The Romance of a Plain Man

"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when it comes to that."

"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of gentlemen."

"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superstitious, if you please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in defiance of family feeling."

As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moonshine," I bade the doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the young moon and the yew-tree.

A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with a throbbing heart.

"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained, unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and pitiable – if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I can trust!"

"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again, clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face, under the old-fashioned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were shining as if from fever.

"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on the subject of my niece – Miss Mickleborough."

"Yes, Miss Matoaca."

"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so, and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit, indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of conscience."

"Yes?" for again she had paused. "It is very kind of you," I added.

"I do not mean it for kindness, Mr. Starr. My niece is very dear to me; and since poor Sarah's unfortunate experience, we have felt more – strongly, if possible, about unequal marriages. I know that you are a most remarkable young man, but I do not feel that you are in any way suited to make the happiness of our niece – Miss Mickleborough – "

"I am sorry, Miss Matoaca, but Miss Mickleborough thinks differently."

"Young people are rarely the best judges in such matters, Mr. Starr."

"But do you think their elders can judge for them?"

"If they have had experience – yes."

"Ah, Miss Matoaca, does our own experience ever teach us to understand the experience of others?"

"The Blands have never needed to be taught," she returned with pride, "that the claims of the family are not to be sacrificed to – to a sentiment. Except in the case of poor Sarah there has never been a mésalliance in our history. We have always put one thing above the consideration of our blood, and that is – a principle. If it were a question of conscience, however painful it might be to me, I should uphold my niece in her opposition to my sister Mitty. I myself have opposed her for a matter of principle."

"I am aware of it, Miss Matoaca."

Her withered cheeks were tinged with a delicate rose, and I could almost see the working of her long, narrow mind behind her long, narrow face.

"I should like to leave a few of these leaflets with you, Mr. Starr," she said.

A minute afterwards, when she had moved on with her meek, slow walk, I was left standing on the pavement with her suffrage pamphlets fluttering in my hand. Stuffing them hurriedly into my pocket, I went on to the office, utterly oblivious of the existence of any principle on earth except the one underlying the immediate expansion of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.

A fortnight later I heard that Miss Matoaca had begun writing letters to the "Richmond Herald"; and I remembered, with an easy masculine complacency, the pamphlets I had thrown into the waste basket beside the General's desk. The presidential election, with its usual upheaval of the business world, had arrived; and that timid little Miss Matoaca should have intruded herself into the affairs of the nation did not occur to me as possible, until the General informed me, while we watched a Democratic procession one afternoon, that Miss Mitty had come to him the day before in tears over the impropriety of her sister's conduct.

"She begged me to remonstrate with Miss Matoaca," he pursued, "and by George, I promised her that I would. There's one thing, Ben, I've never been able to stand, and that's the sight of a woman in tears. Of course when you've made 'em cry yourself, it is different; but to have a lady coming to you weeping over somebody else – and a lady like Miss Mitty – well, I honestly believe if she'd requested me to give her my skin, I'd have tried to get out of it just to oblige her."

"Did you go to Miss Matoaca?" I asked, for the picture of the General lecturing his old love on the subject of the proprieties had caught my attention even in the midst of a large Democratic procession that was marching along the street. While he rambled on in his breaking voice, which had begun to grow weak and old, I gazed over his head at the political banners with their familiar, jesting inscriptions.

"I declare, Ben, I'd rather have swallowed a dose of medicine," he went on; "you see I used to know Miss Matoaca very well forty years ago – I reckon you've heard of it. We were engaged to be married, and it was broken off because of some woman's rights nonsense she'd got in her head."

"Well, it's hard to imagine your interview of yesterday."

"There wasn't any interview. I went to her and put it as mildly as I could. 'Miss Matoaca,' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you've gone cracked.'"

"And how did she take it?"

"'Do you mean my heart or my head, General?' she asked – she had always plenty of spirit, had Matoaca, for all her soft looks. 'It's your head,' I answered. 'Lord knows I'm not casting any reflections on the rest of you.' 'Then it has fared better than my heart, General,' she replied, 'for that was broken.' She looked kind of wild, Ben, as she said it. I don't know what she was talking about, I declare on my honour I don't!"

