Part 4

He wondered whether it could be she had become aware of his persistent presence. He feared she had, and as often that she had not. He imagined sometimes that when he looked her face was quivering with a conquered desire to smile. That disconcerted him a shade. Sometimes he thought she looked suspiciously rosy for a girl unconscious of all the world. Sometimes he looked away, with the idea that if he turned suddenly he should find her stealing a glance at him. But he dared not look very quickly, lest the action should be too marked; and turning with discreet alacrity, he could never feel sure.

One day, at last, having settled in his mind that this tame conduct was unworthy of a man, refusing himself a second in which to think better of any matter, he crossed the street and charged the shop. A bell snapped sharply as he opened the door. It startled him to the point of gasping. He grew crimson, finding himself opposed in truth, as many a night before in dream, by Madame Finibald's sly and lowly smile, breathing the same faintly drug-perfumed air as the princess breathed, no glass screen between himself and the hair. He could have touched it, had he been so bold.

He stammered a request for soap--scented soap. He wished himself tens of ten miles away, or time out of mind dead, when--wonderful! The maiden in the window looked frankly over her shoulder. Was it that her eyes brimmed with friendly laughter, or did it seem so to him because his head had become incapable of a true notion? His heart, so to speak, found its feet; he made a muddle of every sentence he launched upon, but his words had a voice behind them. So much he contrived to convey: he was very hard to please in the matter of soap. He sniffed at a variety of proffered tablets, whose virtues Madame Finibald, in very truth like a witch with a philter to sell, assiduously set forth; each cake he examined seemed to hold in her estimation just a little higher place than the foregoing. At the end of ten minutes, without positively losing her good-humor, she declared that he had seen all in the shop, she was sorry and surprised they could not suit him, they might have a fresh stock in on the morrow. He was leaving in clumsy embarrassment, empty handed, with a promise to return, when the princess lightly jumped from the window-place, and, sweeping the hair off her face, said: "There is one more sort, ma'am. I saw it up there, high, when I dusted. Let me get it."

She fetched the steps, and in a moment had climbed and lifted down a box. She set it on the counter; she opened it herself and held towards him, with a direct glance, a packet with a red rose printed on the wrapper.

Madame Finibald, with an exclamation, snatched it from the girl's hand, and began, as if here had been a little grandchild recovered to her old age, to speak with tenderness of its merits. The girl stood near, twining and untwining a lock around her finger, while she unaffectedly looked at the customer. Her hair came below her knees; every moment she had to toss it back out of her face.

"Go back to your window, wicked child!" cried the old witch, suddenly, as if catching at a piece of gold as it was being taken out of her pocket. "Go back!"

"I am tired of sitting!" said the little princess, twisting her shoulders in her frock with the prettiest peevishness. "I have sat and sat and sat! I have finished my story. Let me go out and get a bun. You know you said I could when it was noon."

She caught at her hair, and, to the infinite wonder of one looking on, began twisting, twisting, twisting, coiling, coiling, coiling, driving in great skewers--while he filled his blissful pockets with rose-scented soap.

The bell snapped in fretful reprehension for her passing out. Less than a minute after, it exclaimed in annoyed surprise for his.

Now was he no longer made lonesome by every coquettish touch the more that the year put to her toilet. For the girl of the regal hair smiled to him, surreptitiously with her lips, but unguardedly with her eyes, when he came by her glass-case; while he dawdled in the window opposite, she communicated with him by signs no other eye could have perceived. Even before their acquaintance had become very old, she slipped out to walk in the garden, and they sat on the green seats and had long, foolish, youthful talks--delightful, foolish, youthful times.

