The Tempering

"You mean in not marrying Morgan?"

The girl nodded. "And in refusing to give Boone up. When he was in Louisville all the time, it was easier. I had his courage to lean on – but since he went back to plan his race for the legislature, I've felt very much alone and outnumbered. They are all so gently immovable. It's terrible to feel that your family are your enemies."

"And your heart refuses the thought of surrender?"

Anne looked at him quickly, and for her eyes he could no longer employ the Blue Grotto as a simile. The waters there are shallow, and in that moment of soul-unmasking he looked through her irises into deeps of feeling, sincere and unalterable, and far down under fathoms of slighter things into the basic pools of passion.

"You can hardly call it refusal," she said in a low voice, shaded with a ghost-touch of indignation. "I have never considered it."

"So I had hoped," he responded gravely, "but I owe you the frankness of admitting that I wasn't sure. On such subjects the boy has naturally been reticent. I could be sure only of how he felt. I wanted to see him get on, and I knew what your influence would mean to him. It has been what sunlight is to a place where the shadows lie too thick. In the mountains, my dear, cows that browse where the sun doesn't penetrate get 'dew poisoning.' Human beings get it from the milk. To both it is often fatal. There's dew poisoning in Boone's blood, too, from generations of brooding shadows. He needed you."

He paused, and she bent forward. "Yes," she prompted softly.

"So I was glad for every moment he had with you – glad enough, even, to endure the thought of what it might ultimately cost him in the usury of heartache."

"And you were willing to let him undergo the heartache?" Her voice perceptibly hardened. "I'm afraid that's a loyalty I can't understand."

"It's the loyalty of a soldier's faith in him," he responded briefly. "I believed that if he must go through the fire he would come out of it not slag, but good metal."

"If his heart has to ache," – the girl's eyes were tender again – "it won't be because I fail him."

"And, for the present, it is you who are paying the assessments of heartache?"

"I guess it's not quite that bad," – but her smile was forced. "I'm merely being gloomed on by melancholy in the family circle as a life-hope going to wreck. By a nod of my head – an acquiescent one to Morgan – I could set the broken family fortunes up again beyond danger and make everybody happy – except myself and Boone. They can't see anything but sheer perversity in my refusal. They see me, as they think, drifting on a sea of poverty and spinsterhood when the port lies open; they see me as a bridesmaid to my friends getting married – even as a godmother to their children – and they shake gloomy heads because the water is all running by the mill!"

"And you are – how old?" – McCalloway's eyes were twinkling with the question, " – in your hopeless celibacy?"

"Twenty-one," came the exact answer. "But it's not just that. Boone still has his way to make. This fall the legislature – two years hence a race for Congress. It's all a very long road."

The soldier nodded his head in understanding. "Yes, it's the waiting game that strains the staunchest morale," he admitted. "And you realize that it won't grow easier. But what of Morgan himself?"

"I guess if there were no Boone," she made candid admission, "Morgan would have won. He has force and power – and I am a worshipper of those things in a man. I thought at first he was a prig, but he's developed. It may be generosity or it may be calculation, but he will neither consent to give me up – nor try to hurry me. He plays the game hard, but he plays it fair."

McCalloway rekindled the pipe that had died, and his next words followed a meditative cloud of smoke from his lips. "It's not hard to understand any man's loving you. I happen to know that more than a few have. Yet if any one might escape, I'd pick Morgan. For him social values and externals are ruling passions. For you they are incidental only."

Anne nodded, but her answer went arrow-straight to the core of the truth. "Morgan fancies me because he thinks I'm popular and well-born. It would make no difference to Boone if I were friendless."

Her confidant laughed. "Here comes Boone himself," he said, rising. "Of late he's been building his political fences and hasn't seen enough of you. I am going to leave you, but at any time that the counsel of an old fellow can help you, call on me, my dear. I'm always at your command – yours and his."

