Part 5

"When did Morgan have his chance?" asked Rutledge, amused at the mischief-maker's plain speaking.

"He went to Venezuela in papa's regiment, but never had a shot fired at him the whole time he was gone. That's what he did. Elise cannot love a man like that."

"Perhaps it was not his fault. He may have been detailed to such duties as kept him away from the shots."

"Yes, I think he says he was; but what of that? He wasn't in the fighting, and that's what it takes to make a hero. Oh, I wish I were a man. I would ride a horse and hunt lions and tigers, and I would have gone to the war in Venezuela and nobody's orders would have kept me from the firing-line--I believe that's what papa calls it--the place where all the fun and danger is. When papa talks about it I can hear my heart beat. Elise says she wouldn't be a man for anything; but I've heard her say that she could love a man if he was a _man_--brave and strong--you know--a man who did things. I would prefer to do the things myself. I wouldn't love any man I ever saw--unless he was just like papa. What regiment were you in, Mr. Rutledge?"

"I wasn't in any regiment," said Rutledge meekly.

"What! Didn't you volunteer?" asked Helen in surprise.

"I did not volunteer"--a trifle defiantly.

"Why?" Helen demanded scornfully. "If I had a brother and he had failed to volunteer I would never have spoken to him again! I thought all South Carolinians were fighters."

"I had other things to attend to," said Rutledge shortly. "Where is Miss Phillips this afternoon?"

"She's out on the river with Mr. Morgan. They will not be back till dinner, so you would just as well sit down here and talk to me.... But I'm sorry you didn't volunteer--you will never be my brother now.... And I was beginning to like you so much."

"I thank you, little girl, for your attempt to think well of me. I see that I have sinned past your forgiveness in not being a hero. Remember that it is only because ninety and nine men are commonplace that the hundredth may be a hero. I am one of the ninety and nine that make the hero possible--a modest king-maker, in a way. A hero must have some one else to fight for, or die for, or live for. He cannot do these things for himself, for that would make him anything but a hero. So you see that the second person is as necessary to the process of hero-making as the hero himself. It's all in the process and not in the product, anyway. It's the hero in act and not in fact, in the making and not in the taking, that enjoys his own heroism and is worth our interest. While he is making himself he thrills with the effort and with the uncertainty as to whether he will get a commission, a lathe-and-plaster arch, or a court of inquiry; and we the ninety and nine, we thrill with the gambling fever and make wagers that his trolley will get off the wire. But when he gets himself done--clean done, so to speak, wrapped in tinfoil and ready for use--then there is nothing left for the hero to do but to pose and await our applause--which is most unheroic; and we, after one whoop, forget him in the excitement of watching the next candidate risk his neck. Besides, the hero's work in hero-making is temporary and limited, for he stops with making one; but we, when we have finished with one, turn to the making of another, and our work is never done. While I am not even one hero, I have helped to make a hundred. Come now--you are generous and unselfish--which would you most admire, one finished hero listening for applause, or a hero-maker, who, without reward or the hope of reward, modestly and continuously assists in thus bringing glory to an endless procession of his fellows?"

"You think you are brilliant, Mr. Rutledge," answered Helen with an impatient toss of her head, "but you can't confuse me by any such talk as that. You needn't think you will be able to persuade Elise by any long jumble of words that you are greater than a hero. A king-maker!" She laughed mockingly at him.

"Don't fear that I will use any sophistry or doubtful method to become your brother," Rutledge rejoined amusedly. "I have only one thing to tell Miss Phillips."

"And what is that?" asked Helen with interest.

"I am inexpressibly pained to refuse your lightest wish," said Rutledge grandiloquently, "but to grant your request would be--telling; and I may--not tell,--perhaps,--even Miss Phillips."

"Do not suffer so," said Helen with an assumption of great indifference. "I don't care to hear it."

"Yes, I predict that you will be delighted to listen to it when it is told to you," said Rutledge confidently. "And it will be beyond doubt. But you are too young to hear such things yet. Be patient. You'll get older if you live long enough."

It fretted Helen to be told that she was young, as she was told a dozen times a day--not that she disliked her youth, but because of the suggestion that she was not free to do as she pleased; and her eyes began to flash at Rutledge's taunt and her mind to form a suitable expression of resentment--when that gentleman walked away from her smiling at her petulant anger.