Her conversation took an amusing interest from the peculiarities of her education. She had seen and heard much in her short life in a hard world, where it was no one's affair to keep anything from her young ken--much of dark, and petty, and unpicturesque--preserving through all a sort of hardy innocence; and she had borrowed from a cheap circulating library a vast lot of fiction dealing with the supremely grand. Her preference in literature, however, had remained for fairy tales, a taste formed when it had been one of her duties to read aloud to certain little children of the rich. She knew them by the score. It was to this, perhaps, some of her remarks owed the fanciful touch that redeemed them from the commonness of her general conversation--a genial commonness, condoned to such young lips. She had a childish way of lending a personality to everything, that amused him more than epigram would have done. She ascribed intention to the wind that blew off her hat, and stopped to express her mind to it. She assumed consciousness in the bench they sat on; she wanted to take the same one, lest it should think they slighted it because it was rickety, for which it was not to blame. Every flower was to her a person. "Hush! They are listening!" she said, looking from the corner of her eye at a bank of knowing pansies. She scolded a button for coming off, as if the want of principle shown by it had been a thing to revolt her. She stood in a one-sided relation of good-fellowship with the brown birds hopping among the gravel, and the fishes in the pond; she spared them many crumbs. With homely good-heartedness she took into an amused regard all the family of spring--buds, blades, insects--addressing speech to them as if she had been a giant and they a very little people.

Never can spring return without Fraisier's remembering that spring. It was bright; by it all the springs following have been cast in the shadow.

The long hair was woven through and through his thoughts; but not as a disturbing, upheaving element. The girl made him waste a great deal of time, but nothing else--not the life of his heart. Because of her good-nature, her entire want of coquetry or perverseness, his feeling for her complicated itself in nowise; rather it grew simpler as it insensibly changed. His wonder and fine dread at feminine appurtenances had worn away a little with increased familiarity; he reposed on that fact as if it had been such an one as becoming accustomed to the noise of guns. He felt under delicate obligations to her for having routed his shyness, and not at all tormented him in any of the thousand ways he apprehended a feminine being would have at her command.

As he was less and less in awe of her and that suspected arsenal, though a charming, fearful element went out of his sentiment, his affection perhaps grew more. She made such a good little comrade! Insidiously, she connected herself in his mind with future days--she who cared only for the day and the pleasure thereof. When he spoke of a thing it would be pleasant to do, a place pleasant to visit, he said, always unreflectingly, yet from a sincere heart: "Some day we must go there. Let us do such a thing some time." When he described the hills and ponds of home, he said what they might have done had she been there last summer or the years before, how they might have rowed and rambled. He painted the good time they might have together, in some not impossible, but not specified time, place, and circumstances.

So the green from tender grew brilliant--grew deep--became void of interest to the accustomed eye, and more or less dust settled over it. It was manifest to all that spring was past.

Then began an anxious time. Those lectures, those miserable lectures! Those courses, those wretched courses, which he had neglected! That blessed information he had spared to cull when the time was for it! These things seemed likely to get their revenge. When he awoke to a sense of his danger--very late! only when the bloom was off the year, when lily and early rose had gone where they could divert no mortal more--he could not believe that he should not, by fitting exertion, catch up in time at the appointed goal. He worked rabidly, with a wet cloth around his head. He thought not of girls in those days, I promise you; he recked not of bronze-gold hair!

It was written that he should not be saved. He closed his school term pitiably conditioned.

When the worst was known, at least was time to breathe, however sore the lungs, then his mind reverted to her. He had been man enough to harbor no spite towards her, accuse her of nothing. He sent her a message and waited at the appointed place, wondering a little, while he waited, at his follies of the spring. They seemed so unnecessary, looked back upon now. Why, in a very real, practical world like this one, where a man's failure to pass his exams was sure to call forth from his progenitor letters such as his pocket at this moment contained, conduct one's self as if existing in a world of lambs and purling streams and shepherdesses? He was one with the actual world in looking with astonishment and condemnation upon his own works. The sky above was hard, barren blue; it seemed so easy, looking back, to have stuck to the approved road. What had possessed him?

