"What did I tell you?" he exclaimed, elated, full of pride in the success of the unique attraction he had devised. But she apprehended a reproach.
"I furgot—I furgot! An', oh, I'd ruther die than spite you so! Lis'n—lis'n——" as the gusts of applause came with a roar. "They sound like painters an' wolves of a stormy night in the woods."
"I told you they'd catch on! I told you how 'twould be. Now look out. The third beat of the fourth bar—count—count—now go'n!"
When, still recalled, and she was to go on for her simple bow of thanks, she cared naught for the audience; she saw only him, the man who had found her fair and gifted, had opened vistas of undreamed-of splendours, and had brought an undiscovered world to her feet; she saw not the world, only him, and the pleasure in his eyes, and the pride and success to which she had ministered.
It was indeed a strange transition for the mountain girl, whose vicissitudes had been hitherto the incidents of the wood-pile and the cow pen. Perhaps only the physical freshness and vigour appurtenant to a life so stagnantly calm enabled her to sustain now the strenuous rush of sudden excitement. She felt more sensibly the dull reaction when all was at an end for the day. Lloyd had quickly left the tent when the experiment in photography was concluded, and the party from New Helvetia had returned to the hotel. Clotilda, looking after him with a keen jealous pang, was surprised and somehow consoled to perceive that he had not followed them thither. A check on the inrush of pride and gratification in her heart had ensued on the appearance of the two young ladies with the camera; but he had indifferently gone his way, and they had retraced their footsteps. Gradually as she slowly strolled along the road leading out of town and toward the encampment of the family, these two fluttering, flouncing white butterflies were less insistently in her mind than the details of her own great triumph, so tardily, so hardly won. "Heart's Delight!"—he had never before called her this and it seemed so apt, so dear a phrase; that it was slang, and absolutely without meaning, never occurred to her for a minute. She felt a great glow of satisfaction. How she had justified his faith in her—his admiration of her talents, her beauty and grace. The echo of the applause—no longer suggestive of the howling of wolves—sounded anew in sweetest flattery through the spaces of memory. Those elegant strangers, the sojourners of New Helvetia Springs, were as naught before the crowd in comparison with her, the central figure, dancing to dulcet music on the stage, all illumined with a burnished golden glow. Her lips curled as she remembered the sudden pang of jealous prescience she had experienced—so fair they were, so daintily bedight, holding themselves with such delicate hauteur and distance, embodying a superiority which she could not imagine and only vaguely felt. But how should she fear a contrast with aught? She remembered his descriptive phrases, not one of which she understood, but they were words of poesy and music on his lips, applied in enthusiastic admiration of her. An oread she was now, fresh from unimagined heights; and now a dryad, escaped from a tree; and once more the most ethereal bacchante that ever wreathed a vine. She conned them again and again as she strolled on. Sometimes she lifted shining, happy eyes to the river, red with the sunset, and here and there white with foam where a half-submerged boulder or a ledge of rock broke the currents into silver. Sunset lingered along the mountain tops and she hardly needed to mend her pace to be sure to reach the encampment before dark. Nevertheless, she looked sharply about her now and then, with vague apprehension. She met few wayfarers, now making their way into town; most of the inebriates, prominent last evening at the street fair, were sobered by this time, and the effects of strong liquor would not again be apparent until later. There was an interregnum in the sway of the Bacchus of the "moonshine." She could not formulate the uneasiness that possessed her, and once again she resolutely turned her mind to the recollection of her triumph, the manager's delight, the poetic justice that had so amply overtaken the cavillers who had derided and belittled the stunt. And still—suddenly she turned and looked behind her. It was an instinct, nothing more; the vigilance of an unnamed, causeless fear. The long red clay road stretched out here straight by the riverside for nearly a quarter of a mile. Silent, still it was, overhung on either hand by the heavily foliaged boughs of great forest trees. A waggon that had passed her a moment since was yet creaking its lumbering course toward the town, and the odour of tar on the hubs was discernible on the soft air. Nearer was the solitary figure of a pedestrian, an old man, to judge by the thick stick with which he supported his steps. At the distance she only noted the long grey coat and a limp broad-brimmed white hat. Turning, reassured, she walked on, conscious of the suave air, redolent of the scent of the forest, the freshness of the river and the pungency of the mint and water-side weeds; a bird—it was a thrush—was singing in the drooping boughs of a great beech; a star was whitely scintillating in the blue sky, seen in the space limited by the tops of the rows of tall trees on either side of the avenue. Suddenly a step sounded just behind her and a hand fell on her arm.
The scream on her lips was framed only in dumb show; her voice was paralysed by sudden terror. It was hardly annulled when her wondering gaze recognised the face—the young eyes under the flapping brim of the old white wool hat; the alert, trig, young mountaineer in the semblance of a slovenly, unkempt, hirpling old vagrant. There was something very sinister in the metamorphosis, and it may be doubted if ever heretofore she had heard of a man in disguise, still less found occasion to discern the traits of the fraud. She gazed with a fascinated horror at him, her cheeks blanched, her white lips still trembling, her eyes dilated and wildly shifting.
"I tole ye ez how I'd see you uns at the Fair, Puddin' Pie," Eugene Binley said, essaying a smile, but it was rather a grimace, for his mood was rancorous. He was ill at ease, too, agitated, suspicious, ever and anon looking over his shoulder, as if he feared an unheralded approach.
"But ye said I wouldn't see you uns," she gasped, finding it still difficult to breathe. "And," she spoke slowly and significantly, "I wisht I hadn't—I wisht I hadn't."
The solemnity of her voice evidently increased his discomposure. But he laughed in a husky, raucous undertone—a sarcastic, unpleasant laugh.
"Ye'd feel freer to go flyin' round with a strange man, ye never heard tell on, ef ye 'lowed thar warn't an eye spyin' on ye."