A cheer went up from the procession, and an expression of eager curiosity came into his face.

"Can you read that inscription, Ben? My eyes ain't so good as they used to be."

"It's some campaign joke. So your lecture wasn't quite a success?"

"It would have been if she'd listened to reason."

"But she did not, I presume?"

"She never listened to it in her life. If she had, she wouldn't be a poor miserable old maid at this moment. What's that coming they're making such a noise about? My God, Ben, if it ain't Matoaca herself!"

It was Matoaca, and the breathless horror in the General's voice passed into my own mind as I looked. There she was, in her poke bonnet and her black silk mantle, walking primly at the straggling end of the procession, among a crowd of hooting small boys and gaping negroes. Her eyes, very wide and bright, like the eyes of one who is mentally deranged, were fixed straight ahead, over the lines of men marching in front of her, on the blue sky above the church steeples. Under her poke bonnet I saw her meekly parted hair and her faded cheeks, flushed now with a hectic colour. In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure, an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the half-compassionate, half-scoffing gazers upon the pavement.

"She's crazy, Ben," said the General, and his voice broke with a sob.

For a minute, as dazed as he, I stared blankly at the little figure with the white flag. Then bewilderment gave place before the call to action, and it seemed to me that I saw Sally there in Miss Matoaca, as I had seen her in the rising moon over the clipped yew, and in the whirlpool of the stock market. Leaving my place at the General's side, I descended the steps at a bound, and made my way through the jostling, noisy crowd to the little lady in its midst.

"Miss Matoaca!" I said.

For the first time her eyes left the sky, and as she looked down, the consciousness of her situation entered into her strained bright eyes. Her composure was lost in a birdlike, palpitating movement of terror.

"I – I am going as far as the Square, Mr. Starr," she replied, as if she were repeating by rote a phrase in a strange tongue.

At my approach the ridicule, somewhat subdued by the sense of her helplessness, broke suddenly loose. Bending over I offered her my arm, my head still uncovered. As the hand holding the white flag drooped from exhaustion, I took it, with the banner, into my own.

"Then I'll go with you, Miss Matoaca," I responded.

We started on, took a few measured paces in the line of march, and then her strength failing her, she sank back, with a pathetic moan of weariness, into my arms. Lifting her like a child I carried her out of the street and up the steps into the General's office. Turning at a touch as I entered the room, I saw that Sally was at my side.

"I've sent for Dr. Theophilus," she said. "There, put her on the lounge."

Kneeling on the floor she began bathing Miss Matoaca's forehead with water which somebody had brought. The General, his eyes very red and bloodshot and his lower lip fallen into a senile droop, was trying vainly to fan her with his pocket-handkerchief.

"We have always feared this would happen," said Sally, very quiet and pale.

"She was talking to me yesterday about her heart," returned the General, "and I didn't know what she meant."

He bent over, fanning her more violently with his silk handkerchief, and on the lounge beneath, Miss Matoaca lay, very prim and maidenly, with her skirt folded modestly about her ankles.

Dr. Theophilus, coming in with the messenger, bent over her for a long minute.

"I always thought her sense of honour would kill her," he said at last as he looked up.

CHAPTER XIX

SHOWS THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

A week after Miss Matoaca's funeral, Sally met me in one of the secluded streets by the Capitol Square, and we walked slowly up and down for an hour in the November sunshine. In her black clothes she appeared to have bloomed into a brighter beauty, a richer colour.

"Why can't I believe, Sally, that you will really marry me a week from to-day?"

"A week from to-day. Just you and I in old Saint John's."

"And Miss Mitty, will she not come with you?"

"She refuses to let me speak your name to her. It would be hard to leave her, Ben, if – if she hadn't been so bitter and stern to me for the last year. I live in the same house with her and see nothing of her."

