Part 22

When this crisis supervened, Lucien Royce was at New Helvetia Springs, at the bowling-alley. His resolution that the beautiful girl, whom he had learned to adore at a distance, should never see him again in a guise so unworthy of him, of his true position in life, and of his antecedents, collapsed one day in an incident which was a satiric comment upon its importance. He met her unexpectedly in the mountain woods, within a few miles of the Cove, one of a joyous young equestrian party, and riding like the wind. The plainness of the black habit, the hat, the high close white collar, seemed to embellish her beauty, in that no adornments frivolously diverted the attention from the perfection of its detail. The flush on her cheek, the light in her eye, the lissome grace of her slender figure, all attested a breezy delight in the swift motion; her smile shone down upon him like the sudden revelation of a star in the midst of a closing cloud, when he sprang forward and handed her the whip which she had dropped at the moment of passing, before the cavalier at her side could dismount to recover it. A polite inclination of the head, a murmur of thanks, a broadside of those absolutely unrecognizing eyes, and she was gone.

She evidently had no remembrance of him. His alert intuition could have detected it in her face if she had. For her he had no existence. He thought, as he walked on into the silence and the wilderness, of his resolution and his self-denial, and he laughed bitterly at the futility of the one and the pangs of the other. He need never wince to be so lowly placed, so mean, so humble, for she never thought of him. He need not fear to go near her, to haunt, like the ghost he was, her ways in life, for she would never look at him, she would never realize that he was near; for most people are thus insensible of spectral influences.

When he sat for the first time on a bench against the wall, by the door of the bowling-alley, with two or three mountaineers whose lethargic curiosity--their venison or peaches having been sold--was excited in a degree by the spectacle of the game of tenpins, he had much ado to control the agitation that beset him, the pangs of humiliation. But after this day he came often, availing himself of the special courtesy observed by the players in providing a bench for the mountaineers, as spectators, who were indeed never intrusive or out of place, and generally of most listless and uninterested attitude toward the freaks and frivolities of New Helvetia. This attention seemed a gracious and kindly condescension, and flattered a conscious sentiment of _noblesse oblige_. There were other spectators, of better quality, on the opposite side of the long low building,--the elders among the sojourners at New Helvetia Springs,--while down the centre, between the two alleys, were the benches on which the players were ranged.

She was sometimes among these, always graceful and girlish, with a look of innocence in her eyes like some sweet child’s, and wearing her youth and beauty like a crown, with that unique touch of dignity suggestive of a splendid future development, and that these days, lovely though they might be, were not destined to be her best. One might have pitied the hot envy he felt toward the youths who handed her the balls and applauded her play, and hung about near her, and chatted in the intervals,--so foolish, so hopeless, so bitter it was. Sometimes he heard her responses: little of note, the talk of a girl of his day and world, but animated with a sort of individuality, a something like herself,--or did he fancy it was like no one else? He had met his fate too late; this was the one woman in all the world for him. She could have made of him anything she would. His heart stirred with a vague impulse of reminiscent ambitions that might have been facts had she come earlier. He loved her, and he felt that never before had he loved. The slight spurious evanescent emotion, evoked from idleness or folly or caprice, in sundry remembered episodes of his old world, or evolved in the desert of his loneliness for Euphemia,--how vain, how unreal, how ephemeral, how unjustified! But she who would have been the supreme power in his life had come at last--and had come too late. How truly he reasoned he knew well, as he sat in his humble garb amongst his uncouth associates on the segregated bench, and heard the thunder of the balls and the swift steps of the lightly passing figures at the head of the alley; but surely he should not have been capable of an added pang when he discerned, with a sense almost as impersonal as if he were indeed the immaterial essence he claimed to be, her fate in the identity of a lately arrived guest. This was a man of middle height and slender, about thirty-five years of age, with a slight bald spot on the top of his well-shaped head. He had a keen narrow face, an inexpressive calm manner, and was evidently a personage of weight in the world of men, sustaining a high social and financial consideration. He did not take part in the game. He leaned against a pillar near her, and bent over her, and talked to her in the intervals of her play. He had apparently little affinity for youthful amusements, and spent much of his time with her parents. His mission here was most undisguised, and it seemed to the poor juggler that the fortunate suitor was but a personified conventionality, whom no woman could truly love, and who could truly love no woman.

