundings that lay about his feet, and unable to realize, even after some effort, the meaning of the suggestions that had been made as to possible dangers lurking in the future.

There was a placidity about Peter amounting to dulness, when he was pricked upon the matter of threatened changes. Your light-weight men, nervous, springy, and quick-glancing, are full of apprehensions; they believe that it is no more than likely that to-morrow may be doomsday, and they prepare themselves even for the most improbable crises. But two hundred pounds gives a certain faith in the established order of things, and it is a significant fact that bulk and the conceit that the world moves slowly, go together. Foretellers are so apt to have a lean and meagre frame that I should be loth to trust the pretensions of a prophet over-endowed with flesh. So the fact that Peter had a constitutional dislike to being stirred up to initiative acts must be laid to his girth and his double chin; not to any lack of fine feeling. His affection for Nellie had become so much a part of himself that it partook of his temperament, and was deliberate and sober; incapable of sudden transitions. Adoring her at a distance had the charm of familiarity, and although in sentimental moods the man liked to picture his star, his flower, as a little housewife, seated of evenings by his side before the fire, with some sewing in her dainty fingers, and a tenderly inclined ear toward the thing he might like to read to her; still, he had grown so used to thinking of such scenes as afar off that to be suddenly desired to look at the necessity of at once taking steps to make his dream a reality, or else to abandon hope of ever making it one, was to ask too much of his optimistic nature. For what is an optimist but a person who believes that everything will turn out all right; whether he chooses to go to work at dawn or lie in bed till twelve?

But, Peter's indolence had a tinge of nobility in it. He saw a young girl, happy in her ignorance of life's responsibilities, fresh, sweet, and bright, with the reflection of her own innocent and tender fancies shining in her unclouded eyes, and he was loth to interpose his tall shadow between her and the landscape. His wish had been to stand aside until she should come gradually to recognize him as an agreeable feature of it, perhaps to learn to look upon him as something indispensable to her life, making a part--a large part of her happiness. Some men of generous nature prefer to have a woman turn toward them of her own accord rather than to put forth the effort that makes wooing an affair of capture. It is pretty certain to happen, though, that the choice of a man of this view is apt to fall upon a girl whose instinct is not so much womanly as feminine. And those who have studied woman-kind will understand the distinction.

But Mistress Amanda's point had, nevertheless, been made, for she had given Peter to understand that there was a rival in the field. And the most optimistic of men does not fail to experience certain sensations in his brain extending to his strong right arm, when an intruder threatens to snatch away the glass where he is quietly watching the full bead gather and waiting to raise it to his thirsting lips.

IV.

IF Peter's thoughts had sought his rival they would have found him at a certain fine old mansion bearing upon the face of the stone gate-post the name ROSELAWN. A well shaded drive swept up to the doorway, hospitably broad, and in seasonable weather open, giving a view of such a hall as can only be found in an old southern house. Family portraits looked down from the walls upon the carefully preserved furniture, recognizing, it may be, with some satisfaction, the presence of articles that had been in favor during their lifetime.

It was Monday morning, and breakfast time, according to the habits of the Armstrong family. The judge was in his place, his wife, comely, neat, and quiet, was in hers, and the three daughters, Laura, Violet, and Bess, had come in severally, and slipped into their chairs after a warm greeting to their father and a rather less impulsive and loving one to their quiet mother.

"Miles not down?" said Violet, the sprightliest of the sisters; a slim girl with a delicately up-tilted face in which dark eyes and a saucily curved mouth prepared one for good-humored but probably pointed banter.

"Down!" repeated that personage, coming in, and dropping discontentedly into the vacant chair next to his mother. "If you had been _up_ and keeping your chickens in order instead of--whatever else you were doing--I could have got some sleep after four o'clock and been down before. I wish you'd think proper to order that black rooster made into fricassee," he continued to his mother, who had no time to reply, however, for Violet put in an instant protest for her pet Captain Jinks, who was such a darling, and so intelligent he could do everything except talk.

Miles dropped the subject, not caring to compromise his dignity by a dispute over such a trifle, but his entire bearing expressed that appearance of unappreciated worth which is so exasperating to women in a family; divining, as they do, that the root of it is invariably some kind of causeless irritation. The girls discovered in a minute that Miles had "got out of the wrong side of the bed" that morning; this supplying a vague, kindly explanation of his acerbities of temper. Undoubtedly he was cross. It showed in his way of receiving a remark that Laura now made. Laura was of the languid type of fair women; heavy-lidded gray eyes, peachy skin, and flesh all wrought into curving lines. A subdued greed of pleasure is the predominating quality of this sisterhood, often existing under the perfect disguise of plaintive, gentle renunciation. When thoroughly understood they weep the profuse tears of spirits feeling themselves above the comprehension of the ordinary mind.