"I thought Miss Matoaca's death might have softened her."

"Nothing will soften her. Aunt Matoaca's death has hurt her terribly, I know, but – and this is a dreadful thing to say – I believe it has hurt her pride more than her heart. If the poor dear had died quietly in her bed, with her prayer-book on the counterpane, Aunt Mitty would have grieved for her in an entirely different way. She lives in a kind of stained-glass seclusion, and anything outside of that seems to her vulgar – even emotion."

"How I must have startled her."

"You startled her so that she has never had courage to face the effect. Think what it must mean to a person who has lived sixty-five years in an atmosphere of stained glass to be dragged outside and made to look at the great common sun – "

A squirrel, running out from between the iron railing surrounding the square, crossed the pavement and then sat erect in front of us, his bushy tail waving like a brush over his ears. While she was bending over to speak to it, the Bland surrey turned the corner at a rapid pace, and I saw the figure of Miss Mitty, swathed heavily in black, sitting very stiff and upright behind old Shadrach. As she caught sight of us, she leaned slightly forward, and in obedience to her order, the carriage stopped the next instant beside the pavement.

"Sally!" she called, and there was no hint in her manner that she was aware of my presence.

"Yes, Aunt Mitty." The girl had straightened herself, and stood calmly and without embarrassment at my side.

"I should like you to come with me to Hollywood."

"Yes, Aunt Mitty."

Pausing for an instant, she gave me her hand. "Until Wednesday, Ben," she said in a low, clear voice, and then entering the surrey, she took her place under the fur robe and was driven away.

The week dragged by like a century, and on Wednesday morning, when I got up and opened my shutters, I found that our wedding-day had begun in a slow autumnal rain. A thick tent of clouds stretched overhead, and the miniature box in the garden looked like flutings of crape on the pebbled walk, which had been washed clean and glistening during the night. The clipped yew stood dark and sombre as a solitary mourner among the blossomless rose-bushes.

At breakfast Mrs. Clay poured my coffee with a rigid hand and an averted face, and Dr. Theophilus appeared to find difficulty in keeping up his cheerful morning comments.

"I'll miss you, Ben, my boy," he remarked, as he rose from the table; "it's a sad day for me when I lose you."

"I hate to lose you, doctor, but I shan't, after all, be far off. I've bought a house, as you know, beyond the Park in Franklin Street."

"The one Jack Montgomery used to live in before he lost his money – yes, it is a fine place. Well, you have my best wishes, Ben, whatever comes; you may be sure of that. I hope you and Sally will have every happiness."

He shook my hand in his hearty grasp before going into his little office, and the next minute I went out into the rain, and walked down for a few words with the General, before I met Sally under the big sycamore at the side gate. I had waited for her but a little while when she came out under an umbrella held by Aunt Euphronasia, who was to accompany us on our journey South in the General's private car. As she entered the carriage, I saw that she wore a white dress under her long black cloak.

"Mammy wouldn't let me be married in black," she said; "she says it means death or a bad husband."

"Dar ain' gwine be a bad husband fur dish yer chile," grumbled the old woman, who was evidently full of gloomy forebodings, "caze she ain' built wid de kinder spine, suh, dat bends easy."

"There'll be nobody at church?" asked Sally.

"Only the General, and I suppose the sexton."

"I am glad." She leaned forward, we clasped hands, and I saw that the eyes she lifted to mine were starry and expectant, as they had been that day, so many years ago, when she stood between the gate and the bed of geraniums in the General's yard.

The carriage rolled softly over the soaking streets, and above the sound of the wheels I heard the patter of the rain on the dead leaves in the gutters. I can see still a wet sparrow or two that fluttered down from the bared branches, and the negro maid sweeping the water from the steps in front of the doctor's house. There was no wind, and the rain fell in straight elongated drops like a shower of silvery pine-needles. The mixture of a fighter and a dreamer! On my wedding-day, as I sat beside the woman I loved, approaching the fulfilment of my desire, I was conscious of a curious gravity, of almost a feeling of sadness. The stillness without, intensified by the slow, soft fall of the rain on the dead leaves, seemed not detached, but at one with the inner stillness which possessed alike my heart and my brain. I, the man of action, the embodiment of worldly success, was awed by the very intensity of my love, which added a throb of apprehension to the supreme moment of its fulfilment.