As he turned his steps toward the house, McCalloway saw the Colonel rouse himself from his afternoon nap in his verandah chair. That morning's Courier-Journal slipped down from the forehead it had been screening against the sun, and the Colonel became aware of a presence at his side. Moses, his butler, stood there with juleps on a tray.

As McCalloway arrived on the verandah and took his glass from the negro, his host rose with a yawning and apologetic smile. "If you'll pardon me, sir," he said, "I'll leave you long enough to dip my sleepy face into a basin of cold water." But when the master had gone the servant lingered until, with an inquisitive impulse, McCalloway put a question.

"Moses, what is your other name? I've never heard it, have I?"

The darkey smiled. "I reckon not, sir. 'Most everybody calls me Colonel Wallifarro's Mose."

The guest reflectively sipped his julep. Moses had always interested him by virtue of his decorous address, which escaped the usual negro pomposity as entirely as his speech escaped the negro dialect. Moses was endowed, not with manners but with a manner – to himself, McCalloway had almost said "the grand manner." It was as if his life, close to fine and sincere things, had made him, despite his blackness of skin, also a gentleman.

"But you have a surname, I dare say."

"Yes, sir. Wallver."

"The same as the Colonel's?"

The butler smiled with an infectious good humour and bowed his head.

"Yes, sir. In slave times we servants took our names from our masters. I reckon my parents did like the rest. But the coloured people spell it the shortest way."

"I see. And you have always been in his service?"

"Whenever he kept house, sir. When Mrs. Wallifarro died and Mr. Morgan was at boarding school, the Colonel lived at the Club. I was assistant steward there during that time, sir."

"Ah, that accounts for a number of things," hazarded the guest with a smile. "For your ex cathedra knowledge of serving wines, for example."

"No, sir, I hardly think so." There was a respectful trace of negation and hauteur in the disclaimer. "I learned in the Colonel's house. That was why they wanted me at the Club."

"Of course; I beg your pardon."

When the coloured man had withdrawn, the smile lingered on the weathered face of the soldier, drawing pleasing little wrinkles about his eyes. Here indeed was that traditional and charming flavour of ingredients which the South has given to the diverse table of the nation.

Colonel Wallifarro was a gentleman in whom the definition of aristocracy found justification; the negro, a survivor of that form of slavery in which the master held his chattel, was a human soul in trust – they were Wallifarros white and black!

Then McCalloway's eyes fell on Boone as he greeted Anne, and a new thought flashed into his mind.

"Wallifarro – Wallver – Wellver," he exclaimed to himself under his breath. "Boone said his old grandfather spoke of his people being lords and ladies once!"

His mind, tempted into a speculative train of ideas, began weaving a pattern of genealogical surmise – a pattern involving not only the blood-lines of a single family, but also the warp and woof of national beginnings. In his imagination he completed the trinity. The Colonel and his servant were exponents of the Old South and its gracious oligarchy. Boone sprang from the hills that bred a race which some one had called "The Roundheads of the South." Yet at the start Boone's blood and that of the Colonel's had perhaps been one blood: the sap of a single and identical tap-root. Two brothers, setting out together in that hegira of empire seekers that turned their faces west, had perhaps been separated by the chances of the wilderness trail. One had won through, and his sons and daughters had dwelt in ease. One had fallen by the hard road, and the mould of decay had taken him root and branch. The name of the stranded one had lapsed into its phonetic equivalent – as had the negro's – and yet —

"No matter. He does not seem to have guessed it," murmured McCalloway. "Perhaps after all it's as well so. He'll make the name as he wears it one that men will come to know."

CHAPTER XXXII

Summer, before it has freckled into hot fulness and forgotten the fresh scent and colour of blossoms! June heralding blitheness from the golden throats of troubadour field larks, rustling and crooning her message in green branches under a sky whose blue is proclamation of her love motif!

Certainly to Boone Wellver and Anne Masters picking strawberries together in a little arbour-walled, orchard-bounded world of garden, the centre of life lay within themselves, and the letters of life spelled "You and I."

