Part 23

Royce sprang up, and running lightly down by the side of the alley placed the pins in readiness to receive her second ball; then stood soberly aside, his hat in his hand, as if to watch the execution of the missile.

“How very polite!” said one of the chaperons over her knitting to another. “I often notice that young man. He seems to take so much interest in the game.”

This trifling dévoir, however, which Royce had not hesitated to offer to a lady, savored of servility in its appropriation by a man. Nevertheless, he was far too discreet, too well aware of what was due to Miss Fordyce, to allow the attention to seem a personal tribute from him. He silently cursed his officiousness, notwithstanding, as he bent down to set the tenpins in place for the second player, who happened to be the smart young cavalier. Only with an effort Royce conserved his blithe air and a certain amiable alacrity as through a round or two of the game he continued to set up the pins; but when the flustered and hurried bell-boy whose duty he had performed came panting in, Royce could have broken the recreant’s head with right good will, and would not restrain a tendency to relapse into his old gait and pose, which had no savor of meekness, as he sauntered up the side of the alley to his former seat beside the mountaineers, who had gazed stolidly at his performance.

Royce noted that one or two of the more athletic of the young men had followed his movements with attention. “Confound you!” he said to himself irritably. “I am man enough to throw you over that beam, and you are hardly so stupid as to fail to know it.”

Miss Fordyce had not turned her eyes toward him,--no more, he said to himself, than if he had been the side of the wall. And notwithstanding the insignia of civilization thrust out of sight into the quicklime and the significance of their destruction, and the flagellant anguish of the discipline of hopelessness and humiliation, he felt this as a burning injustice and grief, and the next instant asked himself in disdain what could such a man gain if she should look at him in his lowly and humble estate?

Royce brooded gloomily upon these ideas during the rest of the game; and when the crowd had departed, and he had risen to take leave of the scene that he lived by, he noticed, with only the sense that his way was blocked, several of the young men lingering about the door. They had been glancing at him, and as one of them,--it was Seymour,--in a very propitiatory manner, approached him, he became suddenly aware that they had been discussing the appropriateness of offering him a gratuity for setting up the tenpins in the heat and dust while they played. Seymour was holding out their joint contributions in his hand; but his affability was petrified upon his countenance as his mild eyes caught the fiery glance which Royce flung at the group, and marked the furious flush which suffused neck and face and ears as he realized their intention. It was a moment of mutual embarrassment. They meant no offense, and he knew it. Had he been what he seemed, it would have been shabby in the last degree to accept such timely offices with no tender of remuneration. Royce’s ready tact served to slacken the tension.

“Here,” he said abruptly, but despite his easy manner his voice trembled, “let me show you something.”

He took a silver quarter of a dollar from the handful of small change still mechanically extended, and, turning to a table which held a tray with glasses, he played the trick with the goblet and the bit of money that had interested the captain of the ill-fated steamboat on the night when Lucien Royce perished so miserably to the world. It was with a good-natured feigning of interest that the young men pressed round, at first, all willing to aid the salving of the honest pride which their offering had evidently so lacerated. But this gave way to an excitement that had rarely been paralleled at New Helvetia Springs, as feat succeeded feat. The juggler was soon eager to get away, having served his purpose of eluding their bounty, but this was more difficult than he had anticipated. He feared troublesome questions, but beyond a “Say, how in thunder did you learn all this?” there were none; and the laconic response, “From a traveling fellow,” seemed to allay their curiosity.

