True and Other Stories Part 5

The sun had set long before; the twilight had deepened and deepened until all at once it seemed to meet, in its meditativeness, a thought, an inspiration, a celestial surprise--and the moon rose, silent and beautiful, like the embodiment of that thought.

A panorama of memory pa.s.sed before Lance's mind, embracing pictures of all the things he had observed during the day, and all that he had seen since he came to North Carolina. He stood there alone, with the ocean moaning subduedly beyond the sandy dunes, four miles away, yet audible through the plash of the nearer waters of the Sound, across which the warm breeze brought its voice to him. He saw in fancy the green waves, the ardent suns.h.i.+ne, the low sh.o.r.e with huts or hamlets cl.u.s.tering occasionally in some favoring nook, surrounded by evergreen oaks and other verdant growths; the chalky lighthouses, the random sails of sh.o.r.e-fishers; the green, inaccessible marshes that fringed so much of the mainland. The poor folk he had met in his rambles, hearty, simple, ignorant and superst.i.tious, came back to his eye in groups, with the surroundings amid which he had happened to encounter them. The gloomy recesses of Elbow Crook Swamp filled in the background of his memory-pictures; wild birds rose and flew across the sky, as it seemed; and all the while Lance was oppressed with a sense of the great natural resources of the region, against which its loneliness, the prevailing ague, and the s.h.i.+ftless languor of the population opposed themselves as a dead-weight on all improvement. Yet, stranger and alone though he was, his soul expanded with the idea of somehow bettering the condition of affairs and making life there brighter and more prosperous.

Then he, too, emerged from revery as the twilight had from its sombreness, and faced clearly the new thought that glowed upon him like the large, sweet moon so dreamily brooding in the sky.

Suddenly he was aware of a shape looming up in the faint moonlight not far from him; the form of a woman, half of whose body was concealed by a curve of the ground, in such a way that it might have been thought she was just rising out of the earth.

The woman was looking seaward. She did not observe his presence.

Such an apparition would, in any case, have given pause to a preoccupied man upon whom it came without warning; but there was a special reason why it should affect Lance in an extraordinary manner. Her face offered itself to him in profile, and was so irradiated by the nocturnal light that it came out clearly against the sky. Seeing it thus, Lance was instantly--I might say, appallingly--struck by its resemblance to a face he had many times seen, one that, in fact, he had been thinking about only a little while before.

The face was like a darker profile of Jessie Floyd, touched with moonlight.

At first, of course, Lance thought that he must be suffering from hallucination; that the day's exposure to the sun had affected his brain and brought out in a visible form the thought of Jessie, which had been so constantly with him. But the unknown woman stirred, and he saw that she was real. Hereupon he scanned her more carefully, guessing that at least the resemblance which he traced was an illusion. No; it remained intact. He could not get rid of it. Clearly, the resemblance was real, no less than the woman.

I have hinted that Lance was of a modestly scientific turn; but he also had in his const.i.tution many susceptibilities whereof science as yet knows little, and the phenomenon so abruptly thrust upon his notice stirred these susceptibilities to their depths. He did not at all know what to make of it. A fear crossed him that he was becoming as superst.i.tious as the ignorant folk on whom he had lately shed the balm of his pity. What did this strange presence and resemblance mean or portend? Was there not some omen hidden in them?

Another thing disturbed him, affecting his mind very much as a sudden contact with the supernatural might have done. In Lance's family, which had sprung from England, fragments of an old story were still extant, about an ancestor who had been involved with one of the colonizing expeditions to Virginia. He did not recall every particular of the story, but sundry items of it were quite distinct. It was said that this early predecessor had fallen in love with an Indian girl, from whom he had been cruelly separated; or that he had come to these virgin sh.o.r.es in search of some one whom he had lost: accounts differed as to that.

But Lance's belief was, that this long-dead member of his long-dead English family had been in quest of his plighted wife, and that he had somehow missed her, returning to England alone. Virginia, in those days, included the territory of North Carolina--the very place to which Lance had drifted, propelled by a rather vague purpose and a desire for knowledge as well as recreation. There was nothing very remarkable in this, perhaps. The young man himself had not thought much about it; for one does not have time, in the present age, to linger over little coincidences and bits of ancient family gossip. The old tale had once or twice flitted through his mind since his installation at the colonel's manor, but it was not a thing he would have considered worth mentioning.

