The Tempering Part 64

"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.

He had seen only the one face, for that particular group sat partly screened behind the inevitable centre stand crowned with its masterpiece of decoration, where a huge lobster lay in state on an ice-cake, surrounded by a variegated cordon of _hors d'oeuvres_.

Then Boone made his way between the tables and found himself being presented to several other women, to a pair of liaison officers on leave and, because it all took place in a moment, suddenly felt the floor grow unsteady under his feet, and saw, as the one clear vision in a blur of indistinctness, the slender figure of a woman whose hair was a disputed dominion along the borderland of gold and brown.

As Anne rose to meet him--for she did rise--the man looked into the face for which he had so long been seeking, and found it paler and thinner than he had known it, yet paradoxically older only in the sense of being perfected and tempered.

The violet eyes held undimmed the light that he had wors.h.i.+pped, and if one could see that sometimes they had looked on ghosts one could see too that they had prevailed over their haunting.

Boone forgot the others about him.

"I have been searching for you," he said.

It was not until late that day that they found themselves alone, sitting in the gardens of the Luxembourg on the south side of the Seine.

Convalescent veterans, some of them pitifully young, were taking the air there as the day cooled toward evening, and Boone and Anne Masters sat on a bench, contented for a while to let the silence rest upon them.

Much had been said and much remained to be said. Finally Boone declared fervently; "At all events, I've found you!"

"Somehow," her voice was low and a little tremulous, "I always felt that if--we ever found ourselves--we would find each other."

"And I think," he responded gravely, "we've done that."

"It wasn't an easy road," she told him, and then as suddenly as an April sun may break dartingly through rainclouds she laughed, and in her violet eyes flashed the old merriment and whimsical humour. "I can laugh now, Boone, but I couldn't then.... Once I could have reached out my hand and touched you."

His eyes widened, and his vanity suffered a sharp sting. He would have sworn that his heart-hunger would have declared her nearness at any hour of that long period of search, and he told her so, but she laughed again.

"That's in romance, Boone dear. We were in life."

"When was it?"

"It was on Fifth Avenue--just off of Was.h.i.+ngton Square, one night when sleet was falling. I remember the wet pavements, because I had a hole in one shoe. I was wrestling with an umbrella that the wind tried to turn inside out--and we all but collided..."

"And you didn't speak to me!"

"No. I hurried away as fast as my feet could carry me--including the one with the leaky shoe."

"But, Anne!" The reproach in his voice was almost an outcry, and the girl laid a hand gently, for a moment, over his.

"If I'd let you find me, Boone--just then--I'd never have found myself.

It would have been surrender."

"But why!"

"Because--just then, I wasn't far from being hungry, and I was very--very close to despair."

The man shuddered, and after a long silence he asked: