He had not thought to notice the dwindling shadows that betokened noon and the waiting dinner which Euphemia had made ready with many a remembrance of his preferences. The sun was westering apace when, as if impelled by a force beyond his control, he found himself in the country road, forging ahead with that long swift stride, the envy of his comrades of the pedestrian club of his urban days. His heart seemed to divine the way, for he scarcely paused to debate which fork to pursue when the road diverged; he gave no heed to the laurel jungles on either hand, or, further on, to the shady vistas under the towering trees; he only perceived at last that the density of the woods had diminished. Soon peaked and turreted roofs appeared among the thinning boughs, and as he crossed an elaborately rustic foot-bridge, coquettishly picturesque, flung across a chasm where deep in the brown damp shadows a silver rill trickled, he recognized this as an outpost of artificiality. A burst of music from a band thrilled his unaccustomed ears; a vast panorama of purple and azure mountains, a vermilion sun, a flaring amber sky, great looming gray crags, and the bronze-green sunlit woods beyond were asserted in an unfolding landscape; he heard the laughter cadenced to express the tempered mirth of polite society, and the stir of talk. The verandas of the two-storied hotel were full of well-dressed people. His swiftly glancing eye marked the dowagers; their very costumes were familiar,—black grenadines or silks with a subdued inclination toward a touch of lavender decoration, and some expert softening of the ravages of time by the sparing use of white chiffon or lace, with always something choice in the selection of dainty shawls on the back of a chair near at hand (how often had he resignedly borne such a wrap over his arm in the meek train of a pretty girl’s chaperon!): he knew the type,—clever, discreet, discerning. On the lawn two games of tennis were in progress, the white of the flannel suits of the men enhanced in the sun against the green grass. Along the road beyond, two or three smart little carts were coming in with the jauntiest of maidens in daintily tinted summer attire and sailor hats. An equestrian couple—the young man of a splendid physique and elegantly mounted—went by him like a flash, as he stood, dazed and staring, by the rail of the bridge. He retained barely enough presence of mind to dodge aside out of the way, and he received a volley of sand, covering him from head to foot, from the heels of the horses as they disappeared in the woods at the steady hand-gallop. On the crag at the verge of the bluff were groups of young people, strolling about or seated on the ledges of the cliff, the young men dangling their feet over the abysses beneath, such being the accepted fad; now and then, one not emerged from the hobbledehoy chrysalis would, by means of grotesque affectations of falling, elicit small complimentary shrieks, half terror, half mirth, from the extremely young ladies whom he favored with his improving society. At one side there was a meeting of fir boughs, a dank and cool dark vista, a great piling of fractured and splintered rocks, a sudden descent, and down this bosky way was so constant a going and coming that Lucien Royce divined that it led to the hidden spring.
He stared at the scene through the tears in his eyes. To him who had never had a home it was home, who had never dreamed of heaven it was bliss. He would have given all he could imagine—but, poor fellow, he had naught to give!—to be able to communicate in some mysterious way the knowledge of his quality to one of those high-nosed, keen-eyed elder women, of composed features and fine position and long social experience and much discrimination in the world’s ways, and to have her commend his course, and counsel prudence, and pity his plight. He looked at the elder men, whose type he also knew,—men of weight in the business world, lawyers, bankers, brokers,—and he thought what a boon might be even the slightest impersonal conversation with one of his own sphere, his equal in breeding, in culture, in social standing. He was starved,—he had not realized it; he was dying of mental inanition; he was starved.
The next moment, two of the tennis-players, ending the diversions of the afternoon with a walk, approached the bridge: the man in his immaculate white flannels, his racket carried over his shoulder; the girl in her picturesque tennis toggery. Royce, dusty, besprinkled with sand, conscious of his coarse ill-made jeans clothes and his great cowhide boots, colored to the roots of his hair as their eyes fell upon him. In adaptation to the custom of the mountaineers, who never fail to speak to a stranger in passing, they both murmured a “Good-evening” as they went by. Royce, rousing with a galvanic start, lifted his hat, hardly realizing why they should glance at him in obvious surprise and with elevated eyebrows. For one moment he pondered fruitlessly on the significance of this trifling incident. The solution of the mystery came to him with a monition of added caution. The social training of the mountaineer does not comprise the ceremony of lifting the hat in salutation. If he would sustain the rural character he must needs have heed, since so slight a deflection was marked. He heard them laughing as they went, and he thought, with all the sensitiveness incident to a false position, that he was the cause of their mirth, the incongruity of this “million of manners” with such a subject. With an aversion to a repetition of this scene he betook himself out of the way of further excursionists, noticing that several couples were slowly strolling in the direction of the bridge. But as he moved forward from under the shadows of the fir and into the clear space of the lawn, he could scarcely sustain the observation which he felt leveled at him, Argus-eyed, from the verandas, the lawn, the tennis-court, the crags. His pride was in arms against his humble plight. His face burned with shame for his coarse garments, the dust, the very clumsiness of his rough boots, the length of his overgrown silky red-brown hair, his great awkward hat, the uncouth figure he cut in respectable society. But despite the flush on his cheek, and a thrill hot and tingling ever starting with each searing thought to his eyes, as if tears were to be shed but for the sheer shame of it, he laughed scornfully at his pride, and despised himself to be so poor, so forlorn, so outcast from his native world, yet so yearning for it. “What does it matter?” he said to himself. “They don’t know me. Lucien Royce is dead,—dead forever.” He walked on for a few minutes, the trained gait of an athlete, his graceful bearing, the individuality and distinction of his manner, all at their best, mechanically asserted as an unrealized protest in some sort that those lorgnettes on the verandas should not conceive too meanly of him. “I suppose I thought the ghost of a dude like Lucien Royce would be a mighty well-set-up affair, with a sort of spectral style about him and an unearthly chic. But what does it matter what they think of a nonentity of a stray mountaineer like this? Lucien Royce is dead,—dead forever!”