Then she appeared. At sight of her his heart dropped its armor. She brought back a whiff of the sweetness of a past atmosphere. Was it possible he had ever been the happy boy he seemed to remember! He smiled up in her face with cheek-muscles stiffened by disuse, and eyes ringed with studious shadows. She had on a flimsy frock, printed all over with little flowers that seemed to him to smell good; her hair, where the great wad projected beyond the straw brim, was touched with a warm, peculiar glory. He had meant to keep himself well hardened against her, tell her the various things necessary in a matter-of-fact way, and bid her good-bye indefinitely. He felt more like crying with his disgraced head in her lap.

He conquered his weakness.... A pretty man he made!

He got out with sufficient composure and dignity what he had to say. He told her all that had happened, the change it made in the coming months. He was not going home for the holidays; he could not endure to see the folks. He was going into the country to spend the summer in hard study, to make sure of "passing" next term. He was going to the particular place he mentioned because he had a friend there, a fellow he had taken up with in the last weeks, one that had had the same bad luck as himself. This man's family lived there; it would not be quite so dreary as being alone.

She chaffed and consoled him in turns. Now that the world had gone all wrong with him, her eyes seemed to him sweeter and softer than he had ever observed. What a good, kind little friend! Lord! what a good, crazy, light-hearted time they had had, and how pretty she looked to-day! What wonderful, thrice wonderful hair it was, waving and ringletting about her glowing summer face, coiling massively on the back of her head! No woman on earth had such hair!

He did wish for a moment that Green, his new friend, might see her--he was proud of her. One night, when they had sat grinding together for mutual assistance, the oil giving out, Green had told him of a cousin of his. Fraisier had said nothing of any girl. He only wished that Green might see the hair of this girl whose name he had foreborne to speak.

Good-bye, Minnie! He should be working like a slave all through the burning golden days--let her think of him a little. He should be very lonesome. When he had studied until his eyes smarted and his head swam, there would be nothing pleasant to do, no one pleasant to talk with--she might spare a moment to be sorry for him now and then. He should be back in the fall. Bless the beautiful and beautiful and beautiful hair! Good-bye, Minnie!

She so little perished from his mind after their parting that whenever--as Green and he lay under the trees, withdrawn from the world and devoted to arduous studies, keeping off the insects by smoke--Green began talking about that cousin of his, Fraisier became half sick with reminiscence. He could not resist replying by talking--with the finest, shyest reverence always--of Minnie. There was a dreamy solace in talking of her to some one. She described so well, too; so unusually. He had a proud secret assurance that as an incident in a man's life she altogether eclipsed a cousin in interest.

"How long is your cousin's hair?" he asked, with assumed casualness, once. Green stared a little, and confessed not having the slightest idea. Fraisier opened his arms as wide as they could go, and said, vaguely blushing, "The young lady I spoke of has hair as long as this!"

"Come! I should like to see it!" spoke Green, in such a tone that Fraisier turned a deep, vexed red.

He said nothing, but on the next day took his books to a different place, choosing to keep to himself so long as Green did not seek him with a suitable apology.

The spot selected by the young men as a meeting ground lay at an equal distance between Green's home and the cottage in which Fraisier had taken up his summer quarters. It was on the skirts of a wood, and, by some accident of the land, often cool when other places were hot. The rolling pasture it commanded was dotted with scrubby evergreens, and crossed by a small brook the cow's hoofs had in some places trodden broad and shallow. It was colored in patches with the frequent pink of clover-heads, surprised here and there with the white of a long-necked, belated daisy.

Fraisier took himself to a spot just not so far from the usual haunt but that Green when he came might see him.

It was a fair, soft, simmering morning, promising a scorching day. He stretched himself under the trees and lighted a pipe--he had taken to a pipe in place of cigarettes since coming into the wilderness. He composed himself for a serious forenoon's work, deciding that it was much more profitable, after all, to study alone--Green was always digressing.

