Part 39 (1/2)
”Have I complained?” she asked.
”Anne,”--the man bent forward and spoke with the fervent earnestness of invincible resolve--”I have a long way to go. I'm still down on the ground level and you are still the evening star! Stars and groundlings, dear heart! They're very far apart, but there's a beacon burning before me and there's a magic in your love!” His expression had grown as tender as it had a little while before been elemental, yet it was not less purposeful. ”In time, by G.o.d's grace I shall climb up to you, but it's a steep journey, and it's asking a good deal of you to mark time while I travel it.”
”It's asking so much,” declared the girl, ”that I wouldn't do it if it wasn't the one thing in the world I want to do--if my heart wasn't set on that and nothing else.”
”Thank G.o.d!” he breathed, ”and thank _you_!”
After a little Anne spoke speculatively:
”I've missed you rather terribly this time. You've seemed to be away so long.”
”I've been building political fences, but to me it's been exile,” he told her. ”This race for the legislature seems a trivial thing to keep me away from you. If I win it--and G.o.d knows I've _got_ to win--it's still a petty victory. But it's the first stage of the journey, and after the legislature comes Congress. You see, small as it is, it's vital.”
Anne studied the gossamer building about which a spider was busying itself, and Boone knew that in her mind some matter was demanding discussion. He waited for her to broach it and soon she began.
”Morgan held politics in contempt until he went too far into the game to abandon it, but even now he's seeking to make it lead to something else.”
”What?” inquired Boone, wondering what topic Anne was approaching by this path of indirection.
”I can tell you without abusing a confidence,” she laughed, ”because he's never told me. I've only guessed it, but I'm sure I'm right. His goal is a European emba.s.sy with a life near the trappings of a throne.
And since Morgan is Morgan, he'll get it. He never fails.”
”In one thing,” announced Boone shortly, ”he's going to fail.”
Anne nodded, ”In one thing he is,” she agreed. ”But if he goes into the diplomatic service, Boone, there'll be a place left vacant in the firm.
Have you thought of that? Wouldn't your own future lie smoother that way? You could take your place here at the bar instead of struggling to herd wild sheep, and in the end you'd be Uncle Tom's logical successor.”
Boone's face became sober, almost, Anne thought, distressed. The easy swing of his shoulders stiffened, and Anne intuitively knew that instead of suggesting a new thought she had broached a subject of painful deliberation, already mulled over with a heavy heart.
Into the young lover's mind flashed the picture of a rough hill evangelist exhorting rougher hearers, and of scriptural words: ...
”taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.”
Finally he spoke: ”I _have_ thought of it, Anne.... The Colonel has even suggested it.... Of course he hasn't said anything about Morgan's going away; he only intimated that there might be a place for me in the practice.”
”You didn't refuse? It's a good law firm, you know--old and honoured.”
Suddenly he spread his hands in a gesture almost of appeal, as though he hoped she might understand and yet hardly dared to expect it.
”Anne, those wild sheep you just spoke of are my people. Perhaps with all their faults they have a few virtues too, and, if they have, loyalty to their own blood is chief of them. The world knows most about their murders, their moons.h.i.+ning and their abysmal ignorance, but you know that their blood is the most undiluted and purest American blood in America. You know that their children grow up illiterate only because they have no alternative. You know that those people are wild, lawless, but, thank G.o.d, generous to a fault, and as honest as the sun is bright. You know that even in their law-breaking they don't follow a base criminality so much as a perverted code of ethics. I was one of them. I inherited their blood-hatreds and their squalor, and because of generous friends I was rescued. If I am worth the effort spent on me at all, I owe it to those men, who saved me from what I might have been, to do my utmost for my 'wild sheep.'”
The girl was counting the iridescent threads of the spider's web, but her eyes caught the fixity with which his hand had unconsciously clenched itself. All that he said was undoubtedly true and creditable.
She would not, in theory, have had him feel or speak otherwise, yet, since it is as impossible to eliminate one's ego from thought as to see through one's reflection in a mirror, she felt suddenly sick at heart.
If the effect of his liberation from the squalid things of his origin meant, after all, only to bind him the more strongly to them; if a quixotic sense of obligation barred him from the broader world he had won to, wherein lay the virtue of salvation? She loved the majestic wildness of the hills and the sweep of their free winds, but of the people in general she had thought as one gently bred and nurtured might naturally think of the less fortunate and more vulgar of the world.
Then she heard his words going on again but seeming to sound from a distance:
”Except for what generous friends did for me, I might--I would in all probability have grown as rank and wild as many other boys up there. The feud would perhaps have claimed me. For human life and human rights, I might have had the same contempt, and instead of standing here free and fortunate I might even now be wearing stripes in the penitentiary. If I've escaped, I think my people are ent.i.tled to what little I can offer them.”