After a while Royce despaired of drawing her attention to himself,—he who had been in his own circle the cynosure of all youthful eyes. “There’s nothing in the world so stupid as a girl in love,” he moralized, irritated at last.
This state of unwilling obscurity developed in him a degree of perversity. He was prepared to assume an attitude of lowly admiration, of humble subservience, the kiss-the-hem-of-your-robe-save-for-the-foolishness-of-it sort of look which might impress her and the rest of the Sims family and all admiring spectators with the fact of how stuck full of Cupid’s arrows he had now become. But no man can play the rôle of lover, however lamely, when the lady of his adoration notices him no more than a piece of furniture.
As he went through the passage one day, she happened to be there alone, tilted back in her chair against the wall, her small feet upon one of the rungs, her curls stirring in the breeze, droning laboriously aloud from the Third Reader, the pride and limit of her achievement.
“Here,” he said cavalierly, reaching out and taking the book quickly from her hand, “let me show you how I read that.”
Now elocution had been one of the versatile juggler’s chief accomplishments. He read the simple stanzas in a style of much finish. His voice was of a quality smooth as velvet, and his power of enunciation had been trained to that degree that its cultivation was apparent only in the results, and might have seemed a natural endowment, so scantily was the idea of effort suggested. His special and individual capacity lay in the subtle inflections of tone, which elicited from the verses meanings hitherto undreamed-of by her. It was as if a stone had been flung into still water. Above these suddenly interjected new interpretations the circles of thought widened from one elastic remove to another, and Euphemia sat dazed in the contemplation of these diverse whorls and concentric convolutions of the obvious idea. She said nothing as he handed back the book with an elaborate ballroom bow, but gazed up at him with an absorbed, serious face, all softened and gently appealing like a bewildered child’s, and then fixed her eyes intently upon the page, as if seeking to find and hold those transient illusions of fickle fancy that had glimmered so alluringly through the plain, manifest text. He left her thus as he put on his hat and stepped out upon the path leading down the slope. He glanced back once, to see her still sitting there, motionless but for the wind which swayed the fair loosely curled hair of her bent head and the folds of her faint green dress as it did the sprays of the vines on the opposite side of the passage, which grew so thick that they formed a dark background for her figure in the cool shadowy green dusk; otherwise he might not have been able to distinguish it from out the glare and glister of the open sunny space where he stood. He gazed unobserved for a moment; then he turned and went on in much dissatisfaction of spirit. It was no way, he argued within himself, to assume the character of a lovesick swain by demonstrating his superiority to the fair maiden,—to flout her poor and painful efforts by the exhibition of his glib accomplishment. “I must needs always have an audience,—be always exhibiting my various feats and knacks. I was born a juggler,” he said ruefully.
But that evening when they sat at supper,—much later than usual, since the favorite Spot had wandered far into the forest, and did not return till she was sought and found and driven reluctantly home, with many pauses by the way,—the furtive glances across the table did not emigrate from his side of it. The meal was served in the main room of the cabin, to avoid the cloud of moths which the light outside in the passage would attract. In the white, languid, dispirited glow of the tallow dip the furnishings of the apartment were but dimly visible. Now and again the flicker of the wind set astir the pendent strings of pepper and bunches of dried herbs and various indiscriminate gear that swung from the beams. The red embers where the supper had been cooked were spread apart on the hearth that the heat might be lessened, and here and there through the white efflorescence of the ash only a tinge of the vermilion hues of the coals could be discerned. Despite its subdued red glare the failing fire had little irradiating effect, and added scantily to the cheer of the apartment. The batten shutter flapped back and forth with a wooden clamor; the wind had brought clouds and rain impended, and Tubal Cain Sims’s corn was not yet all planted, and the ground would probably be too wet to plough for a week or more. Grum and indignant because of this possible dispensation of Providence, he sat in his shirt-sleeves, with his shock head bent, only looking up from under his grizzled shaggy eyebrows to discern in the glimmer of the candle the food he wanted, and only speaking to growl for it. The one crumb of comfort he coveted was denied him. A certain johnny-cake had burnt up “bodaciously” on its board as it baked before the fire, and it would seem that Tubal Cain Sims, from his youth up, had subsisted solely on the hope of this most dainty of rural cates, so surlily did he receive the news, and so solemnly did he demand to be told how in the name of Moses a cake that never was put near the fire, but baked by the heat thrown on the hearth, could be reduced to cinders.
“Witched somehows, I reckon,” suggested Mrs. Sims easily; and since argument could not move that massive lady, Tubal Cain resorted to silent sulks, not in the vain hope of shaking her equilibrium, but for the sake of their own solace to the affronted spirit.
Although this disaster chanced within Euphemia’s own jurisdiction and beneath her presidial care, she took no part in the spirited colloquy on the subject, but seemed absorbed in thought, ever and anon casting a covert look at the young man. As of late he had fallen into the habit, with the opportunity afforded at meal-times, of contemplating her with swift and furtive glances, more than once their eyes met, to the visible embarrassment of both; the juggler, to his astonishment, coloring furiously as might any country boy, and a touch of surprise and almost inquiry becoming visible in the eyes of Euphemia. Strange that so poor and primitive a contrivance as a pallid tallow dip could set such stars of radiant beauty in those long-lashed pensive orbs. They looked bewilderingly lovely to the young man as they were suddenly fixed upon him, intent with the first intimation of personal interest which he had ever discerned in their depths.
“How long hev you-uns hed schoolin’?” she demanded abruptly.
“Schooling? I? Oh yes. From the time I was six years old till I was twenty-two,” he replied.