Part 29 (2/2)

So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live.

The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer example of the Old South--which was now the New South as well; but one friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange world of its loneliness.

At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize--only the bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and others--that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to conceal--until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront.

He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and manners.

Morgan was consistently polite--but it was a detached politeness which often made Boone's blood quicken to the impulse of belligerent heat.

Morgan palpably meant to ignore him with a disdain masked in the habiliments of courtesy. When Boone went reluctantly to dine at Colonel Wallifarro's home he felt himself a barbarian among cultivated people--though that feeling sprang entirely from the new sensitiveness.

As a matter of fact, he bore himself with a self-possessed dignity which Colonel Wallifarro later characterized as ”the conduct of a gentleman reduced to its simplest and most natural terms.”

But for the most part of that first winter in town his life, outside the office, was the life of the boarding house in downtown Third Street; the life of slovenly but highly respectable women with a penchant for cheap gossip; of bickerings overheard through division walls; of disappointed men who should, they were a.s.sured, if life stood on all fours with justice, be dwelling in their own houses. In short, it was the dreary existence of unalleviated obscurity.

But to Boone it was something else. In his third-floor room was a window and a gas jet.

The window looked across to another world where, behind a fine old sycamore that took on alluring colour of bole and bark and leaf, stood a club through whose colonial doors men like Morgan Wallifarro went in and out.

At night too that mean room was to him sanctuary, for then there was the gas jet, and the gas jet stood, to a cabin-bred boy, for adventuring into all the world of literature of which McCalloway had talked.

Boone had the list written down, and the public library had the books.

So while the couple in the next room debated the question of separation and divorce, their voices carrying stridently through lath and plaster, Boone was ranging the world with Darwin, with Suetonius and his ”Lives of the Caesars,” with the whole bright-panoplied crew: Plutarch, Thackeray, Dumas, Stevenson, Macaulay, and Kipling.

Then, too, there were visits to the jail where a kinsman lay in durance.

But when summer came he heaved a sigh of vast relief.

As the train took him back through flat beargra.s.s and swelling bluegra.s.s, through the beginnings of the hills, where he saw the first log booms in the rivers--his heart seemed to expand and his lungs to broaden out and drink deep where they had been only sipping before.

Dutifully and promptly upon his arrival at the McCalloway cabin, Boone went over to see Happy, and as he drew near, for all the a.s.surance of a courage, by no means brittle, he halted in the road and braced himself before he crossed the stile.

To go there was something of an ordeal. To stay away, without making the effort, would leave him guiltily recreant to an old friends.h.i.+p which, on one side, had been love.

”It's Boone Wellver. Can I come in?” he shouted from the road, and Cyrus, who looked aged and hunched his shoulders more dejectedly than of old, rose slowly from his hickory-withed chair on the porch and stood upright.

At first he did not speak. Indeed, he did not speak at all until he had come with deliberate steps down to the stile, where he faced the visitor across the boundary fence, as a defending force might parley over a frontier. Then raising a long arm and a pointed finger down the road, he spoke the one word, ”Begone!”

”I came to see Happy,” said the visitor steadily. ”I don't think she is nursing any grudge.”

”No,” the old fellow's eyes flashed dangerously; ”women folks kin be too d.a.m.n fergivin', I reckon. Hit war because she exacted a pledge from me to keep hands off thet I ever let matters slide in ther first place. I don't know what come ter pa.s.s. She hain't nuver told me--but I knows you broke her heart some fas.h.i.+on. Many a mountain war has done been started fer less.”

Boone straightened a little and his chin came up, but still there was no resentment in his voice:

”Then I can't see your daughter--at your house? Will you tell her that I sought to?”

In a hard voice Cyrus answered: ”No--ef she war hyar I wouldn't give her no message from ye whatsoever--but since she ain't hyar thet don't make no great differ.”

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