Still holding out her sunbonnet in wide distention, she slowly set forth along the path, not even turning back, for sheer perversity, as she saw Ben look anxiously over his shoulder to descry if she followed in the distance.
"Thar ain't much good in life nohow. Things seem set contrariwise." Then, after a moment, and turning her eyes upon him, for she had an almost personal interest in the man whose tragic fate she had first of all discovered, "What sorter good thing did he miss?" she asked, as she settled her sunbonnet soberly on her head.
"Well"—Selwyn began; then he hesitated. He had spoken rather than thought, for he thought little, and he was not used to keeping secrets. Moreover, despite his courageous disbelief in his coming fate, he must have had some yearnings for sympathy; the iron of his exile surely entered his soul at times. The girl, so delicately framed, so flower-like of face, seemed alien to her rude surroundings and the burly, heavy, matter-of-fact folk about her. Her spirituelle presence did away in a measure with the realization of her limitations, her ignorance, and the uncouth surroundings. Even her dress seemed to him hardly amiss, for there then reigned a fleeting metropolitan fashion of straight full flowing skirts and short waists and closely fitting sleeves,—a straining after picture-like effects which Narcissa's attire accomplished without conscious effort, the costume of the mountain women for a hundred years or more. The sunbonnet itself was but the defensive appurtenance of many a Southern city girl, when a-summering in the country, who esteems herself the possessor of a remarkably beautiful complexion, and heroically proposes to conserve it. Unlike the men, Narcissa's personality did not suggest the distance between them in sophistication, in culture, in refinement, in the small matters of external polish. She seemed not so far from his world, and it was long since he had walked fraternally by the side of some fair girl, and talked freely of himself, his views, his plans, his vagaries, as men, when very young, are wont to do, and as they rarely talk to one another. He had so sedulously sought to content himself with the conditions of his closing existence that the process of reconciling the habit of better things was lost in simple acceptance. He was still young, and the sun shone, and the air was clear and pure and soft, and he walked by the side of a girl, fair and good and not altogether unwise, and he was happy in the blessings vouchsafed.
After a moment he replied: "Well, I thought he might have made a lot of money. I thought I might go partners with him. I had written to him."
Her face did not change; it was still grave and solicitous within the white frame of her sunbonnet, but its expression did not deepen. She did not pity the dead man because he died without the money he had had a chance to make. She evidently had not even scant knowledge of that most absorbing passion, the love of gain, and she did not value money.
"Somehow whenst folks dies by accident, it 'pears ter me a mistake—somehows—ez ef they war choused out'n time what war laid off fur them an' their'n by right." Evidently she did not lack sensibility.
"Yes," he rejoined, "and you know money makes a lot of difference in people's lives there in the valley towns. Lord knows, 't would in mine."
He swung his riding-whip dejectedly to and fro in his hand as he spoke, and she pushed back her sunbonnet to look seriously at him. He was a miracle of elegance in her estimation, but the fawn-colored suit which he wore owed its nattiness rather to his own symmetry than the cut or the cloth, and he had worn it a year ago. His immaculate linen, somewhat flabby,—for the mountain laundress is averse to starch,—had been delicately trimmed by a deft pair of scissors around the raveling edges of the cuffs and collar, and showed rather what it had been than what it was. His straw hat was pushed a trifle back from his face, in which the sunburn and the inward fire competed to lay on the tints. She did not see how nor what he lacked. Still, if he wanted it, she pitied him that he did not have it.
"Waal, can't you-uns make it, the same way?"
She asked this sympathetically. She was beginning to experience a certain self-reproach in regard to him, and it gave her unwonted gentleness. She felt that she had been too quick to suspect. Since Ben's report of the reconnoitring interview on which she had sent him in Con Hite's interest, she had dismissed the idea that Selwyn was in aught concerned with the traveler's sudden and violent death; and she did not incline easily to the substituted suspicion that the dead man was a "revenuer," and that Selwyn had written to him to recommend the investigation of Con Hite, whose implication in moonshining he had some cause to divine.