After a little he forgot their ill-starred benevolence; his spirits expanded in this youthful society, the tone of which was native to him, and from which he had long been an outcast. He began to reflect subacutely that the idea of a fugitive from justice would not occur to men of their social position so readily as to the mountaineers, who were of a more restricted field of speculation and limited knowledge of the world. He might seem to these summer sojourners, perhaps, a man educated beyond his prospects in life and his station, and ashamed of both; such types are not altogether unknown. Or perhaps he might be rusticating in this humble fashion, being a person of small means, or a man with some malady, attracted here like others in search of health, but of a lower grade of society. “For they tell me,” he said satirically to himself, “that such people have lungs and livers like the best of us!” He might be a native touched by some unhallowed ambition, and, having tried his luck in the outer world, flung back upon his despised beginnings and out of a job. He might be the schoolmaster in the Cove, of a vastly higher grade than the native product, doubtless, but these young fellows were uninterested and unobservant, and hardly likely to evolve accurate distinctions. He felt sure that the idea of crime would occur to these gay butterflies the most remotely of all the possible solutions of the anomalies of his presence and his garb. He began to give himself up unconsciously to the mild pleasure of their association; their chatter, incongruously enough, revived his energies and solaced his feelings like some suave balm. But he experienced a quick repulsion and a start of secret terror when two or three, having consulted apart for a few moments, joined the group again, and called upon him to admire their “cheek,” as they phrased it, in the proposition they were about to make,--no less than that he should consent to perform some of his wonderful feats of sleight of hand at an entertainment which they proposed to give at New Helvetia. They explained to him, as if he had not grievous cause to know already, that the young ladies had devised a series of tableaux followed by a ball; that the children had scored a stunning success in a “tacky party;” that the married people had preëmpted the not very original idea of a _fête champêtre_, and to preclude any unmannerly jumping of their claim had fixed the date, wind and weather permitting, and had formally bidden the guests, all the summer birds at New Helvetia Springs. And now it devolved upon the young men to do their part toward whiling away time for the general pleasure,--a task for which, oddly enough, they were not so well equipped as one might imagine. They were going to give a dramatic entertainment upon the stage which had been erected for the tableaux in the ballroom, and which still stood, it being cheaper, the proprietor had remarked, to leave it there than to erect it anew; for no one could be sure when the young people would want it again. There would be college songs first, glees and so forth, and they made much of the prestige of a banjo-player in their ranks. Some acrobatic feats by the more athletic youths were contemplated, but much uneasiness was felt because a budding littérateur--this was again Mr. Seymour--was giving token of a total breakdown in a farce he was writing for the occasion, entitled “The New Woman,” which, although beginning with aplomb and brilliancy, showed no signs of reaching a conclusion,--a flattering tribute to the permanence of the subject. Mr. Seymour might not have it completed by the date fixed. The skill of this amateur prestidigitator would serve to fill the breach if the playwright should not be ready; and even if inspiration should smile upon him and bring him in at the finish, the jugglery would enliven the long waits while the scenes were being prepared and the costumes changed.

Royce, with a sudden accession of prudence, refused plumply; a sentiment of recoil possessed him. He felt the pressure of the surprise and the uncertainty like a positive pain as he sat perched on the high window-sill, and gazed out into the blank unresponsiveness of the undergrowth of the forest, wilting in the heat of a hazy noon. The young men forbore to urge him; that delicate point of offering money, obviously so very nettling to his pride, which seemed altogether a superfluous luxury for a man in his position, hampered them. He might, however, be in the habit of giving exhibitions for pay; for aught they knew, the discussion of the honorarium was in order. But they had been schooled by the incident of the morning; even the quarter of a dollar which had lent itself to the nimble gyrations of legerdemain had found its way by some unimagined art of jugglery into the pocket of its owner, and Millden Seymour, who had a bland proclivity to smooth rough places and enjoy a refined peace of mind, was swearing by all his gods that it should stay there until more appropriately elicited.

An odd thing it was, Royce was feeling, that without a moment’s hesitation he should accept the box receipts of the “show” in the Cove, on which he had subsisted for weeks, and yet in his uttermost necessity he could not have brooked appearing as a juggler before the sojourners at New Helvetia Springs for his own benefit. The one audience represented the general public, he supposed, and was far from him. The other he felt as his own status, his set; and he could as soon have handed around the hat, after one of the snug little bachelor dinners he used to be so fond of giving in St. Louis, as ask remuneration for his assistance in this amateur entertainment of the young butterflies at New Helvetia.

He burst into abrupt and sardonic laughter as he divined their line of cogitation, and realized how little they could imagine the incongruities of his responsive mental processes. In the quick change from a pondering gravity to this repellent gayety there was something of the atmosphere of a rude rebuff, and a certain dignity and distance informed the manner of the few who still lounged about with their cigars. Royce hastened to nullify this. They had shown much courtesy to one of his low degree, and although he knew--from experience, poor fellow--that it was prompted not so much by a perception of his deserts as by a realization of their own, it being the conduct and sentiment which graced them and which they owed to persons of their condition, he had no wish to be rude, even though it might seem that he owed a man in _his_ position nothing.

“Oh, I’ll help you,” he said hastily, “though we shall have to rig up some sort of properties. But I don’t need much.”