When once Royce had acquired the sense of invisibility, he put no curb on his poor and humble cravings to see her, to hear the sound of her voice albeit she spoke only to others. Every day found him on the mountaineers’ bench at the bowling-alley, sometimes alone, sometimes in grotesque company, the ridicule, he knew, of the young and thoughtless; and he had no care if he were ridiculed too. Sometimes she came, and he was drearily happy. Frequently she was absent, and in dull despair he sat and dreamed of her till the game was done. He grew to love the inanimate things she touched, the dress she wore; he even loved best that which she wore most often, and his heart lightened whenever he recognized it, as if the sight of it were some boon of fate, and their common preference for it a bond of sympathy. Once she came in late from a walk in the woods, wearing white, with a purple cluster of the wild verbena at her bosom. There was a blossom lying upon the floor after the people were all gone. He saw it as it slipped down, and he waited, and then, in the absolute solitude, with a furtive gesture he picked it up, and after that he always wore it, folded in a bit of paper, over his heart.

In the midst of this absorbing emotion Lucien Royce did not feel the pangs of supplantation till the fact had been repeatedly driven home. When, returning from New Helvetia, he would find Jack Ormsby sitting on the steps of the cabin porch, talking to Euphemia, he welcomed as a relief the opportunity to betake himself and his bitter brooding thoughts down to the bank of the river, where he was wont to walk to and fro under the white stars, heedless of the joyous voices floating down to him, deaf to all save the inflections of a voice in his memory. He began gradually to note with a dull surprise Euphemia’s scant, overlooking glance when her eyes must needs turn toward him; her indifferent manner,--even averse, it might seem; her disaffected languor save when Jack Ormsby’s shadow fell athwart the door. In some sort Royce had grown obtuse to all except the sentiment that enthralled him. Under normal circumstances he would have detected instantly the flimsy pretense with which she sought to stimulate his jealousy, to restore his allegiance, to sustain her pride. She had not dreamed that her hold upon his heart, gained only by reason of his loneliness and despair and the distastefulness of his surroundings, had slackened the instant a deep and real love took possession of him. She had not divined this hopeless, silent love--from afar, from infinite lengths of despair!--for another. She only knew that somehow he had grown oblivious of her, and was much absent from her. This touched her pride, her fatal pride! And thus she played off Jack Ormsby against him as best she might, and held her head very high.

The sense of desertion inflicted upon him only a dull pain. He said listlessly to himself, his pride untouched, that she had not really loved him, that she had been merely fascinated for a time by the novelty of the “readin’s,” and now she cared for them and him no more. He recalled the readiness with which she had forsworn her earlier lover, when his conscience had conflicted with her pride, and this seeming fickleness was accented anew in the later change. Royce tacitly acquiesced in it, no longer struggling as he had done at first with a sense of loyalty to her, but giving himself up to his hopeless dream, precious even in its conscious futility.

How long this quiescent state might have proved more pleasure than pain it is hard to say. There suddenly came into its melancholy serenities a wild tumult of uncertainty, a mad project, a patent possibility that set his brain on fire and his heart plunging. He argued within himself--with some doubting, denying, forbidding instinct of self-immolation, as it seemed, that had somehow attained full control of him in these days--that in one sense he was fully the equal of Miss Fordyce, as well born, as well bred, as she, as carefully trained in all the essentials that regulate polite society. She would sustain no derogation if he could contrive an entrance to her social circle, and meet her there as an equal. He had overheard in the fragmentary gossip mention of people in New Orleans, familiars of her circle, to whom he was well known. He did not doubt that his father’s name and standing would be instantly recognized by her father, Judge Archibald Fordyce,--the sojourners at New Helvetia were identifiable to him now,--or indeed by any man of consequence of that gentleman’s acquaintance. Under normal circumstances the formality of an introduction would be a matter of course. If she had chanced to spend a winter in St. Louis, Royce would doubtless have danced with her on a dozen different occasions; he wondered blankly if he would then have adequately valued the privilege! He felt now that he would give his life for a touch of her hand, a look of her eyes fixed upon him observingly; how the utter neutrality of her glance hurt him! He would give his soul for the bliss of one waltz. He trembled as he realized how possible, how easily and obviously practicable, this had become.

For the tableaux and fancy-dress ball had been so relished by the more juvenile element of New Helvetia that the successor of that festivity was already projected. This was to be a grotesquerie in calico costumes and masks, chiefly of facetious characters. The masks were deemed essential by the small designers of the entertainment, since the secret of the various disguises had not been carefully kept, and these vizards were ingenuously relied on to protect the incognito of certain personages garbed, with the aid of sympathetic elders, as Dolly Varden, Tilly Slowboy (with a rag-doll baby furnished with a head proof against banging on door-frames or elbows), Sir John Falstaff, three feet high, Robinson Crusoe, and similar celebrities. The whole affair was esteemed a tedious superfluity by the youths of twenty and a few years upward, already a trifle blasé, who sometimes lingered and talked and smoked in the bowling-alley after the game was finished and the ladies had gone. It was from overhearing this chat that Royce learned that although the majority of the young fellows, tired with one effort of devising costumes, had declined to go in calico and in character, still, in deference to the style of the entertainment and the importunity of the children who had projected it, they had agreed to attend in mask. Their out-of-door attire of knickerbockers and flannel shirts and blazers ought to be deemed, they thought, shabby enough to appease the “tacky” requirements of the juvenile managers, who were pleased to call their burlesque masquerade a “tacky party.”