On the girl's uncovered hair the stir of a light breeze and the sparkle of a clear sun awoke that dispute of dominion of which McCalloway had spoken; contention along the borderland between brown and gold. On her cheek the crystal brightness threw its searching question and revealed no flaw.

Boone, looking up from the place where he knelt among the vines, found in his own heart the echo to all the day's minstrelsy. He rose to his feet with his bronzed face paled under a sudden wave of emotion, which broke out of his surcharged feeling as a whitecap breaks on the crest of a high running swell. His eyes, devouringly fixed on the girl, blazed into a wordless adoration, and he felt, at once, giant-strong and water-weak in the surge of the great paradox. It would just then have been as easy for him to construe the fourth dimension as to put his lover's thoughts into a lover's words, but her woman's eyes read what he could not say and became bafflingly deep as she turned them away across the gold and blue and green of the morning.

Boone's arms twitched at his sides under the fret of his inarticulate fulness of spirit. The only language left in him was that primitive language of action. His, under the superimposed structure of acquired things, was a heritage which could know no love that was not a soul-stirring passion; no hate that was not a withering fire.

Now it seemed to him that under the hurricane power of his love for Anne Masters the pillars of the world shook. He caught her in his arms and pressed her to him until her hair brushed his cheek and her heart-beat could be felt against his breast.

His voice, at last regained, was broken like that of a man sobbing.

"I can't say it – there aren't any words – for it!"

All his previous love-making had made Anne remember that first agitated confession, "I think of you like the evening star – you're as far out of reach as if you were up there in heaven." Always there had been something almost humble in his deference, as if he had admitted himself a vassal lifting eyes to royalty. Now he was seizing her with the fierce proprietary embrace of one who claims his own and who will not be denied. The arms that held her pressed her till they hurt in the embrace of the untamed man for his own woman, and, since for her too, love was the great paradox, the fierce and ardent flood that had swept him lifted her on its tide and rang through her with a sort of wild triumph.

"You – you don't have to say anything – now," she told him somewhat faintly. If it had been up yonder, with the jutting escarpments of the hills about them, this wild moment would have shaped itself in more orthodox fashion with the eternal fitnesses. But the moment left them with something of tumultuous exaltation, as though they had burst together through the shell of a superficial world and touched the essentials.

After a little, when again they could realize the more tranquil voices of the birds and the little winds, Anne, with a hand on each of his shoulders, spoke slowly and very thoughtfully:

"I don't need to be told, Boone. If I didn't know, life wouldn't be worth much to me."

"When I'm away from you," he answered still in a shaken voice, "I always hear your voice. I always see you, yet when I come back to you, you're always a surprise to me – I find that my memory hasn't been able to do you justice."

She was silent for a little, and then into the serene contentment of her eyes crept a tiny shadow of trouble.

"Boone, dear," she said soberly, "we have a long time to wait – and we can't afford to – let ourselves – be tempest-tossed this way – until we can see the end. We can't be patient and – like this – at the same time."

"How can I be patient?" he demanded.

"You know," she reminded him. "I'm not wearing an engagement ring yet and – "

His face shadowed ruefully, but he forced a confident smile and pitched his tone to the manner of jest.

"The ring that's fit for you to wear ought to cost a king's ransom, Anne," he declared, "and I haven't any monarchs in the 'jail-house' just yet."

"It isn't that, dear, and you know it. If I were to wear your ring now – with years perhaps of waiting – it would only mean endless war at home. There'll be unavoidable battles enough when the time comes. It hardly seems worth while to court them in advance."

"I knew," – he spoke with a heavy heart – "that they'd take you through the torture chamber before they let you marry me. Are you sure, dearest, that I'm worth it to you?"

The girl's head came up with the tilt of pride which he loved, and with the violet blaze in its eyes.

"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 God'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 God!" 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 God 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 embassy 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 moonshining 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 God, 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 entitled to what little I can offer them."