He had merely ventured to partially skirt the lawn, bending his steps toward the shelter of a small two-storied building at the nearest corner of it, and somewhat down the road. The lower portion of this structure, he perceived, was used as a store, containing a few dry goods, but dispensing chiefly needles and pins, especially hairpins, and such other commodities of toilet as the guests might have forgotten or exhausted or could be induced to buy. He paused in the doorway: even the sight of the limited stock ranged decorously on the shelves, the orderly counters, the smooth countenance of the salesman, seemed pleasing to him, as reminiscent of the privileges of civilization.
“Can we do anything for you, sir?” asked the clerk suavely.
Royce caught himself with a start. Then speaking with his teeth half closed to disguise his voice, and drawling like a mountaineer, he said, shaking his head, “Jes’ viewin’ the folks some.”
He had a sense that the imitation was ill done, and glanced furtively at the face of the man behind the counter. But the clerk was devoid of speculation save as this faculty might explore his customers’ pockets. Royce noted, however, a second warning, and since the sun was down and the lawn now depopulated, save for here and there a hastening figure making for the deserted verandas, he ventured out in his shabby gear upon the plank walk that stretched along the bluff where no crags intervened, but the descent was sheer to a green and woodsy slope below. The early tea was in progress; the band that for some time had been heralding its service, playing within the quadrangle, was silent now, and the shadows were abroad in the mountains; mists were rising from dank ravines on the opposite range. A star was in the flushed sky. A whippoorwill’s plaintive tones came once and again from the umbrageous tangles that overshadowed the spring. Yellow lamps were flaring out into the purple dusk from the great looming unsubstantial building. He marked the springing into sudden brilliancy of a row of windows on the ground floor, that revealed a long, bare, empty apartment which he identified as the ballroom. There would be dancing later on. A cheerful clicking as of ivory against ivory caused him to pause abruptly and peer down the slope below, where a yellow radiance was aglow amongst the trees and precipitous descents. It came from the billiard-room in the pavilion, picturesquely poised here among the rocks and chasms, and looking out into a wild gorge that gave a twilight view of the darkening valley, and the purple glooms of the mountains towering along the horizon. It was the airiest type of structure. With only its peaked roof and its supporting timbers, the floor and the flights of steps, it seemed free to the breeze, so wide and long were the windows, all broadly open. Royce, looking down into its illuminated interior, glowing like a topaz in the midst of the dark foliage that pressed close about it, had a glimpse of the green cloth of the tables, the red and white balls, the dexterously poised cues, the alertly attitudinizing figures,—still loitering in white flannels, although the lights now agleam in bedroom windows told that all the world had begun to dress for the ball,—and heard the pleasant, mirthful voices.
Why did he linger here, he asked himself, as he repressed the natural mundane interest which almost spoke out his criticism as he watched the game with the eye of a connoisseur. This was not for him. He was not of this world. He had quitted it forever. And if he were mortified to fill a place in a sphere so infinitely removed from that to which he was born and entitled, would it better matters to emerge from his decent obscurity and his promised opportunities, his honest repute and his simple happiness, to the conspicuous position as the cynosure of all eyes in a criminal trial, and to the permanent seclusion of a felon’s cell? For that was what he risked in these hankerings after the status and the sphere from which he was cast out forever.
He was in the darkening road and plodding homeward before this admonition to his own rebellious heart was concluded, so did the terrors of that possible ignominious fate dominate his pride, and scorch his sensibility, and lay his honest self-respect in the dust. He was tired. The drops stood on his forehead and his step lagged. Thrice the distance in the time he had walked it would not have so reduced his strength as did the mental perturbation, the inward questionings, those tumultuous plungings of his strong young heart. He was pale, and his face was lined and bore some vague impress of the nervous stress he had sustained, when at last he came up the steps of the open passage at Sims’s house, and Jane Ann bent her anxious flabby countenance toward him.
“Waal, before the Lawd!” she exclaimed, holding the tallow dip in her hand so as to throw its light full upon him,—and he divined that at frequent intervals in the last two hours she had emerged thus with the candle in her hand to listen for his step,—“hyar the chile be at last! Whar in the name o’ sense hev ye been, John Leonard?” she demanded, as Phemie fluttered out, pale and wistful despite her embarrassed laughter at the folly of their fright, and old Tubal Cain followed stiffly, with sundry grooves of anxiety added to the normal corrugations of his face.