Then it was that Royce realized his opportunity. The knickerbockers and flannel shirt, the red-and-black blazer and russet shoes, in which he had entered Etowah Cove, now stowed away in the roof-room of Tubal Cain Sims’s house, were not more the worse for wear than much of such attire at New Helvetia Springs after a few weeks of mountain rambles. Ten minutes in the barbershop of the hotel, at a late hour when it would be deserted by its ordinary patrons, would put him in trim for the occasion, and doubtless its functionaries who had never seen him would fancy him in this dress a newly arrived guest of the hotel or of some of the New Helvetia summer cottagers. He had even a prevision of the free and casual gesture with which he would hand an attendant a quarter of a dollar and send across the road to the store for a mask. And then--and then--he could feel already the rhythm of the waltz music beating in every pulse; he breathed even now the breeze quickening in the motion of the dance, endowed with the sweetness of the zephyrs of the seventh heaven. It was she--she alone--whom he would care to approach; the rest, they were as naught! One touch of her hand, the rapture of one waltz, and he would be ready to throw himself over the bluff; for he would have attained the uttermost happiness that earth could bestow upon him now.

And suddenly he was ready to throw himself over the bluff that he should even have dreamed this dream. For all that his pulses still beat to the throb of that mute strain, that his eyes were alight with an unrealized joy, that the half quiver, half smile of a visionary expectation lingered at his lips, the red rush of indignant humiliation covered his face and tingled to the very tips of his fingers. He was far on the road between the Cove and the Springs, and he paused in the solitude that he might analyze this thing, and see where he stood and whither he was tending. He, of all men in the world, an intruder, a partaker of pleasures designed exclusively for others! He to wear a mask where he might not dare to show his face! He to scheme to secure from her,--from _her_!--through false pretenses, under the mistake that he was another, a notice, a word, chance phrases, the touch of her confiding hand, the ecstasy of a waltz! He had no words for himself!

He was an exile and penniless. He had no identity. He could reveal himself only to be falsely suspected of a vile robbery in a position of great trust; any lapse of caution would consign him to years of unjust imprisonment in a felon’s cell. He was the very sport of a cruel fate. He had naught left of all the lavish earthly endowments with which he had begun life save his own estimate of his own sense of honor. But this was still precious to him. Bereft as he was, he was still a gentleman at heart. He claimed that,--he demanded of himself his own recognition as such. Never again, he determined, as he began to walk slowly along the road once more, never again should expert sophistries tempt him. He would not argue his equality with her, his birth, his education, the social position of his people. It was enough to reflect that if she knew all she would shrink from him. He would not again seek refuge in the impossibility that his identity could be discovered as a guest at the ball. He would not plead as a set-off against the deception how innocent its intention, how transient, how venial a thing it was. And lest in his loneliness,--for since the atmosphere of his old world had once more inflated his lungs he was as isolated in the Sims household, he found its air as hard to breathe, as if he were in an exhausted receiver,--in his despair, in the hardship of his lot, in the deep misery of the first true, earnest, and utterly hopeless love of his life, some fever of wild enterprise should rise like a delirium in his brain, and confuse his sense of right and wrong, and palsy his capacity for resistance, and counsel disguise, and destroy his reverent appreciation of what was due to her, he would put it beyond his power ever to masquerade in the likeness of his own self and the status of his own true position in the world; he would render it necessary that he should always appear before her in the absolutely false and contemptible rôle of a country boor, an uncouth, unlettered clown.

At the paradox of this conclusion he burst into a grim laugh; then--for he would no longer meddle with these subtle distinctions of right and wrong, where, in the metamorphoses of deduction, the false became true, and interchangeably the true was false--he began to run, and in the strong vivacity of his pride in his physical prowess he was able to reflect that better time was seldom made by an amateur, unless for a short spurt, than the pace he kept all the way to the Sims cabin. He would not let himself think while in the roof-room he rolled the jaunty suit into a bundle. He set his teeth and breathed hard as he recognized a certain pleasure which his finger-tips derived from the very touch of the soft, fine texture of the cloth, and realized how tenuous was the quality of his resolution, how quick he must needs be to carry into effect the conclusions of his sober judgment, lest he waver anew. He was out again and a mile away before he began to debate the disposition which it would be best to make of the bundle under his arm. He recalled with a momentary regret Mrs. Sims’s kitchen fire, over which doubtless Euphemia was now bending, busy with the johnny-cake for the evening meal. He dismissed the thought on the instant. The feminine ideas of economy would never suffer the destruction of so much good all-wool gear, whatever its rescue might cost in the future. Moreover, it would be inexplicable. He could get a spade and bury the bundle,--and dig it up, too, the next time this mad, unworthy temptation should assail him. He could throw it into the river,--and fish it out again.