Evans Rutledge had more interest in Helen's words about her sister than he showed in his manner or conversation. He had not told Elise what his heart had told him for many days past, though she did not need spoken words to know. He, manlike, thought that he was keeping this knowledge of his supreme affection for her a secret in his own soul, to be delivered as a startling and effective surprise when an impressive and strategic opportunity should come to tell her of it. She, womanlike, read him as easily as a college professor is supposed to read Greek, and concerned herself chiefly with feigning ignorance of his interest in her.

Elise's true attitude toward Rutledge was a sort of neutrality. She was neither for him nor against him. She was attracted by everything she saw or knew of him, and looked upon him with that more than passing interest which every woman has for a man who has asked or will ask her to be his wife.

On the other hand she was decided she could not accept Rutledge. She had but crossed the threshold of her unfettered young womanhood, and her natural and healthy zest in its pleasures overcame any natural impulse to choose a mate. Added to this were the possibilities held out in her romantic imagination as the increasing newspaper prophecies concerning her father induced day-dreams of court-like scenes and princely suitors when she should be the young lady of the White House, the most exalted maiden in great America, with the prerogative of a crown princess. A temporary prerogative surely, but well-nigh irresistible when combined with the compelling charm of American womanhood, that by right of genius assumes the high positions for which nature has endowed the gentlewomen of this republic, and by right of fine adaptability and inborn queenliness establishes and fortifies them, as if born to the purple, in the social high places of older civilizations.

Elise Phillips, with all her democratic training, with her admirable good common sense, with her adorable kindliness of heart and friendliness of spirit for every man and woman of high or low degree, with her sincere admiration for true manliness and pure womanliness unadorned by any tinsel of arbitrary rank, with all her contempt for the shams and pretences of decayed nobilities parading dishonoured titles, was yet too much a woman and too full of the romantic optimism of life's spring-time not to dream of princely youths wearing the white flower of blameless lives who would come in long procession to attend her temporary court.

And in that procession as it even now passed before her imagination, she kept watch for _him_,--the ideal of her maiden soul, the master of her virgin heart;--_him_, with the blue eyes and flaxen hair and the commanding figure that looked down upon all other men;--_him_, with the look and gesture of power that men obeyed and women adored, and that became tender and adoring only for her;--_him_, with a rank that made him to stand before kings with confidence, and a clean life that might stand before her white soul and feel no shame;--_him_, with a strength and courage that failed not nor faltered along the rocky paths by which the laurel and Victoria Crosses grow, and that yet would falter and tremble with love in her presence. Oh, the wonderful dreams of Youth! How real they are, and how powerful in changing the issues of life and of death.

Had Rutledge taken counsel of his mother or heeded her disapprobation of Miss Elise Phillips, he would have saved himself at least from the pain of a flouted love; and if he could have made his heart obey his mother's wish he would have avoided the stress of many heartaches and jealousies, and of slow-dying hope.

Mrs. Rutledge had her young womanhood in the heart-burning days of the Great War, and the partisan impress then seared into her young soul was ineradicable. She had a youth that knew fully the passions and the sorrows of that awful four years of blood and strife: for every man of her house, father and five brothers, had she seen dead and cold in their uniforms of gray; and her antipathy for "those people" who had sent anguish and never-ending desolation into her life might lie dormant if memory was unprovoked, but it could never change nor lose its sharp vehemence.

She had objected to Elise from the moment her son showed a fancy for her, and began quietly to sow in his mind the seeds she hoped would grow into dislike and aversion. She told him that "those people," as she invariably called persons who came from that indefinite stretch of country which her mind comprehended in the term "the North," were "not of our sort,"--that they were intelligent and interesting in a way;--that Elise Phillips was unquestionably fascinating to a young man, that her money had given her a polish of mind and manner that was admittedly attractive; but that she was not fitted to be the life companion of a man whose culture and gentlemanliness was not a product of schools and of dollars but a heritage from long generations of gentle ancestors who had bequeathed to him converging legacies of fine and gentle breeding.

Evans Rutledge, however, was of a new day; and his mother's theory that good blood was a Southern and sectional product found no place in his thought. He was tender, however, and considerate of his mother's prejudices, and was never so rude as to brush them aside contemptuously. He always treated them with deference and tried always to meet them with some show of reason. In the case of Elise Phillips he sought to placate his mother's whim and capture her prejudice by tacitly agreeing to the general proposition while excepting Elise from it by the use of Colonel Phillips' well-worn statement that his mother was a South Carolinian.

