“I have no doubt of it!” cried the juggler in delighted anticipation. He looked down for a moment, dubious of the wisdom of the course he had in contemplation, but with a quick joy beating at his heart. It was but natural, he argued within himself, recognizing the access of pleasure, that, young and debarred as he was from the society of his equals, he should experience a satisfaction in these fleeting glimpses of life as he had once known it, and in its attraction for him was no harbinger of regret and rue. Moreover, he judged that it would excite less attention for him to buy the book in person—he would make it appear that he was on an errand for some cottager of the summer sojourners—than if this ignorant parson should overhaul the literature of the Springs, with some wild tale of lessons from an elocutionary mountaineer. As to danger, he would hold his tongue as far as he might, and he deemed that he looked the veriest mountain rustic in the garb he so despised. “Rather a jaunty rural rooster, perhaps,” he said to himself, “but as rural as a cornfield.”
XI.
Royce waited over one day after this agreement with Tynes, and marked with satisfaction how thoroughly his will was subject to his own control. He had seen New Helvetia once. There was naturally a certain mundane curiosity on his part to be satisfied. Doubtless, after another excursion or so thither, it would all pall upon him and he would be more content, since there was no dream of unattainable enchantments at hand upon which he dared not look.
The place was singularly cheerful of aspect in its matutinal guise. The slanting morning sunshine struck through the foliage of the great oaks and dense shrubs; but there was intervenient shadow here, too, dank, grateful to the senses, for the day already betokened the mounting mercury. Across the valley the amethystine mountains shimmered through the heated air; ever and anon darkly purple simulacra of clouds went fleeing along their vast sunlit slopes beneath the dazzling white masses in the azure sky. In a ravine, a tiny space of blue-green tint amongst the strong full-fleshed dark verdure of the forests of July bespoke a cornfield, and through a field-glass might be descried the little log cabin with its delicate tendril of smoke, the home of the mountaineer who tilled the soil. Of more distinct value in the landscape was the yellow of the harvested wheatfields in the nearer reaches of the valley, where the bare spaces revealed the stage-road here and there as it climbed the summits of red clay hills.
There was no sound of music on the air, the band being off duty for the nonce. Even that instrument of torture, the hotel piano, was silent. The wind played through the meshes of the deserted tennis-nets, and no clamor of rolling balls thundered from the tenpin-alley, the low long roof of which glimmered in the sunshine, down among the laurel on the slope toward the gorge. The whole life of the place was focused upon the veranda. Royce’s reminiscent eye, gazing upon it all as a fragment of the past as well as an evidence of the present, discerned that some crisis of moment impended in the continual conjugation of the verb s’amuser. The usual laborious idleness of fancy-work would hardly account for the unanimity with which feminine heads were bent above needles and threads and various sheer fabrics, or for the interest with which the New Helvetia youths watched the proceedings and self-sufficiently proffered advice, despite the ebullitions of laughter, scornful and superior, with which their sage counsel was invariably received. There was now and again an exclamation of triumph as a pair of conventionalized wings were held aloft, completed, fashioned of gauze and wire and profusely spangled with silver. He caught a sudden flash of tinsel, and noted the special demonstrations of congratulation and great glee which ensued when one of the old ladies, fluttered with the anxiety of the inventor, successfully fitted a silver crown upon the golden locks of a poetic-faced young girl, a very Titania. The jocose hobbledehoy whom Royce had noted on the occasion of his previous excursion sat upon a step of the long flight leading from the veranda to the lawn, surrounded by half a dozen little maidens, and, armed with a needle and a long thread, affected to sew industriously, rewarded by their shrieking exclamations of delight in his funniness every time he grotesquely drew out the needle with a great curve of his long arm, or facetiously but futilely undertook to bite the thread.