Nevertheless, because of those occult susceptibilities which I have mentioned, at the moment of encountering this mysterious woman with her face turned seaward, the remembrance flashed up over his mental horizon like a kindling beacon-fire. A marvelling awe took hold of him, and for his life he could not have shaken off the fantasy that made him conceive of her as a projection from the shadowy past, an image that typified the lost mistress, or the forgotten Indian maiden, with whom his ancestor's life-history had been linked. The circ.u.mstance that she was gazing eastward also had an effect upon him; he could easily have persuaded himself that she was waiting for her vanished lover to come to her over the waves.

But the fancied resemblance to Jessie--that was the most bewildering element of all. Why should it occur to him? And why should he feel such an unwonted s.h.i.+ver running through his veins?

The simplest way to banish all this nonsense was, doubtless, to go forward and speak to the girl. The good nature of the inhabitants, Lance knew, made such an informality excusable; but, as he was about to try that solution of his perplexity, and find out who this woman really was, the figure began to descend the slope on the farther side from him, and disappeared so noiselessly that she seemed to have crumbled and dropped back into the earth from which she came.

Lance stood still; that curious warm s.h.i.+ver thrilled his veins anew.

Then he turned away and resumed his tardy progress toward the distant manor-house, muttering aloud: "How can I be such a fool?"

But the vision, notwithstanding, remained imprinted on his consciousness, and troubled him.

CHAPTER V.

BIRTHDAY TOKENS.

The next morning ushered in Miss Jessie Floyd's birthday anniversary.

The emanc.i.p.ated housemaid, ancient Sally, had given Lance timely warning of this occasion, and he had taken the precaution to send to New York for a present which he thought might be acceptable.

The question as to what sort of a gift he should select had been a hard one to decide. If the truth must be told, he had allowed himself the inappropriate but impa.s.sioned notion that he would like to give her a ring; inappropriate because he had not yet succeeded in effecting those preliminaries which justify a young man in giving a ring to a young woman; though, except for that, it was exactly what would best have conveyed his sentiments. Just why an ornament for a lady's hand should have this potent significance, when it is her ear that receives the lover's confession, was not perfectly clear to him; yet it was plain that there was no insurmountable objection to his offering Miss Jessie a pair of ear-drops. He therefore ordered some pearl ones, hoping to please her. To please himself, he ordered a ring. But the little packet which lay beside her plate at the breakfast-table, that morning, contained only the ear-drops. The ring was securely locked in Lance's private consciousness and his trunk.

Perhaps in order to appease his own self-reproaches for cheris.h.i.+ng this jewelled secret, but also to prevent any embarra.s.sment in Jessie's receiving a costly trifle from him, Lance thought it best to let Colonel Floyd know of his intention beforehand. He did so, late in the evening, after returning from his solitary expedition.

"I hope this will be quite agreeable to you, sir," he ventured, with becoming deference, when he had explained.

The colonel remembered that he himself had once been young, and probably found it easy to gauge the effort it cost his youthful friend to maintain this deference in a case where he was positive that he had an inalienable right to do as he pleased.

"My dear Lance," he replied, "neither my daughter nor myself can need any outward token to a.s.sure us of the kindly feeling you entertain toward us. That is the only reason why I might regret that you have decided to offer one. A simple congratulation or good wishes would have been enough, I a.s.sure you; but I appreciate your thoughtfulness, and Jessie, I am sure, will be delighted."

"Thank you, colonel. Then it is all right," said Lance, decisively, feeling as if he had just snapped the cover tight over the pearls and rescued them from loss.

They were sitting in the room which the colonel, with innocent grandeur, called his library, surrounded with a few editions of English and Latin cla.s.sics, flanked by rows of obsolete works largely relating to politics; and they were engaged in the unscholarly pastime of sipping whiskey and water. It may be that the beverage had softened the colonel into a pensive mood.