The carriage crawled up the long hill, and stopped before the steps leading to the churchyard of Saint John's. Like a sombre omen up went the umbrella in the hands of Aunt Euphronasia; and as I led Sally across the pavement to the General, who stood waiting under the dripping maples and sycamores, I saw that she was very pale, and that her lips trembled when she smiled back at me. With her arm in the General's, she passed before me up the walk to the church door, while Aunt Euphronasia and I followed under the same umbrella a short way behind.

At the door the minister met us with outstretched hands, for he had known us from childhood; and when Aunt Euphronasia had removed the bride's moist cloak, Sally joined me before the altar, in the square of faint light that fell from the windows. The interior of the church was very dim, so dim that her white dress and the minister's gown seemed the only patches of high light in the obscurity. Through the window I could see the wet silvery boughs of a sycamore, and, I remember still, as if it had been illuminated upon my brain, a single bronzed leaf that writhed and twisted at the end of a slender branch. Never in my life had my mind been so awake to trivial impressions, so acutely aware of the external world, so perfectly unable to realise the profound significance of the words I uttered. The sound of the soft rain on the graves outside was in my ears, and instead of my marriage, I found myself thinking of the day I had seen Sally dancing toward me in her red shoes, over the coloured leaves. In those few minutes, which changed the course of our two lives, it was as if I myself – the man that men knew – had been present only in a dream.

When it was over, the General kissed Sally, and wiped his eyes on his silk handkerchief.

"You're a brave girl, my dear, and I'm proud of you," he said; "you've got your mother's heart and your father's fighting blood, and that's a good blending."

"I wish the sun had shone on you," observed the old minister, while I helped her into her cloak; "but we Christians can't afford to waste regret on heathen superstitions. I married your mother," he added, as if there were possible comfort in a proof of the futility of omens, "on a cloudless morning in June."

Sally shivered, and glanced across the churchyard, where the water dripped from the bared trees on the graves that were covered thickly with sodden leaves.

"The sun may welcome us home," she replied, with an effort to be cheerful; "we shall be back again in a fortnight."

"And you go South?" asked the minister nervously, like a man who tries to make conversation because his professional duty requires it of him. Then the umbrella went up again, and after a good-by to the General, we started together down the walk, with Aunt Euphronasia following close as a shadow.

"The rain does not sadden you, sweetheart?"

"It saddens me, but that does not mean that I am not happy."

"And you would do it over again?"

"I would do it over until – until the last hour of my life."

"Oh, Sally, Sally, if I were only sure that I was worthy."

A light broke in her face, and as she looked up at me, I bent over and kissed her under the leafless trees.

CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH SOCIETY RECEIVES US

It was a bright December evening when we returned to Richmond, and drove through the frosty air to our new home. The house was large and modern, with a hideous brown stone front, and at the top of the brown stone steps several girl friends of Sally's were waiting to receive us. Beyond them, in the brilliantly lighted hall, I saw masses of palms and roses under the oak staircase.

"Oh, you bad Sally, not even to ask us to your wedding. And you know how we adore one!" cried a handsome, dark girl in a riding habit, named Bonny Page. "How do you do, Mr. Starr? We're to call you 'Ben' now because you've married our cousin."

I made some brief response, and while I spoke, I felt again the old sense of embarrassment, of strangeness in my surroundings, that always came upon me in a gathering of women – especially of girls. With Sally I never forgot that I was a strong man, – with Bonny Page I remembered only that I was a plain one. As she stood there, with her arm about Sally, and her black eyes dancing with fun, she looked the incarnate spirit of mischief, – and beside the spirit of mischief I felt decidedly heavy. She was a tall, splendid girl, with a beautiful figure, – the belle of Richmond and the best horsewoman of the state. I had seen her take a jump that had brought my heart to my throat, and come down on the other side with a laugh. A little dazzling, a little cold, fine, quick, generous to her friends, and merciless to her lovers, I had wondered often what subtle sympathy had knit Sally and herself so closely together.

