Part 67 (1/2)
”Why, what?” he asked with a perplexed smile.
”Law! Mr. Mahch, you cayn't all of a sudden do dat; dey'll on'y talk wuss.”
”Well, Johanna--I'm not going to try it. I'm going to take the express train this evening.” He started on, but checked up once more and faced around. ”O--eh--Johanna, I'd rather you'd not speak of this, you understand. I natu'ly don't want Mrs. Ravenel to know why I go; but I'm even more particular about General Halliday. It's none o' his--hm! I say I don't want him to know. Well, good-by. O--eh--Johanna, have you no word--of course, you know, the North's a mighty sizable place, and still it's just possible I might chance some day to meet up with--eh--eh--however, it's aft' all so utterly improbable, that, really--well, good-by!”
A while later Johanna stopped at that familiar point which overlooked the valley of the Swanee and the slopes about Rosemont. The sun had nearly set, but she realized her hope. Far down on the gray turnpike she saw the diminished figure of John March speeding townward across the battle-field. At the culvert he drew rein, faced about, and stood gazing upon Widewood's hills. She could but just be sure it was he, yet her tender spirit felt the swelling of his heart, and the tears rose in her eyes, that were not in his only because a man--mustn't.
While she wondered wistfully if he could see her, his arm went slowly up and waved a wide farewell to the scene. She s.n.a.t.c.hed out her handkerchief, flaunted it, and saw him start gratefully at sight of her and reply with his own. Then he wheeled and sped on.
”Go,” she cried, ”go; and de Lawd be wid you, Mr. Jawn Mahch, Gen'lemun!--O Lawd, Lawd! Mr. Jawn Mahch, I wisht I knowed a n.i.g.g.e.r like you!”
LXIX.
IN YANKEE LAND
It was still early May when Barbara Garnet had been six weeks in college. The inst.i.tution stood in one of New England's oldest towns, a place of unfenced greenswards, among which the streets wound and loitered, hunting for historic gambrel-roofed houses, many of which had given room to other sorts less picturesque and homelike. In the same search great elms followed them down into river meadows or up among flowery hills, casting off their dainty blossoms, putting on their leaves, and waving majestic greetings to the sower as he strode across his stony fields.
Yet for all the sudden beauty of the land and season Miss Garnet was able to retain enough of her ”nostalgia” to comfort her Southern conscience. She had arrived in March and caught Dame Nature in the midst of her spring cleaning, scolding her patient children; and at any rate her loyalty to Dixie forbade her to be quite satisfied with these tardy blandishments. Let the cold Connecticut turn as blue as heaven, by so much the more was it not the green Swanee? She had made more than one warm friends.h.i.+p among her fellow-students, but the well-trimmed lamp of her home feeling waxed not dim. It only smoked a trifle even in Boston, that maze of allurements into which no Southerner of her father's generation ever sent his brother, no Southerness her sister, without some fear of apostasy.
Barbara had made three visits to that city, where Mrs. Fair, the ladies said, ”did a great deal for her.” Yet when Mrs. Fair said, with kind elation, ”My dear, you have met Boston, and it is yours!” the smiling exile, as she put her hand into both hands of her hostess, remembered older friends and silently apologized to herself for having so lost her heart to this new one.
At that point came in one who was at least an older acquaintance--the son. Thoroughly as Barbara had always liked Henry Fair, he seemed to her to have saved his best attractiveness until now, and with a gentleness as masculine as it was refined, fitted into his beautiful home, his city, the whole environing country, indeed, and shone from them, in her enlivened fancy, like an ancestor's portrait from its frame. He came to take her to an exhibition of paintings, and thence to the railway station, where a fellow-student was to rejoin her for the trip back to college. Mrs. Fair had to attend a meeting of the society for something or other, of which she was president.
”These people make every minute count,” wrote Barbara to Fannie; ”and yet they're far from being always at work. I'm learning the art of recreation from them. Even the men have a knack for it that our Southern men know nothing about.”
”You might endorse that 'Fair _versus_ March,'” replied Ravenel to his wife, one evening, as he lingered a moment at tea. She had playfully shown him the pa.s.sage as a timorous hint at better self-care; but he smilingly rose and went out. She kept a bright face, and as she sat alone re-reading the letter, said, laughingly, ”Poor John!” and a full minute afterward, without knowing it, sighed.
This may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that Barbara's long but tardy letter was the first one Fannie had received from her. It told how a full correspondence between the writer's father and his fellow college president had made it perfectly comfortable for her to appear at the inst.i.tution for the first time quite unescorted, having within the hour parted from Mr. and Mrs. Fair, who, though less than three hours' run from their own home, would have gone with her if she could have consented. She had known that the dormitories were full and that like many other students she would have to make her home with a private family, and had found it with three very lovable sisters, two spinsters and a widow, who turned out to be old friends--former intimates--of the Fairs. And now this intimacy had been revived; Mrs.
Fair had already been to see them once, although to do so she had come up from Boston alone. How she had gone back the letter did not say.
Fannie felt the omission.
”I didn't think Barb would do me that way,” she mused; and was no better pleased when she recalled a recent word of Jeff-Jack's: that few small things so sting a woman as to disappoint her fondness and her curiosity at the same time. Now with men--However! All Barbara had omitted was that Mrs. Fair had gone back with her son, who on his way homeward from a trip to New York had been ”only too glad” to join her here, and spend two or three hours under spring skies and s.h.i.+ngle roof with the three pleasant sisters.
This was in the third of those six weeks during which Barbara had been at college. About half of the two or three hours was spent in a stroll along the windings of a small woodland river. The widow and Mrs. Fair led the van, the two spinsters were the main body, and Henry and Barbara straggled in the rear stooping side by side among white and blue violets, making perilous ventures for cowslips and maple blossoms, and commercing in sweet word-lore and dainty likes and dislikes.
When the procession turned, the two stragglers took seats on a great bowlder round which the stream broke in rapids, Barbara gravely confessing to the spinsters, as they lingeringly pa.s.sed, that she had never done so much walking in her life before as now and here in a place where an unprotected girl could hire four hacks for a dollar.
The widow and Mrs. Fair left the others behind. They had once been room-mates at school, and this walk brought back something of that old relation. They talked about the young man at their back, and paused to smile across the stream at some children in daring colors on a green hillside getting sprouts of dandelion.
”Do you think,” asked the widow, ”it's really been this serious with him all along?”
”Yes, I do. Henry's always been such a pattern of prudence and moderation that no one ever suspects the whole depth of his feelings. He realizes she's very young, and he may have held back until her mind--her whole nature--should ripen; although, like him, as you see, she's ripe beyond her years. But above all he's a dutiful son, and I believe he's simply been waiting till he could see her effect on us and ours on her.
Tell me frankly, dear, how do you like her?”
The Yankee widow had bright black eyes and they twinkled with restrained enthusiasm as she murmured, ”I hope she'll get him!”
”Ah!” Mrs. Fair smiled gratefully, made a pretty mouth and ended with a wise gesture and a dubious toss, as who should say, ”I admit he's priceless, but I hope he may get her.”