Anne felt a weight of foreboding on her heart, but she laid her hands on his shoulders. "Of course, dear," she said softly, "it's not just getting to the place, after all, is it? One must travel the right road, too."

On the deck-rail of a coast-wise fruit steamer beating down from equatorial waters leaned two men, whose ages were seemingly about forty. Off the starboard bow lay the island of San Lorenzo, yellow in the sun, with its battered crown of broken fortress. Ahead lay Callao, yellow, too, with its adobe walls, and rust-red where its corrugated iron roofs caught and husbanded the heat which needed no husbanding. Far off, between terraces of sand and the slopes of San Cristobal, one could make out the church towers of Lima.

The two travellers looked idly, somewhat contemptuously, on a shore line that had fired the imagination of Pizarro and his conquistadores. They were not of those to whom historic associations lend glamour, neither were they themselves precisely objects of romantic interest. One was dark of hair and skin and saturnine of expression. The other was blond, floridly blond, and unmistakably Teutonic.

"Know anything about oil, mein friendt?" inquired the fair-haired traveller, and the other laughed.

"Oil? My middle name's oil. I've drilled it in Mexico and – " abruptly the speaker became less expansive as he added, "and elsewhere."

The German smiled. "Elsewhere?" he observed. "It is a large place – nein? Has oil been always your business?"

From Guayaquil they had been travelling companions, but they had shared no personal confidences. The reply came non-committally.

"I've followed some several things."

The Teuton did not press his interrogations, and a silence fell between the two. While it lasted, the face of Saul Fulton settled into a frown of discontent.

At Lima there would perhaps be mail, and upon the answer to a letter written long ago his future plans depended.

"Shall we dine together in Lima?" The suggestion came at last from the German. "So perhaps we shall be less bored."

Saul Fulton nodded. "Why not? I'll meet you at the American café at six, but the dinner'll be on me."

Fulton could afford to entertain if the spirit moved him, and if his news was good he would have the wish to celebrate. These years of his wanderings since he had left home with an indictment hanging above his head had not all been lean, but prosperity in exile had of late become bitter on his tongue with the ashiness of dead-sea fruit. Saul was homesick. He wanted to shake from his feet for ever this dry dust of the rainless west coast. He wanted to see the stars come up out of a paling lemon afterglow, across peaks ragged with hardwood and fringed with pine.

He had tasted the bread and wine of many latitudes, and perhaps in all of them life had been more kindly than in the mountains of his birth, yet no child could be more homesick. He wanted to parade before the pinch of his neighbour's poverty the little prizes of his ignoble success – and, more than that, he wanted something else.

But when the sun was dropping back of San Cristobal's cone he stood on a cobble-stoned street on the outskirts of Lima, cursing under his breath with a torn envelope in his hand. His letter had not brought him good news.

The communication, in the first place, had not come from the man to whom he had written, though he grudgingly admitted that perhaps this vicarious reply was essential to caution.

"To come back here now would be the most heedless thing in the world, he says." That had been the hateful gist culled from the detail. The "he says" must refer to the unnamed attorney, to whom Saul had made the confession which gave value to his evidence against Asa Gregory.

If Asa were free, of course he knew that to return to Marlin County would be to ask insistently for death – and not to ask in vain. But Asa lay securely immured behind jail walls which would not be apt to open for him unless to let him pass into the still safer walls of the penitentiary or out into the cemented yard where the gallows stood.

The forces of the prosecution owed him something. They owed him so much that he had walked in no terror of extradition, or even, after a prudent absence, molestation at home. Technically of course he still stood charged as an accomplice to murder who had forfeited his bond, but there may be divergences between a technical and an actual status. The attorney who preferred now not to be quoted had doubtless discussed the matter with the Commonwealth, and that the Commonwealth had no wish to hound him was indicated by this passing on of the advice "ride wide."

Who then stood between him and a safe return to the State he had served with vital testimony? This letter told him in the none too elegant phrasing of a friend from the hills.