“You just keep that up,” he said, conserving an expression of animosity before which she visibly quaked, “and you’ll have Mrs. Sims brewing her infernal herb teas for me in about three minutes and a quarter. I want you to stop talking about my being ill, short off.”
As she gazed at him she burst into a little trill of treble laughter, that had nevertheless the suggestion of tears ready to be shed, in the extremity of her relief.
“I have walked twenty miles to-day, and it’s a goodish tramp in the heat of the day,—over to New Helvetia and back; and I’m fagged out, that’s all.”
Her equilibrium was restored once more, and her eyes were radiant with the joy of loving and being loved. Yet she paused suddenly, her hand—he winced that he should notice how rough and large it was, the nails blunt and short and broad—resting motionless on the edge of the pan, as she said, “I wisht ye would gin up goin’ ter that thar hotel. Ye look strange ter-day,”—her eyes searched his face as if for an interpretation of something troublous, daunting,—“so strange! so strange!”
“How?” he demanded angrily, knitting his brows.
“Ez ef—ef ye bed been ’witched somehows,” she answered, “like I ’low folks mus’ look ez view a witch in the woods an’ git under some unyearthly spell. The woods air powerful thick over to’des New Helveshy, an’ folks ’low they air fairly roamin’ with witches an’ sech. I ain’t goin’ ter gin my cornsent fur ye ter go through ’em no mo’.”
She pressed a pod softly, and the peas flew out and rattled in the pan, and the tension was at an end. He felt that she was far too acute, however. He was sorry she had ever known of his visits to New Helvetia. She should suppose them discontinued. He certainly coveted no feminine espionage.
He could not escape the thought of the place now. The face of the beautiful stranger was before his eyes every waking hour; and there were many, for the nights had lost their balm of sleep. The tones of her voice sounded in his ear. The delicate values of her refined bearing, the suggestions of culture and charm and high breeding which breathed from her presence like a perfume, had enthralled his senses as might the subtle and aerial potencies of ether. He had no more volition. He could not resist. Yet it was not, he stipulated, this stranger whom he adored. It was what she represented. He perceived at last that for him the artificialities of life were the realities. Even his own cherished gifts were matters of sedulous cultivation of certain natural aptitudes, the training of which was more remarkable than the endowment; and indeed, of what worth the latent talent without that culture which gives it use, and in fact recognized being at all? The status had an inherent integral value, the human creature was its mere incident. Nature was naught to him. The triumphs of the world are the uses man has made of nature; the forces that have lifted him from plane to plane, and sublimated the mere intelligence, which he shares with the beast, into intellectuality, which is the extremest development of mind.
As he argued thus abstractly, the longing to see her again grew resistless. Not himself to be seen, and never, never again by her! He would only look at her from afar, as one—even so humble a wretch—might gaze at some masterpiece of the artist’s craft, might kneel in abasement and self-abnegation before some noble shrine. He craved to see her in her splendid young loveliness and girlish enjoyment, in gala attire, at the grand fête on which the youth of New Helvetia were expending their ingenuity of invention and expansive energy. Even prudence could not say him nay. Did fate grudge him a glimpse that he might gain at the door, or while between the dances she walked with her partner on the moonlit veranda? Who would note a flitting ghost, congener of the shadow, lurking in the deep glooms beneath the trees and looking wistfully at the world from which he had been snatched away?
It was with a lacerating sense of renunciation that he parted with each instant of the time during the momentous evening when he might have beheld her in the tableaux; for he could with certainty fix upon the place she occupied, having gathered from the talk at the store the date and order of the festivities. But he could not rid himself of the Sims family. It had been vaguely borne in upon Mrs. Sims that he was growing tired of them, and in sudden alarm lest Euphemia’s happiness prove precarious, and with that disposition to assume the blame not properly chargeable to one’s self which is common to some good people, who perceive no turpitude in lying when the deceit is practiced only on themselves, she made herself believe that the change was merely because she had been remiss in her attentions to her guest, and had treated him too much and too informally as one of the family. She smiled broadly upon him, with each of her many dimples in evidence, which had never won upon him, even in the days of his blandest contentment. She detained him in conversation. She requested that he would favor her with the exact rendition of the air to which he sang the words of Rock of Ages, one Sunday morning when he had heard the bells of the St. Louis church towers ringing from out the misty west; and as he dully complied, his tones breaking more than once, she accommodatingly wheezed along with him, quite secure of his commendation. For Jane Ann Sims had been a “plumb special singer” when she was young and slim, and no matter how intelligent a woman may be, she never outgrows her attractions—in her own eyes.