"Please get Wash to hitch Peg-leg to the phaeton right after breakfast, will you?" Laura said. "I must drive over to Miss Annie's to try on my dress she is making for the tournament."

The light of disapproval kindled in Miles' grave face.

"Are you girls going to persist in attending that silly entertainment?" he inquired.

"You certainly didn't used to think it silly," answered the one chiefly addressed. "Time was--and not so very long ago, either--when you rode at tournaments yourself! I haven't forgotten the tournament at Manasses two years ago, when we were visiting cousin Jennie Davis"----

But Miles' head had disappeared, following his hands in a dive beneath the table for his egg-cup, rolled off by a movement of his arm that would have seemed scarcely accidental could this young gentleman have been suspected of an ulterior wish to cut short some embarrassing allusion. Every one is endowed with some propensity tending to the discomfiture of others. Laura's talent in this direction, unknown to herself, lay in bringing up people's outgrown inclinations; so keeping them to the mortified level of a self they conceived they had risen above and would fain forget. Reminiscences of this kind are peculiarly afflicting to young divines, to whom the problem of preserving an appearance commensurate with the severity of their doctrine is often in danger from the good memories of their intimate friends. Can we wonder that the ordained preacher of twenty-two shrank sensitively from reminders of the peccadilloes committed by the gay youth of twenty?

Miles suffered, in the privacy of family life, from the tendency to treat him as an ordinary young man, whereas, he felt that he had become remarkable. To be informed, at the instant of assuming a superior tone, that he had been used to joining in the customs he condemned was sufficiently humiliating. But Laura's observation held a sting for his irritable conscience that she had no idea of. The dropping of the egg-cup had stopped her slow speech, for she had an acute sense of sympathy for awkwardness in a person ordinarily free from it, being herself studiously graceful.

"Let Sally bring you another egg," she was good enough to suggest. The yellow damsel dawdling against the side table put herself to some trouble to carry out the order, for the admiration that was but lukewarm in the house glowed effulgently in the kitchen; the young preacher being idolized by the negroes.

But Miles' appetite had been satisfied. He pushed back his plate and looked past his offending sister into space; his mind taking a flight in search of consolation ending at Benvenew, making some pretty notes of a pair of confiding eyes and a sweetly deferential tongue that had never uttered a word hurtful to his self-esteem. Of one devout disciple he was sure. Mingled with his triumph in it was a grateful acknowledgment of the immense advantage in this connection of quality over quantity; the sweetbriar rose being worth all the rest of feminine creation.

"What's that about the tournament?" the judge inquired. Three girlish voices chimed an answer of which he extracted the gist at his leisure; managing to arrive at the important item, that Miles was setting himself above all innocent amusements, and declined to accompany his sisters to the tournament.

"Miles' nonsense be damned!" said the head of the house. "I'll be your beau if he won't. I reckon I'm young enough yet to go about with all of you." The judge was forty-five, and excepting for a little too much fulness of chin, and a slight stiffness in his knees, he might have passed for the handsome elder brother of his son. Secretly, he was proud of the boy and looked upon the extreme views he held as the natural excess of an enthusiastic temperament concentrating itself upon theology. He expected Miles to grow more reasonable when his first zeal should have worn off. But his own disposition was choleric, and while he was looking forward to an amelioration of the strict views held by the young preacher he was frequently tempted to bluster a little upon their points of difference.

The Armstrongs were rather given to disputations, and the household atmosphere was not seldom an uncomfortable one for the neutral mother, who had positive opinions upon only two subjects: the flavor of cookery and the good looks of her husband. She was quite satisfied that her son treated her respectfully, that he had good manners, and that his clothes set well; in less important points he was welcome to follow his own inclinations. During little clashes she was accustomed to occupy herself with considerations about the next dinner. Therefore, Miles was surprised to hear her say:

"I think Miles is very much in the right in not giving his countenance to tournaments. As a minister, he couldn't. They bet on the horses and betting's not right. I heard that Penny Haywood bet fifty dollars last year and lost. I'm sure, Judge, you wouldn't like Miles to bet?"

The judge had given to this unwonted animation the compliment of wide-open eyes and smiling mouth.