Part 64 (1/2)
”If you'll excuse me for introducing myself,” he said, ”I'll give you this. You left it in your seat when you got off the train coming down.”
Happy smiled, and, since they were, after all, neighbours, talked with him for the rest of the journey. Though it had been a long while since her heart had admitted a flutter at the glances or speeches of a man, the young woman found herself awakening to the discovery that she was still young. He asked if he might come to see her, and often after that his horse stood hitched at the settlement school. When one night a few months later he smiled his grave smile and said, ”I've come to bid you farewell; I'm going away tomorrow,” she acknowledged a sudden sharpness of pang.
”Where?” she demanded. And he answered:
”Over there.”
They were standing on the squared log that made a foot bridge between the thicketed banks of Little Laurel, and through a heavy ma.s.s of clouds the moon was just emerging into a narrow field of pearl and opal.
Because it was rising and still hung low, its face was not pallid but rosy, and the top plumes of a single hemlock-clump showed outlined, and swaying. Elsewhere the sky was still cloud-dark.
”I haven't known you long,” Joe Gregory was saying, ”and I've always been a mighty plain, uninteresting sort of man, but if I come back, there'll be things I've got to say to you.” He paused, and there was a touch of eager hope in his voice as he finished. ”The war'll change lots of things. Maybe it'll change me some, too.”
”Don't let it change you too much, Joe,” the girl cautioned him, and he bent forward to a.s.sure himself that the light which he thought he saw in her eyes was real.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Paris by night was a dancer who has taken the veil. Paris by day, when the siren screamed its air-raid warning, was a bold spirit not cowed but sobered with a realization of death. Yet today Paris was vibrantly alive along her boulevards where, despite the shadow, bright currents flowed and sparkled.
For was not this the Fourth of July, the national day of the sister republic across the sea? And this afternoon would not the avenues echo to the tramp of the first marching feet, as columns in khaki swung along under the flag of the new ally?
Paris had bled as she waited; France had given life and treasure and made no lament, but now the vanguard of mighty reinforcements had arrived, and this afternoon, in the welcome poured out upon them, Paris would voice her quickened spirit of confidence restored and doubt dispelled.
Along sidewalks, where once the world had come to behold the gaiety and taste the enchantment, trooped civilian crowds, linking elbows with the uniformed sleeves of France, of Italy, of Britain, of Belgium and of Portugal. Everywhere flashed and rang the cheer of a great day, and everywhere showed the sobering of black with the tunics of horizon blue.
With the fluttering flags went the white of bandages, and with tramp of feet mingled the stumping of the _blesse's_ crutch.
Boone Wellver had been in Paris a short time only, and tomorrow he was leaving for England--and then home. He felt that Congress was no longer his place of first duty--and he meant to resign. Pitched to a tone as much deeper than feud hatreds as the bay of artillery is deeper than rifle-fire, the voice which called for vengeance rang in his ears, and his hands ached for the feel of the musket.
He would have preferred that today, his last in Paris, should have been left untrammelled. He wanted to drift with the laughing crowds between the chestnut trees and to return the gay salutation of eyes that gleamed the more brightly because they had been washed with tears. He wanted to lose himself in that general picture which portrayed the spirit of France so simply and gloriously valiant that, as one laughed, one felt a catch in the throat for the background of tragedy against which all the brightness was painted.
But a requirement of civility had robbed him of that full liberty and left him no choice but to follow the instructions which had been contained in a letter from a New York member of the House of Representatives.
”If you have the opportunity in Paris,” his colleague had written, ”my wife and I wish very much that you would look up some close friends of ours.
”They are a little group of New York women who, with some reconstruction unit, have been doing worth-while work in stricken territories of France and Belgium. Our particular friend is Mrs. L. N. Steele, and while I can't direct you to her, at the enclosed address they can give you greater particulars. I understand they are occasionally in Paris, and, if so--” Boone had groaned impatiently, then had dutifully made inquiries, with the result that at noon today he was to meet and lunch with a party including his friend's friend.
Now he reluctantly made his way along the thronged streets to the designated restaurant in the Rue de Rivoli.
Even of her grim necessity, Paris had made a decorative virtue. The pasted-paper designs on the shop windows--put there to prevent bomb-shattered panes from flying dangerously--seemed to have had no other purpose than the expression of their designers' originality and temperament. The piled sand-sacks that b.u.t.tressed monuments and arches had a certain deftness of arrangement that escaped the unsightly.
Boone crossed the Place de la Concorde--where once the guillotine had stood--and turned under the arches, looking at the signs.
He entered a restaurant that was, today, crowded, looking vaguely about him, and with a shepherding urbanity of deportment the head waiter came forward to his a.s.sistance.
Boone paused, still searching the tables across the colour sc.r.a.ps which two colours always dominated--horizon-blue and mourning black.
Then he saw a gloved hand raised in a signalling gesture, and recognized the lady of whom he had made his inquiries for Mrs. Steele.