Suddenly he remembered the lime-kiln. The greater portion of its product had been used long ago, but the residue still lay unslaked in the dry cavern, and more than once, in passing, he had noted the great boulder rolled to the aperture and securely closing it against the entrance of air and moisture. The place was in the immediate vicinity, and somehow, although he had been here often since, the predominant impression in his mind, when he reached the jutting promontory of rock and gazed down at the sea of foliage in the Cove, that surely had once known the ebb and flow of tides other than the spring bourgeonings and the autumn desiccations, was the reminiscence of that early time in Etowah Cove when he had stood here in the white glare from the lime-kiln and watched that strange anamorphosis of the lime-burner’s face through the shimmering medium of the uprising heat. He seemed to see it again,--all unaware that now, in its normal proportions, that face looked down upon him from the height of the cliff above, although its fright, its surprise, its crafty intimations, its malevolence, distorted it hardly less than the strange effects of the writhing currents of heat and air in that dark night so long ago.

The young man hesitated once more. He had a certain conscientious reverence for property and order; it was with a distinct wrench of volition that he would destroy aught of even small value. But as he seated himself on the ledge, shaking out the natty black-and-red blazer, he recognized the melody that was mechanically murmuring through his lips,--again, still again, the measures of a waltz, that waltz through whose enchanted rhythms he had fancied that he and she might dreamily drift together. He sprang to his feet in a panic. With one mighty effort he flung the great boulder aside. Hastily he dropped the garments with the shoes, belt, and long blue hose, into the cavern, and with a staff stirred the depths of the lime till it rose above them. More than once he was fain to step back from the scorching air and the smarting white powder that came in puffs from the interior.

“That’s enough,” he muttered mockingly after a moment, as he stood with his muscles relaxed, sick with the sentiment of the renunciation of the world which the demolition of the sophisticated garb included in its significance. “I cannot undertake to dance with any fine lady in this toggery now; she’d think I had come straight from hell. And,” with a swift change of countenance, “so I have!--so I have!”

Then, with his habitual carefulness where any commercial interest, however small, was concerned, he roused himself, wrenched the great boulder back into its place, noting here and there a crevice, and filling it with smaller stones and earth that no air might gain admission; and, with one final close scrutiny of the entrance, he took his way into the dense laurel and the gathering dusk, all unaware of the peering, suspicious, frightened face and angry eyes that watched him from the summit of the cliff above.

The discipline of life had certain subduing effects on Lucien Royce. He felt very much tamed when next he took a seat upon the bench placed aside in the corner of the bowling-alley, to affect to watch the game, but in truth to give his humble despair what added pain it might deem pleasure and clutch as solace, by the sight of her smiles won by happier men, the sound of her voice, the meagre realities of the day to supplement the lavish and fantastic visions of his dreams. He had reached the point where expectation fails. He looked only for the eventless routine of the alley,--the hour of amusement for the others, the lingering separation, the silence of the deserted building, and the living on the recollection of a glance of the eye, a turn of the head, a displaced tendril of hair, softly curling, until to-morrow, or the next day, or the next, should give him the precious privilege of making such observations for the sustenance of his soul through another interval of absence. Suddenly, his heart, dully beating on through these dreary days, began to throb wildly, and he gazed with quickening interest at the scene before him: the long narrow shell of a building with the frequent windows where the green leaves looked in, the brown unplastered walls, the dark rafters rising into the shadowy roof, and the crossing of the great beams into which records of phenomenal successions of ten strikes had been cut by the vaunting winners of matches, with their names and the dates of the event, the year of the Lord methodically affixed, as if these deeds were such as were to be cherished by posterity. Down the smooth and shining alley a ball was rolling. Miss Gertrude Fordyce, wearing a sheer green-and-white dress of simple lawn and a broad hat trimmed with ferns, was standing at the head of the alley, about to receive her second ball from the hands of a blond young cavalier in white flannels. Royce had seen him often since the morning when he had observed him giving his valuable advice as to the erection of the stage in the ballroom, and knew that he was Millden Seymour, just admitted to the bar, with a reputation for talent, an intelligent face, and a smooth and polished _bonhomie_ of manner; he was given to witty sayings, and was a little too intent upon the one he was exploiting at this moment to notice that the pins at the further end of the alley had not been set up, the hotel functionary detailed for that duty not having arrived. Miss Fordyce hesitated, with the ball in her hand, in momentary embarrassment, the color in her cheeks and a laugh in her eyes.