CHAPTER VIII.
Miss Swendon, going up the wooded hill toward the house, raising her head, saw a man coming toward her down the narrow path. The low sunlight struck through the trees on his broad forehead and magnificent golden beard flowing full on his breast. He was in evening-dress; a topaz blazed on his snowy shirt-front; he walked meditatively, his hands clasped behind him; his eyes rested on her with beaming pleasure. She turned her head away, but saw him, without her eyes, advancing upon her—coming, it seemed to her, into her life.
Mr. Van Ness's personality indeed was too potent to admit of his slying unnoticed, like an ordinary human being, in and out of anybody's vision. You might look at him but for a moment, but his majestic port, the fineness of his linen, the very set of his high hat, his Christian benignity and grace, remained with you ever after, a possession of comfort and joy.
Jane knew him at a glance, though they had never met before. All of her life she had heard Aristides called the Just, and been a trifle bored by it. Undoubtedly this was he. She was not petulant or bored now.
If we want a key to her feeling, we can find it in the fact that there was not a moment since she burned the will that she had not known that she was right in doing it, and that there was not a moment in which she had not remembered that in the judgment of the world she was a thief.
Here was the man sent by Laidley out of his grave to judge her, a man who was embodied Virtue and Honor—in the world's eye.
There was evidently no doubt in Mr. Van Ness's mind, either, as to who the slight erect woman might be who came slowly up the rocky path, one hand on the dog's collar, the folds of her blue dress falling about her like the drapery of an antique statue, the coils of yellow hair only held in place by a black velvet band. If he had been watching her growth for years, as he said, waiting for this supreme moment, he gave no sign of emotion now that it had arrived, except that the radiance in his protruding light eyes became more intense. I may as well say, once for all, that Mr. Van Ness never was known to yield to weak emotion, irritability or any of those vicious humors which beset other men. If he had done so it would have grievously wounded the faith of his disciples. He possibly had met these temptations in his cradle, as the infant Hercules the serpents, strangled them and left them dead there, so passing into a serene boyhood and victorious middle age.
Bruno at this moment caught sight of the stranger, and began to growl ominously. Now, the dog was an amiable, courteous dog ordinarily, but subject, like his mistress, to irrational antipathies, and, like her, with a large reserve of untamed blood to support his prejudices. He stopped, dropped his head between his fore legs, his eyeballs reddened, he barked a short, sharp warning. Miss Swendon knew the signs: she had seen them once before. She caught him by the collar, looking straight at the exceptionally handsome man with the underbred blaze of yellow on his shirt-front: "Down! down, sir!—You had better go back," to Mr. Van Ness. "I beg of you to go back."
"No, no," gently, and still advancing. "Poor fellow!—Let me catch his eye, Miss Swendon."
It was something in the eye, however, which maddened the dog: he shook in every limb; his lips were drawn back; the sharp teeth glistened.
Jane threw herself on her knees, her arms about his throat: she motioned Van Ness back with her head, but the enraged animal threw her off as he would a wisp of straw, and sprang straight at his throat. Van Ness, though a heavily-built man, staggered back; but he caught the dog about the throat with both hands, and held him as in a vise. The red eyeballs and panting tongue were close to his face. Next, Bruno struck with his paw at one of the white soft hands, and tore a great gash in it, from which the blood gushed; but the pleasant smile did not leave the lips of his antagonist.
"Now, Miss Swendon," he said gently, "I think you can soothe him. I will hold him quiet to listen to reason."
Jane came to him, and in a few moments had the beast subdued and lying panting at her feet, his bloodshot eye still fixed on Van Ness. She was pale and trembling, offered her handkerchief to tie up the wounded hand, and was humble in her apologies; but Van Ness knew all the while that her sympathies were with the dog. Judge Rhodes had heard the scuffle, and arrived now, out of breath, and violent in his abuse of poor Bruno.
"Why you keep such an ill-conditioned beast, Jane, I cannot understand," he cried as he swabbed and tied the wound.
Mr. Van Ness beamed down unruffled on the stout little man: "You are always unjust to dogs, Rhodes. Now, I should say that our friend Bruno was one of the Brahmin caste—fine-natured and well-bred as a rule. Liable to mistakes, perhaps.—I am right, Miss Swendon?" and he beamed down in his turn on Jane, who sat on the bank, stroking the dog's muzzle as it lay on her knee. She forced a smile which proved a failure, said that he was right, and that she must hurry before them to the house. She stopped as soon as she was out of sight to hug the dog with a sob: "But we are not wild beasts, are we, Bruno?"