"Speaking of congratulations," he said, "these anniversaries begin to make me think that my Jessie perhaps hasn't got so much to be congratulated for."

"I think she has a great deal," said his guest, with some fervor. "More than I have, at any rate. She still has her father--" his listener smiled sedately--"she has her old home, and--and herself!"

Lance had not known in advance that he was going to wind up with those words, and was himself rather astonished at them.

The colonel braced his neck and looked at the young man somewhat narrowly for an instant; after which he subsided, and observed, good-humoredly: "That is saying a good deal, too. What I had in mind, however, was the changed condition of everything here--the melancholy changes that have come since the war. When Fairleigh Park, sir, embraced five hundred acres instead of twelve, and when I had a hundred good n.i.g.g.e.rs, it was a very different matter. Why, sir, even in this poor house there was hardly a stick or a rag left on my return from the field. My books"--here the colonel waved his arm with proprietary pride at the faded volumes on his shelves--"my books fortunately had been removed to Wilmington, where my wife and daughter were in the care of friends; but a foraging party of the Northern soldiery came here, sir, in my absence, and, though there wasn't a soul opposed them, they broke the mirrors, chopped my piano into kindling, stabbed and maimed the pictures on the walls, and tore the hangings into shreds. Yes, sir, that was the n.o.ble revenge they took upon me for daring to fight in defence of my native land. Ah, I must not recall those things," he added, recovering himself. "Thank G.o.d, we are a united country once more, and I don't regret my share of the loss. But I was also thinking, sir, of Jessie's mother."

The veteran leaned his head on his hand, unable to speak further. There was a quivering of the muscles in his good old, honest, disciplinarian face, that touched Lance's heart.

"I can understand what a loss that has been to you," he said, gently--"and to Miss Jessie."

The colonel raised his head again, and looked with determination at the opposite wall, mustering his self-control.

Lance resumed, with some hesitation, but impelled to speak at this precise moment, though he had not contemplated doing so. "I--I have reflected a great deal about Miss Jessie," he said.

Colonel Floyd's attention was prompt and watchful at once. He regarded the speaker with mingled friendliness and jealousy. "You are very good, my friend," said he.

The younger man smiled involuntarily. "I see no great merit in my thinking of her. I can't help it."

His host hemmed, and gave evidence, by his restless manner, of being ill at ease. "I don't know that I fully understand you," he began, moved by a conviction that he did understand with the greatest distinctness.

"Well," said Lance, "I suppose it ought to be very easy to explain myself; but I find it extremely difficult. I have thought about Miss Jessie--I wish it were possible to add in any way to her happiness."

The colonel rose. "Pray say nothing more," he begged, not unkindly, but with some reserve.

"I will say nothing, if you prefer, beyond this: that her welfare and her future cannot possibly be of greater moment to you than to me."

Lance looked at the colonel squarely until he had finished, and then he dropped his eyes. There was no mistaking the purport of his tone, which went farther than his words.

"My dear fellow," said the colonel, stretching out his hand, "from what I have seen of you I like you; I may say, I esteem you. If you have anything to say which concerns Jessie more than it does me, tell it to her."

The other accepted his hand, and pressed it. They stood thus for a moment, before parting for the night, and Lance saw that the old soldier approved of him. A strange feeling also came over him, that his host and he met not so much on the basis of a possible father-and-son relations.h.i.+p as on that of brotherhood. There was a community in their love for Jessie; each felt the depth of the other's devotion to her, different though it was from his own; and to Lance this mutual trust was of good omen.

Before the breakfast-hour they met again in the pleasant dining-room.

The colonel was mixing a mint-julep by an open window which gave upon the garden.

"I'm not feeling quite well," he said, "and so concluded to tone myself up a little. It's a great thing to have a Virginian's grave in your garden."

"Virginian's grave" was the facetious term, as Lance had learned, applied to a bed of mint; in allusion to the theory that where a Virginia gentleman is buried the plant essential to his favorite beverage in life will spring up and multiply.

He laughingly declined to share in the refreshment, and the two said little to each other. Their talk of the night before lingered with them in the form of a slight constraint, mixed with suspense.