"That makes Miss Phillips a granddaughter of South Carolina," said Rutledge to his mother; "and surely there cannot be much degeneracy in two generations,--especially when the Southern blood was of the finest strain."

Mrs. Rutledge admitted that the argument was not without force, but solemnly warned her son there was no telling when the common strain might crop out.

"What's bred in the bone will come out in the blood," she said, "and bad blood is more assertive than good."

Evans loved his mother better than any other soul except Elise, and he would go far and deny himself much to obey even her most unreasonable whim, but his love for Elise was too fervid a passion to be stifled for the sake of a war-born prejudice. He would win her; yes, he must win her; and he waited only the winning moment to plead openly for his happiness.

*CHAPTER VIII*

It was a morning in late September that Elise and Rutledge went for their last canoe ride on the mighty river. Mrs. Phillips and her daughters were to leave for home on an early afternoon train, and Mrs. Rutledge and Evans for Montreal an hour later.

It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter's advance agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty master.

The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature.

It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of Elise as an invigorating draught. She was so _en rapport_ with the morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the day.

The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature's quickening heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise's charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man. She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have its origin in some vague unmanly weakness--and weakness in a man she despised.

She had talked to him of a score of things since they had embarked, passing rapidly from one to another in order to keep him away from the one subject he seemed attracted to from any point of the conversational compass. At the moment she had been so clearly impressed with his almost feminine gracefulness the conversation was taking a dangerous swerve, she thought; and for a minute she was at a loss how to divert the course of language from the matter nearest his heart. In a blind effort to do so she unthinkingly challenged him to prove his sterner strength which she had never seen put to the test.

"It's easy going here, isn't it?" she said. "What a pity we couldn't have one visit to the island before we go away."

"Do you wish to go there?" asked Rutledge.

"I would like to," she replied, "but of course we cannot attempt it without an experienced canoe-man. It is about time for us to return; don't you think so?"

"That depends on whether you really want to go to the island," returned Rutledge, who was quick to see and resent the intimation that he was not equal to the business of putting her across the racing water between them and the small cluster of trees and shrubs growing among a misshapen pile of rocks nearly across the river.

"I am told no one but these half-breed guides have ever tried the passage," he continued. "Not because it is so very dangerous, I suppose, but because it is too small to attract visitors to try the rough water."

"They can get to it easily from the other side, can't they? It seems so near to that," said Elise.

"No. Jacques tells me that the narrow water on the other side runs like a race-horse, and has many rocks to smash the canoe. Even going from this side I would prefer to leave you here, Miss Phillips, and of course that would make the visit without inducement to me."

"You allow your carefulness of me and your politeness to me to reason you out of the danger," said Elise, without any sinister purpose; but Rutledge recalled Helen Phillips' words about Elise and heroes, and became uncomfortable.

"I used them to reason you out of the danger," he replied. "If the argument does not appeal to you I am ready for your orders."

"Then let's go over," said Elise, prompted half by the challenge in his eyes and half by her subconscious desire to see him vindicate his feminine grace.

"I admit I am a coward," Rutledge remarked as he turned the canoe toward the island.

"Oh, if you confess to being afraid!" said Elise in mingled surprise and pity. "I certainly cannot insist. Let's return to the hotel."

"You mistake me," Rutledge replied as he sent the light craft on toward the rapids. "My cowardice is in permitting you to bully me into carrying you into some danger. I should have the courage to refuse."

"You would have me believe in your courage, then, whether you choose danger or avoid it. That is artful," Elise rejoined.

The word "artful" nettled Rutledge, and he put his resentment into the strokes which sent the canoe forward. If Elise Phillips could believe of him that he would attempt to establish a reputation for courage by a trick of words, words would be inadequate, of course, to defend him from the imputation. There was no chance now to convince her, he thought, save to try the passage. So, despising the weakness which would not let him point the canoe homeward, he set his strength against the increasing current, and soon lost thought of the argument in the zest of sparring with the river.

Elise became absorbedly interested in the contest and in his handling of the boat. The interest of both became more and more intense as the water began to slap the canoe viciously and toss them with careless strength. A wave rolling over a sunken rock rushed upon them with a gurgle and swash and passed under the canoe with a heave and splash that tilted them uncomfortably and threw a hatful of water over the side. Another came with a more impatient toss, and Elise crouched upon the seat to preserve her equilibrium. Rutledge looked round at her face, which was unsmiling but without fear, and asked:

"Shall we go back?"