She felt the dog's insane desire to tear off this amiability, this cloying gentleness of the newcomer, and find what was beneath. It was just as it used to be long ago when prim, polite little misses came to play with her—white, pink-eyed poodles consorting with a big Newfoundland. She used to feel clumsy and worsted beside them, possessed by the devil too to scare and disgust them. Yet she knew herself more right than they all the time.
When she sat at the head of the dinner-table an hour or two later, soft silken drapery having taken the place of the soft woollen, and her usual calm good temper on the surface instead of pallor and tears, her secret mood was very much the same. Mr. Neckart sat apart from her: he spoke little, and that only to the captain, who was eager about the political question of the day. Judge Rhodes, dropping his voice, poured into her ear eulogiums on Van Ness.
"Did you see him smiling down on that brute? Now, how did he know but he had given him the hydrophobia?"
"I appreciated the self-control," smiling. "So did Bruno. It drove him mad."
"Self-control? I tell you, it's super-human! I've thought sometimes it was a divine power sustaining him. Why, I saw that man at his mother's deathbed. She lay in his arms, and he sang to her—hymns, you know—sang to her in a clear, unbroken voice until her spirit had passed out of hearing. I couldn't have done it, even for a stranger."
"I am sure you could not," said Miss Swendon.
"He sinks self out of sight wholly, you see. Now, he had a dog once—a hound like yours—brought him up. It was touching to see them together—the devotion of the poor brute. Well, he sold him, and gave the hundred dollars to his State Home for Children. He could not afford such a luxury as the dog's love, he said, while these poor wretches needed so much."
"But my dog," said Miss Swendon quite distinctly, "is more to me than all the wretches in Pennsylvania."
There was an awkward silence.
Mr. Van Ness turned his handsome face on her with a benign nod: "How natural and beautiful that is! Her dog and her babe and her lover are more to a woman than all the outside world. So they ought to be! Love is like air: when it is confined it only fills a given space, but give it escape and it spreads over all God's creation. The day is not far distant when young, fair women will freely give themselves to the work of raising the dangerous classes."
"Well, I don't know about that," said Rhodes. "I'm growing hopeless. What with ignorance and whiskey and conceit, the dangerous classes even here are too heavily handicapped to make any running. They will need two or three lives after this, it seems to me, to bring them up to a fair starting-point."
"That's a fact!" cried the captain. "Now, there are beggars. My plan is to give to 'em all, and so be on the safe side; but the organized charities tell us they are all impostors; and then every day some organized charity turns out a swindle! What is a man to do?"
"To do? Give himself up, I suppose, to the cause of the poor and the Lord, as this man has done!" cried the judge earnestly, touching Van Ness on the shoulder, who shook his head and smiled—a sad, deprecating smile.
"Don't look for wages of any sort, then. If a man wants to be suspected by the rich and abused by the poor, let him take up my work," he said a moment after, meeting Neckart's eye with a frank laugh.
"No doubt you are right," said Mr. Neckart gravely. "I never tried it."
They were rising from the table at the moment. As they passed through the hall, Mr. Neckart halted beside a window in which grew some house-plants. Jane came directly to him. She had fallen of late into the habit of consulting him in all her plans, as they both knew very well that she was not at all a capable woman—according to the New England idea: she lacked acuteness and knowledge of facts and all the fashionable aptitudes. She had not even cognizance enough of Wagner or cloisonné or old andirons to put her en rapport with her times.
It was a daily matter for her to appeal to Neckart to help her ignorance here or there, yet when he heard the soft rustle of her skirts beside him he grew perceptibly colder and stiffer, waiting without a smile for her to speak.
"I have brought my mind, as usual, to have it made up," she began gayly, growing instantly sober when she caught his glance. "What do I want with this ready-made Mentor? Do you think I need a financial adviser?"
"I have no doubt you will find Mr. Van Ness both shrewd and honest in that capacity, if you choose to consult him."
"Why should I? I suppose the money is invested properly. I draw the dividends regularly, and I have no use for money but one. I mean to make my father's life happy with it, and I know how to do that. Nobody can teach me. What have I to do with this reformer and his State Home?"