"You'd always promised that I should be your bridesmaid," she remarked reproachfully; "she's hurt us dreadfully, hasn't she, Bessy? And it's very forgiving of us to warm her house and have her dinner ready for her."

Bessy, the little heroine of the azalea wreath and my first party, murmured shyly that she hoped the furniture was placed right and that the dinner would be good.

"Oh, you darlings, it's too sweet of you!" said Sally, entering the drawing-room, amid palms and roses, with an arm about the neck of each. "You know, don't you," she went on, "that poor Aunt Mitty's not coming kept me from having even you? How is she, Bonny? O Bonny, she won't speak to me."

Immediately she was clasped in Bonny's arms, where she shed a few tears on Bonny's handsome shoulder.

"She'll grow used to it," said little Bessy; "but, Sally, how did you have the courage?"

"Ask Bonny how she had the courage to take that five-foot jump."

"I took it with my teeth set and my eyes shut," said Bonny.

"Well, that's how I took Ben, with my teeth set and my eyes shut tight."

"And I came down with a laugh," added Bonny.

"So did I – I came down with a laugh. Oh, you dears, how lovely the house looks! Here are all the bridal roses that I missed and you've remembered."

"There're blue roses in your room," said Bonny; "I mean on the chintz and on the paper."

"How can I help being happy, when I have blue roses, Bonny? Aren't blue roses an emblem of the impossible achieved?"

Bonny's dancing black eyes were on me, and I read in them plainly the thought, "Yes, I'm going to be nice to you because Sally has married you, and Sally's my cousin – even if I can't understand how she came to do it."

No, she couldn't understand, and she never would, this I read also. The man that she saw and the man that Sally knew were two different persons, drawing life from two different sources of sympathy. To her I was still, and would always be, the "magnificent animal," – a creature of good muscle and sinew, with an honest eye, doubtless, and clean hands, but lacking in the finer qualities of person and manner that must appeal to her taste. Where Sally beheld power, and admired, Bonny Page saw only roughness, and wondered.

Presently, they led her away, and I heard their merry voices floating down from the bedrooms above. The pink light of the candles on the dinner table in the room beyond, the vague, sweet scent of the roses, and the warmth of the wood fire burning on the andirons, seemed to grow faint and distant, for I was very tired with the fatigue of a man whose muscles are cramped from want of exercise. I felt all at once that I had stepped from the open world into a place that was too small for me. I was a rich man at last, I was the husband, too, of the princess of the enchanted garden, and yet in the midst of the perfume and the soft lights and the laughter floating down from above, I saw myself, by some freak of memory, as I had crouched homeless in the straw under a deserted stall in the Old Market. Would the thought of the boy I had been haunt forever the man I had become? Did my past add a keener happiness to my present, or hang always like a threatening shadow above it? There was a part in my life which these girls could not understand, which even Sally, whom I loved, could never share with me. How could they or she comprehend hunger, who had never gone without for a moment? Or sympathise with the lust of battle when they had never encountered an obstacle? Already I heard the call of the streets, and my blood responded to it in the midst of the scented atmosphere. These things were for Sally, but for me was the joy of the struggle, the passion to achieve that I might return, with my spoils and pile them higher and higher before her feet. The grasping was what I loved, not the possession; the instant of triumph, not the fruits of the conquest. Love throbbed in my heart, but my mind, as if freeing itself from a restraint, followed the Great South Midland and Atlantic, covering that night under the stars nearly twenty thousand miles of road. The elemental man in me chafed under the social curb, and I longed at that instant to bear the woman I had won out into the rough joys of the world. My muscles would soon grow flabby in this scented warmth. The fighter would war with the dreamer, and I would regret the short, fierce battle with my competitors in the business of life.