The talk fell upon these immediately, and he forthwith perceived that he was in for it. And why not? he asked himself. How did it endanger him, or why should he shun it? All the Cove and the countryside for twenty miles around knew of his feats of sleight of hand; and since accident had revealed his knack to this little coterie of well-bred and well-placed young men, why should he grudge the exhibition to the few scores of ladies and children at New Helvetia, to aid the little diversion of the evening? His scruples could have no force now, for this would bring him--the social pariah!--no nearer to them than when he sat by the tenpin-alley and humbly watched his betters play. The episode of the jugglery, once past, would be an old story and bereft of interest. He would have had his little day, basking in the sun of the applause of his superiors, and would sink back to his humble obscurity at the side of the bowling-alley. Should he show any disposition to presume upon the situation, he realized that they well understood the art of repressing a forward inferior. The entertainment contemplated no subsequent social festivities. The programme, made out with many an interlineation, had been calculated to occupy all the time until eleven o’clock; and Royce, looking at it with the accustomed eye of a manager of private theatricals, felt himself no prophet to discern that midnight would find the exhausted audience still seated, enjoying that royal good measure of amusement always meted out by bounteous amateurs. Throughout the evening he would be immured with the other young men in the close little pens which served for dressing and green rooms,--for all the actors in the farce were to be men,--save for the fraction of time when his jugglery would necessitate his presence on the stage. True, Miss Fordyce, should she patronize the entertainment, might then have to look at him somewhat more discerningly than she would look at the wall, perhaps! It could surely do her no harm. She had seen worse men, he protested, with eager self-assertion. She owed him that much,--one glance, one moment’s cognition of his existence. It was not much to ask. He had made a great sacrifice for her sake, and all unknown to her. He had had regard to her estimate of her dignity and held it dear. He had done her reverence from the depths of his heart, regardless that it cost him his last hope.

The powers of the air were gradually changing at New Helvetia Springs. The light of the days had grown dull and gray. Masses of white vapor gathered in the valley, rising, and rising, and filling all its depths and slopes, as if it were the channel of some great river, till only the long level line of the summit of the opposite range showed above the impalpable tides in the similitude of the further banks of a great stream. It was a suggestive resemblance to Lucien Royce, and he winced as he looked upon it. He was not sorry when it had gone, for the gathering mists soon pervaded the forests, and hid cliffs and abysses and even the familiar path, save for the step before the eye, and in this still whiteness all the world was lost; at last one could only hear--for it too shared the invisibilities--the rain falling steadily, drearily, all the day and all the long, long hours of the black night. The bowling-alley was deserted; lawn-tennis had succumbed to the weather; the horses stood in the stalls. One might never know that the hotel at New Helvetia Springs existed except that now and again, in convolutions of mist as it rolled, a gable high up might reveal itself for a moment, or a peaked turret; unless indeed one were a ghost, to find some spectral satisfaction in slipping viewless through the white enveloping nullity, and gazing in at the window of the great parlor, where a log fire was ruddily aflare and the elders perused their newspapers or worked their tidies, and the youth swung in rocking-chairs and exchanged valuable ideas, and played cards, and read a novel aloud, and hung in groups about the tortured piano. So close stood a poor ghost to the window one day, risking observation, that he might have read, over the charming outline of sloping shoulders clad faultlessly in soft gray cloth, the page of the novel which Miss Fordyce had brought there to catch the light; so close that he might have heard every syllable of the conversation which ensued when the man in whom he discovered her destiny--the cold, inexpressive-looking, personified conventionality--came and sat beside her on the sofa. But the poor ghost had more scruples than reality of existence, and, still true to the sanctions that control gentlemen in a world in which he had no more part, he turned hastily away that no syllable might reach him. And as he turned he ran almost into the arms of a man who had been tramping heavily up and down the veranda in the white obscurities, all unaware of his propinquity. It might have been better if he had!

XIV.

For there were strangers at New Helvetia,--two men who knew nobody and whom nobody knew. Perhaps in all the history of the hotel this instance was the first. The patronage of New Helvetia, like that of many other secluded southern watering-places, had been for generations among the same clique of people, all more or less allied by kindred or hereditary friendship, or close association in their respective homes or in business interests, and the traditions of the place were community property. So significant was the event that it could scarcely escape remark. More than one of the hereditary sojourners observed to the others that the distance of fifty miles from a railroad over the worst stage-road in America seemed, after all, no protection from the intrusion of strangers. Here were two men who knew nobody, whom nobody knew, and who seemed not even to know each other. One was a quiet, decorous, reserved person who might be easily overlooked in a crowd, so null was his aspect. The other had good, hearty, aggressive, rustic suggestions about him. He was as stiffly upright as a ramrod, and he marched about like a grenadier. He smoked and chewed strong, rank tobacco. He flourished a red-bordered cotton handkerchief. He had been carefully trimmed and shaved by his barber for the occasion, but alas, the barber’s embellishments can last but from day to day, and the rougher guise of his life was betrayed in certain small habitudes, conspicuous among which were an obliviousness of many uses of a fork and an astonishing temerity in the thrusting of his knife down his throat at the dinner-table.