The spot he had chosen was not so good, it proved, as the one he had left clear for Green. A path ran through the woods, just within the trees; there was a frequent patter of bare feet on the dust, children with pails passed looking for things. He waited to proceed with his theorem till their high piping, scattered voices had died away. It was not so cool, either; as a fact, it was hotter than most places. He did not crave the exertion of seeking a better; this was at least shady. He turned over on his back and closed his eyes, yielding gracefully to the force of circumstances.

A light blow in the face, from an acorn, perhaps, roused him. He thought of Green, and, instantly broad awake, looked for the development of some practical joke.

It was not Green--he saw it with a sort of disappointment. It was one of the berry-seeking children that had caught sight of him snoozing, and followed its natural instinct. A boy's grinning head was seen bobbing above one of the neighboring bushes. He turned from it in disgust and felt surlily about the grass for his pipe, about his person for a match--

Gracious powers! what sort did the young one take him for, with this free persecution? Another acorn had hit him smartly on the head.

"Look out, there!" he called, making a feint of rising to give chase.

"Come on!" shouted the boy, gayly, from behind the bush. There was a burst of laughter, a flash and flutter of pink, and the boy, who turned out to be a girl, came precipitately towards him. She stopped just short of a collision, and dropped in the grass panting with laughter. He stared at her blankly. Every time she looked up and caught sight of his expression she doubled herself and fairly writhed.

"He doesn't know me!--he doesn't know me!" she brought forth amid her convulsive giggling.

"Minnie! My God! What--what have you done to yourself?" he exclaimed, and had no breath left.

She moderated her laughter, and presented her smiling face a moment for him to see well what had happened. She ran her fingers over her cropped head, ruffling it absurdly, making the short locks stand on end.

"Isn't it funny? Doesn't a person look funny at first? The rest of it is hanging, like a fairy horse's tail, in the window, across the picture of the Elixir lady. (Bad old woman! Cheat! She didn't give me much for it! But, Natty Fraisier, I would have taken even less, I did want to come so!) You poor, lonesome boy! I can stay a whole week--perhaps more. I have found a place in the village, just near you. The first child I met told me all I wanted to know. I thought it would have been harder. Mercy! isn't it heavenly still and sweet here, with hills and cows? I was never in the true country before. Mercy! isn't it good? Look out, you flower there--over there, you, miss! That is called a bee; he has a terrible stinger--oh, he is an old acquaintance? Go ahead, then, and give him a nice swing, and honey for his tea. Oh, Natty, I am so glad! Aren't you glad?"

He choked and cleared his throat. No, without that voice, never in the world would he have known her. Before him seemed to be a common little street-boy who had run off in a girl's new pink dress and shiny shoes--an unknown boy whose features had something painfully familiar. Strange! He remembered Minnie's face as possessing a certain harmony in its lines, however childish and trivial they were; this terrible little impostor, though not ill favored, was broad of jaw and narrow of forehead; his eyes even were not the same, but smaller and nearer together, while the mouth was larger--its very proneness to laughter increased its commonness. And that ridiculous hair--literally chopped off by an unskilled hand and twisted here and there with unpractised tongs! It was so thick, it had no more light or lustre than a hearth-brush.

Her face sobered ever so little as she looked at him. "What is the matter? Poor dear! you haven't got over those exams. But I won't bother, you know, and take up all your time; I have learned better. I won't interfere with any work, I promise, Natty. See me swear? On this algebra! Only, before you begin and when you have done each day, we will go for walks and rows. I saw a boat on the pond. We will have lunch on the grass, and make a fire with sticks we pick up. Look! you put three long sticks like that and hang the kettle in the middle. We will do all those things we used to plan when we never much thought there would be a chance. You poor, lonesome boy, have you been having a horrid time? We will make up for it now. Natty, you don't care about the _hair_, do you? You needn't. You know, I had got mortally sick of sitting in that window. I could not have stood it a day longer. When a fly buzzed on the pane I wanted to scream. Again and again I have come near putting my foot through the glass at one of the gaping faces, then jumping down and catching the old woman while she told lies about my having used her Elixir faithfully--never touched a drop!--and dancing her up and down all around the room until she dropped. I shall go back to taking care of little children now, as I did before she found me. I do love children! And in that business, I don't mind telling you, I shall do better without all that hair. No matter how tight I did it up, some one was always grumbling that it made too much show. You mustn't care a bit about the hair, Natty; I gave it up without a twinge. I cut it off with my own hands. You have no idea how much comfortabler this is in hot weather. My head feels so light! I can dip it in the water any minute. I do love it like this!"