With zealous gallantry sundry of the young men plied back and forth between the groups on the veranda to facilitate the exchange of silks and scissors, and occasionally trotted on similar errands, businesslike and brisk, down the plank walk to the store. Sometimes they asked here for the wrong thing. Sometimes they forgot utterly what they were to ask for, and a return trip was in order. Sometimes they demanded some article a stranger to invention, unheard of on sea or shore. Thus cruelly was their ignorance of fabric played upon by the ungrateful and freakish fair, and the little store rang with laughter at the discomfiture of the young Mercury so humbly bearing the messages of the deities on the veranda; for the store was crowded, too, chiefly with ladies in the freshest of morning costumes, and Royce, as he paused at the door, realized that this was no time to claim the attention of the smooth-faced clerk. That functionary was as happy as a salesman ever gets to be. There was not a yard of any material or an article in his stock that did not stand a fair chance of immediate purchase as wearing apparel or stage properties. Tableaux, and a ball afterward in the dress of one of the final pictures, were in immediate contemplation, as Royce gathered from the talk. This was evidently an undertaking requiring some nerve on the part of its projectors, in so remote a place, where no opportunities of fancy costumes were attainable save what invention might contrive out of the resources of a modern summer wardrobe and the haphazard collections of a watering-place store. Perhaps this added element of jeopardy and doubt and discovery and the triumphs of ingenuity heightened the zest of an amusement which with all necessary appliances might have been vapid indeed.
Royce could not even read the titles of the books on the shelf at this distance, above the heads of the press, and he turned away to await a more convenient season, realizing that he had attracted naught but most casual notice, and feeling at ease to perceive, from one or two specimens to-day about the place, that mountaineers from the immediate vicinity were no rarity at New Helvetia; their errands to sell fruit to the guests or vegetables or venison to the hotel being doubtless often supplemented by a trifle of loitering to mark the developments of a life so foreign to their experience. As he strolled along the plank walk, his supersensitive consciousness was somewhat assuaged as by a sense of invisibility. Every one was too much absorbed to notice him, and he in his true self supported no responsibility, since poor Lucien Royce was dead, and John Leonard was merely a stray mountaineer, looking on wide-eyed at the doings of the grand folk.
From that portion of the building which he had learned contained the ballroom he heard the clatter of hammer and nails. The stage was probably in course of erection, and, idly following the sound along a low deserted piazza toward one of the wings, he stood at length in the doorway. He gazed in listlessly at the group of carpenters working at the staging, the frame being already up. A blond young man, in white flannel trousers and a pink-and-white-striped blazer, was descanting with knowingness and much easy confidence of manner upon the way in which the curtain should draw, while the proprietor, grave, saturnine, with a leaning toward simplicity of contrivance and economy in execution, listened in non-committal silence. The wind blew soft and free through the opposite windows. Royce looked critically at the floor of the ballroom. It was a good floor, a very good floor. Finally he turned, with only a gentle melancholy in his forced renunciation of youthful amusements, with the kind of sentiment, the sense of far remove, which might animate the ghost of one untimely snatched away, now vaguely awaiting its ultimate fate. He continued to stroll along, entering presently the quadrangle, and noting here the grass and the trees and the broad walks; the romping children about the band-stand in the centre, dainty and fresh of costume and shrill of voice; the chatting groups of old colored nurses who supervised their play. One was pushing a perambulator, in which a precocious infant, totally ignoring passing adults, after the manner of his kind, fixed an eager, intent, curious gaze upon another infant in arms, who so returned this interested scrutiny that his soft neck, as he twisted it over the shoulder of his nurse, was in danger of dislocation.
“Tu’n roun’ yere, chile!” she admonished him as if he were capable of understanding, while she shifted him about in her arms to cut off the vision of the object of interest. “Twis’ off yer hade lak some ole owel, fus’ t’ing ye know; owel tu’n his hade ef ye circle roun’ him, an’ tu’n an’ tu’n till his ole fool hade drap off. Didn’ ye know dat, honey? Set disher way. Dat’s nice!”
She almost ran against the juggler as she rounded the corner. He caught the glance of her eye, informed with that contempt for the poor whites which is so marked a trait of negro character, as she walked on, swaying gently from side to side and crooning low to the baby.