"No," the girl answered.

They soon found that the water was swifter than they had judged it from the shore, and that they had not put across far enough up-stream to make the island easily. They were nearing it, but the current was becoming boisterous and they were drifting faster and faster down-stream. Swifter water and rougher met the canoe at every paddle-stroke. Rutledge with his back to Elise dropped on one knee in the water in the canoe bottom and gave every energy to his work. If Elise had not been with him he would have liked nothing better.

As for the girl, she would not insist on this wild ride again, but, being in, she was having many thrills of pleasure. Rutledge's manner gave her confidence that they would reach the island, but with how much discomfiture she was as yet uncertain. She was drenched with water from the slapping waves and the swiftly flying paddle, which was Rutledge's only weapon against the wrath of the river. She saw in his resolute efforts that their situation was at least serious if not dangerous, and she hardly took her eyes from him; but with her closest scrutiny she did not detect the slightest indecision or apprehension.

Only once did fear come to her, and that but for a moment. The struggle was now quick and furious. They were in the mad whirl of crushing water that tore alongside the island and was ripped and ground among the bullying rocks. She heard Rutledge stifle a cry as he sent the canoe out with a back-stroke that almost threw her overboard, and the rioting current slammed them past a jagged vicious-looking rock just under the river's surface which would have smashed their cockle-shell to splinters. When she looked down upon it as they were shot past she thought for an instant of death and dead men's bones. Then--

"Out! Quick--now!" yelled Rutledge, as with a strength that seemed as much of will as of muscle, he shoved the canoe's nose up against the island and held it for a moment against the fury of the water.

Elise rose at his sharp command and leaped lightly out upon a bare rock, giving the canoe a back kick which sent it swinging around broad across the current. As it swung off Rutledge, seeing no favourable place below him to make another landing, quickly gave his end of the boat a cant toward the island, dropped the paddle in the canoe, grabbed the mooring chain and jumped for the land. He jumped and alighted unsteadily but without further mishap than so far capsizing the canoe that it shipped enough water to more than half submerge it and threaten to sink it. With his effort to draw it up on the rock and save it from sinking entirely, the water in the canoe rushed to the outer end, sending that completely under and floating the paddle out and away. He yanked the canoe up on the island and, turning, looked straight into Elise's eyes for ten seconds without speaking.

"Why don't you say it?" the young woman asked with amused defiance.

"Say what?" inquired Rutledge.

"What you are dying to tell me."

"I love you," answered Rutledge simply.

"Oh! You--you--impudent--you horrible!" cried Elise with a gasp. "To presume I would invite you to tell me--that! How dare you!"

"I dare anything for you," said Rutledge. "I love you and--"

"Stop! Not another word on that subject--lest your presumption become unbearable! You know very well, Mr. Stupidity, that I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"

"I have told you--so--your--exp--"

"Stop, I say! I will not listen to another word. Your persistence is almost--insulting!"

"Insulting!" said Rutledge in amazement. "Then pardon me and I'll not offend again;" and he turned to take a look at the fast-riding paddle as it turned and flashed far down the river.

Elise was glad of the chance to gather her wits together and prepare a defence against this abrupt method of wooing. Indeed she was on the defensive against her own heart. One fact alone, however, would justify her deliberation: that she was not certain of her own mind. Friendship may halt and consider, admiration may sit in judgment; but love that questions, or is of two minds, or hesitates, is not love.

She turned away from him and the river to give attention to this new problem which was of more immediate interest to her than the question of how they were to get away from the island. Rutledge came to her after awhile.

"Miss Phillips," he said, "I have the honour to report that, while we are prisoners on this island now, our imprisonment will not be lengthy. Fortunately I saw Jacques on the other side of the river and made him understand, I think, that we have lost our paddle. At any rate he put off toward the hotel at great speed, and will be down with another canoe I hope before you become tired of your island." And he added, as if to relieve the tense situation: "While we wait I shall be glad to show you over the premises and to talk about anything that you may prefer to discuss."

Elise could not tell from the formal manner of Rutledge's words whether he was really offended or humourously stilted in his speech. She could be as coldly polite as any occasion demanded; but, believing that she had effectually put an end to his love-making for the day, she met his formality of manner in her naturally charming and friendly spirit.