Did she deem him, then, only a common mountaineer, a graceless unlettered lout? She rated him as less than the dust beneath her feet. He could not endure that she should think of him thus. How could she be so obtuse as to fail to see that he was a gentleman for all his shabby gear! It was in him for a moment to hasten after her and reveal his name and quality, that she might not look at him as a creature of no worth, a being of a different sphere, hardly allied even to the species she represented.
He was following on her path, when the reflex sentiment struck him. “Am I mad?” he said to himself. “Have I lost all sense of caution and self-preservation?”
He stood panting and silent, the wounded look in his eyes so intense that by some subtle sympathetic influence they hurt him, as if in the tension of a strain upon them, and he passed his hand across them as he took his way back to the spring.
Did he wish the lady to recognize his station in life, and speculate touching his name? He was fortunate in that she was so young, for to those of more experience the incongruities of the interest manifested by an uncouth and ignorant mountaineer in a metaphysical book like that might indeed advertise mystery and provoke inquiry. Was he hurt because the lady, noting his flagrant poverty, had evidently wished to bestow upon him the volume which he had been reading with such delight,—so little to her, so infinite to him? And should he not appreciate her delicate sense of the appropriate, that had forbidden this generosity, considering her youth, and the fact that he was a stranger and seemingly a rustic clown? He rather wondered at the scholarly bent of her taste in literature, and her avoidance of the mirthful scenes of the veranda, that she might spend the morning in thought so fresh, so deep, so expansive. It hardly seemed apposite to her age and the tale that the thermometer told, for this was a book for study. There was something simple-hearted in his acceptance of this high intellectual ideal which all at once she represented to him. A few months ago he might have scoffed at it as a pose; he would at least have surmised the fact,—a mistake had been caused by a similarity of binding with that of a popular novel of the day with which she had hoped to while away the time in the cool recesses beside the spring, and thus the volume had been thrown discarded on the rock, while she climbed the slopes searching for the Chilhowee lily.
The fire of humiliation still scorched his eyes, and his deep depression was patent in his face and figure, when he reached the Sims house at last, and threw himself down in a chair in the passage. One elbow was on the back of the chair, and he rested his chin in his hand as he looked out gloomily at the mountains that limited his world, and wished that he had never seen them and might never see them again. The house was full of the odor of frying bacon, for there was no whiff of wind in the Cove. The rooms were close and hot, and the sun lay half across the floor, and burnt, and shimmered, and dazzled the eye. The suffocating odor of the blistering clapboards of the roof, and of the reserves of breathless heat stored in the attic, penetrated the spaces below. Jane Ann Sims sat melting by degrees in the doorway, where, if a draught were possible to the atmosphere from any of the four quarters, she might be in its direct route. Meantime she nodded oblivious, and her great head and broad face dripping with moisture wabbled helplessly on her bosom.
Euphemia, coming out suddenly with a pan of peas to shell for dinner, and seeking a respite from the heat of the fire, caught sight of Royce with a radiant look of delight to which for his life he could not respond. She was pallid and limp with the work of preparing dinner, and even in the poetic entanglements of her curling shining hair she brought that most persistent aroma of the frying-pan. The coarse florid calico, the misshapen little brogans which she adjusted on the rung of her chair as she tilted it back against the wall with the pan in her lap, her drawling voice, the lapses of her ignorant speech, her utter lack of all the graces of training and culture, impressed him anew with the urgency of a fresh discovery.
“What air it ez ails you-uns?” she demanded, with a certain anxiety in her eyes. “Ye hev acted sorter cur’ous all this week. Do you-uns feel sick ennywhars?”
“Lord, no!” exclaimed the juggler irritably; “there’s nothing the matter with me.”
She looked at him in amazement for a moment; he had had no words for her of late but honeyed praise. The change was sudden and bitter. There was an appealing protest in her frightened eyes, and the color rushed to her face.
He had no affinities for the rôle of fickle-minded lover, and he was hardly likely to seek to palliate the cruelty of inconstancy. He took extreme pride in being a man of his word. The sense of honor, which was all the religion he had and chiefly active commercially, was evident too in his personal affairs. Was it her fault, he argued, his poor little love, that she was so hopelessly rustic? Had he not sought her when she was averse to him, and won her heart from a man she loved, who would never have thought himself too good for her? He would not apologize, however. He would not let her think that he had been vexed into hasty speech by the mere sight of her, the sound of her voice.