Mr. Neckart had been in the habit of looking down on her in her occasional outbursts with an amused indulgence as from an immeasurable difference of years. He was looking down at her now with unsmiling and, as she thought, unfriendly eyes; but she was suddenly, for the first time, conscious of how young he actually was, and how near to her in many unworded, fathomless ways. She drew back within the narrow limits of the window, and was silent.
He withdrew his eyes from her with an effort, and did not immediately answer. When he did, it was in a cool business tone. "I do not know what relation Mr. Van Ness may hold to you hereafter, if any," he said. "But he seems to me thoroughly honest and manly. He is the first professed reformer I ever saw who was not either subservient or aggressive to me, as a newspaper-man who did not ride his hobby."
"I do not see him with your eyes," she said with a shrug. "Bruno's, rather."
Neckart laughed. After the manner of men, he had judged the man who was crossing his life with calm common sense and justice, but he was quite satisfied that the woman with neither should condemn him.
The late clear twilight lingered with a haze of red in the sky, although the sun had been down for an hour or more. Jane stood irresolutely in the window. Through the bushes she could see the stoop where her father and the judge sat smoking, Mr. Van Ness beside them, his benign, sheep-like gaze wandering slowly around in search of her.
"Of course he does not smoke!" she said. "He has not a single weakness on which one can hang a liking; and he has actually taken father's own chair!" which by the way she had cushioned herself years ago, when it and two small stools furnished their shabby room. No wonder that she and the captain looked upon it as a sacred relic.
The window where they stood was shaded on the outside by privet and althea bushes: it opened to the ground, and a sandy little footpath ran directly to the river, where her boat was moored. Usually, while the captain took his after-dinner nap, she rowed along the shore, and Neckart, when he was there, would sit in the stern reading or scribbling his next leader, but oftener leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head, listening with half-closed eyes to her chatter. It is significant to note the occasion on which a silent woman has a flux de bouche. The necessity for talking was upon Jane at this moment. There were twenty things which she must tell Mr. Neckart to-night—how the shoemaker Twiss, who used to live—or starve—in the alley back of their garden, was here as head-gardener; and how capitally that consumptive sempstress, Nichols, managed the dairy and was growing quite fat at the work; and how that boy in the stable, whom Neckart had brought from the printing-office, where he was going headlong to the devil, had really turned out the best of fellows. The truth was, that there were very few people who had been kind to Jane or the captain in the days when they were all hungry together whom Neckart had not met at the farm, either as visitors or settled in fat sinecures of office. He had arranged the business part of their removal, indeed, in many cases. But he was in no mood for consultation to-night—answered briefly when she spoke to him: his face, hard and inflexible, was turned toward the river. "His mind is filled with some matter of state—that Navy appropriation bill, I suppose," she thought, looking at him deferentially. Her little affairs and thoughts fell back on her as if they had struck against iron.
She never wanted sympathy or advice from others: sometimes there were whole days in which, her father being gone, she scarcely spoke a word. But now, at the necessity for silence, her heart sunk with a miserable emptiness, her throat choked, hot wretched tears came up into her eyes. She had thought all the week of this day, and she had kept the best of all she had to tell until this evening. She thought, of course, they would go out in the boat, and now his mind was full of the Navy appropriation bill!
She pulled the white threads from the ragged cactus leaves beside her, looking at him sometimes from under her lashes. "I think I will go out on the river," she said timidly.
"Shall I push out the boat? The water will drift you without rowing," going promptly before her down the path. He took up the little anchor, wiped the seat of the bateau with the sponge, and held out his hand to help her in. She seated herself and took the oars. Surely he was coming? He never had allowed her to go alone. No: he waited with one hand on the stern, and then pushed her off, taking off his hat as the boat darted out into the current and her oars struck the water.
It was the bill: no doubt it was the bill! She knew he had been sent for to Washington on business concerning it. Of course he was a statesman, and it was quite right that the government and the country should have the benefit of his best thoughts. But what if this bill and other bills should always fill his mind, and leave no room there for—for the poor little affairs of his friends? "What would father do then?"
The oars rested motionless in the row-locks. Her eyes were dry, but there was a breathless stricture on her breast, as though an iron hand had clenched her and for the moment crushed the life back.