She ran her hands through her hair again, ruffling it still more fantastically. Fraisier winced. He was sick beyond calculating the degree. "Oh, my poor girl!" he contrived at last to say.

She looked at him more closely than before in her overrunning joy, and her face fell a little. No doubt she had seen herself in mirrors since her alteration, but not in a real mirror until she saw herself reflected in his very pale face. She smiled still, but a little foolishly; then no more, and stopped chatting. It was as if a stone had been set to seal up a spring--a large stone laid upon her bubbling heart. There was a silence.

He saw that she must be seeing what he could not keep out of his face. He could not help it; he could get no control over his feelings, over his expression. He was not sure he cared to--he did not try. He was at sea: he did not know what he felt, what he did not feel. The bottom seemed to have dropped out of his heart, out of the world--out of something, everything. He knew not! He only knew he was sick--sick, and incapable of speech, of action, of reflection.

"You can't stay here, child," he heard some one saying, in a matter-of-fact, superficial voice. "Don't you see, yourself, that you can't? For your own sake, I mean. It would never do, Minnie. You must understand that. You don't know what a thing a small country village like this is, for gossip and slanderous tongues. I couldn't let you injure yourself so, don't you see?"

"It wouldn't be proper?" she inquired, faintly.

"No, Minnie; no, it wouldn't--at all. Don't you see it?"

She got to her feet, full as pale as he now.

"All right," she said, and after a few mechanical steps, paused a moment, looking down, biting her finger--lost in thought, or waiting for something to happen, for him to say something further.

He could not speak--he could not make himself speak.

"All right," she said again, very distinctly, and turned to go without another word.

"Minnie! Minnie!" he faltered, and had instinctively cast himself after her. His outstretched hand almost touched her pink draperies. She turned on him fiercely, whisking herself out of reach. He was confronted for a second by a little angry street-boy face, but with the gathered experience and woe of half a race in the eyes. "Let me alone! Don't dare to touch me! Nathaniel Fraisier, I hate you!"

She began desperately to run. He saw her clutch her poor little ruined head, and heard her cry out, breaking into sobs: "Oh, my hair! Oh, my hair!"

He dropped in the grass, face downward, and pressed his hands over his ears, trembling. It all seemed so strange, so out of proportion.

In the late afternoon of that same hot day the crabbed little bell on Madame Finibald's door snapped to let in a tired, dusty youth, whose dejected face was so flushed, one's thought at sight of him turned at once on sunstroke. He leaned wearily over the counter and asked a few questions, at which madame's liver seemed so shaken she could not keep a hold on her good manners. At the height of her voice she began berating all the world, and one absent person. Fraisier tried to calm her, with vague, soothing motions of his hands patting down the air. When she subsided enough for him to be heard, he pointed to a long tail of shining hair in the window, and spoke again, growing redder, if possible, than before--so red that his eyes watered, and he had to shade them a moment, leaning his elbows on the counter. She unhitched the hair, shaking it brutally. He put out his hands in remonstrance. She flung it down before him with a forbidding proposition and a deep snort of malice. Meekly he emptied his purse on the counter, unfolding the bills, spreading out the silver and lucky pieces to count, reserving only for himself a crumpled ticket.