The two strangers appeared on the evening of the dramatic entertainment among the other guests of the hotel in the ballroom, as spectators of the “Unrivaled Attraction” profusely billed in the parlor, the office of the hotel, and the tenpin-alley. The rain dashed tempestuously against the long windows, and the sashes now and again trembled and clattered in their frames, for the mountain wind was rising. Ever and anon the white mist that pressed with pallid presence against the panes shivered convulsively, and was torn away into the wild night and the savagery of the fastnesses without, returning persistently, as if with some fatal affinity for the bright lights and the warm atmosphere that would annihilate its tenuous existence with but a single breath. The blended sound of the torrents and the shivering gusts was punctuated by the slow dripping from the eaves of the covered walks within the quadrangle close at hand, that fell with monotonous iteration and elastic rebound from the flagging below, and was of dreary intimations distinct amid the ruder turmoil of the elements. But a cheerful spirit pervaded the well-housed guests, perhaps the more grateful for the provision for pleasantly passing the long hours of a rainy evening in the country, since it did not snatch them from alternative pleasures; from languid strolls on moonlit verandas, or contemplative cigars in the perfumed summer woods under the stars, or choice conferences with kindred spirits in the little observatory that overhung the slopes. The Unrivaled Attraction had been opportunely timed to fill an absolute void, and it could not have been presented before more leniently disposed spectators than those rescued from the jaws of unutterable ennui. There sounded a continuous subdued ripple of laughter and stir of fans and murmur of talk amongst them; but, although richly garbed in compliment to the occasion, the brilliancy of their appearance was somewhat reduced by the tempered light in which it was essential that they should sit throughout the performance and between the acts, for the means at the command of the Unrivaled Attraction were not capable of compassing the usual alternations of illumination, and the full and permanent glare of splendor was reserved to suffuse the stage. The audience was itself an object of intense interest to the actors behind the scenes, and there was no interval in which the small rent made in the curtain for the purpose of observation was not utilized by one or another of the excited youths, tremulous with premonitions of a fiasco, from the time when the first groups entered the hall to the triumphant moment when it became evident that all New Helvetia was turning out to honor the occasion, and that they were to display their talents to a full house. It was only when the stir of preparation became tumultuous--one or two intimations of impatience from the long-waiting audience serving to admonish the performers--that Lucien Royce found an opportunity to peer out in his turn upon the scene in the dusky clare-obscure. Here and there the yellow globes of the shaded lamps shed abroad their tempered golden lustre, and occasionally there came to his eye a pearly gleam from a fluttering fan, or the prismatic glitter of a diamond, or the ethereal suggestion of a girl in white in the midst of such sombre intimations of red and brown and deeply purple and black in the costumes of the dark-robed elders that they might hardly be accounted as definite color in the scale of chromatic values. With such a dully rich background and the dim twilight about her, the figure and face of the girl he sought showed as if in the glamours of some inherent light, reminding him of that illuminating touch in the method of certain painters whose works he had seen in art galleries, in which the radiance seems to be in the picture, independent of the skylight, and as if equally visible in the darkest night. She wore a green dress of some silken texture, so faint of hue that the shadows of the soft folds appeared white. It was fashioned with a long, slim bodice, cut square in the neck, and a high, flaring ruff of delicate old lace, stiff with a Medici effect, that rose framing the rounded throat and small head with its close and high-piled coils of black hair, through which was thrust a small comb of carved coral of the palest possible hue. She might have been a picture, so still and silent she sat, so definitely did the light emanate from her, so completely did the effect of the pale, lustrous tints of her attire reduce to the vague nullities of a mere background the nebulous dark and neutral shades about her. How long Royce stood and gazed with all his heart in his eyes he never knew. He saw naught else. He heard naught of the stir of the audience, or the wild wind without, or the babel upon the stage where he was. He came to himself only when he was clutched by the arm and admonished to clear the track, for at last the curtain was to be rung up.

What need to dwell on the tremulous eagerness and wild despair of that moment,--the glee club all ranged in order on the stage, and with heart-thumping expectation, the brisk and self-sufficient tinkle of the bell, the utter blank immovableness of the curtain, the subdued delight of the audience? Another tintinnabulation, agitated and querulous; a mighty tug at the wings; a shiver in the fabric, a sort of convulsion of the texture, and the curtain goes up in slow doubt,--all awry and bias, it is true, but still revealing the “musicianers,” a trifle dashed and taken aback, but meeting a warm and reassuring reception which they do not dream is partly in tribute to the clownish tricks of the curtain.