For the Major: A Novelette

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

Towards the end of the evening—or rather, of the reception—he sang, accompanying himself upon the guitar. His guitar had a long loop of red ribbon attached to it; Miss Carroll surveyed it and its owner with coldest eye, as, seated upon a low ottoman in the centre of the room, he began what she had called his "little songs." His songs were, in truth, always brief; but they were not entirely valueless, in spite of her prejudice against them. They had a character of their own. Sometimes they contained minor strains too old for Far Edgerley to remember, the wild, soft, plaintive cadences of the Indian women of tribes long gone towards the setting sun, of the first African slaves poling their flatboats along the Southern rivers. And sometimes they were love-songs, of a style far too modern for the little, old-fashioned town to comprehend. Dupont's voice was a tenor, not powerful, but deliciously, sensuously sweet. As he sat there singing, with his large, bold dark eyes roving about the room, with his slender dark fingers touching the strings, with his black moustache, waxed at the ends, the gleam of his red handkerchief, and the red flower in his coat, he seemed to some of the ladies present romantically handsome. To Sara Carroll he seemed a living impertinence.

What right had this person of unknown antecedents, position, and character to be posturing there before them?—to be admitted at all to the house of her father? And then her eyes happened to fall upon her father's wife, who, in the chair nearest the musician, was listening to him with noticeable enjoyment. She turned and left the room.

By doing this she came directly upon Frederick Owen, who had apparently performed the same action a little while before. They were alone in the wide hall; every one else was in the drawing-room, gathered round the singer.

"It—it was cooler here," Owen explained, rather awkwardly. At this instant Dupont's voice floated out to them in one of his long, soft notes. "It has 'a dying fall,' has it not?" said the clergyman; he was trying to speak politely of her guest. But as his eyes met those of Miss Carroll, he suddenly read in them a feeling of the same strength and nature as his own, regarding that guest. This was a surprise, and a satisfaction. It was the first corresponding dislike he had been able to discover. For his own dislike had been so strong that he had been searching in all directions for a corresponding one, with the hope, perhaps, of proving to himself that his was not mere baseless prejudice. But until this evening he had not succeeded in finding what he sought. It was all the other way.

It should be mentioned here that Owen had not betrayed this dislike of his. If he had done so, if his objection to the musician had been known, or even suspected, it is probable that Dupont would hardly have attained his present position in Far Edgerley. For after Madam Carroll's opinion, the opinion of the rector of St. John's came next. But he had not betrayed it. There was nothing of essential importance against Dupont. The fact that he was precisely the kind of fellow whom Frederick Owen particularly disliked was simply a matter between the two men themselves, or rather, as Dupont cared nothing about it, between Owen and his own conscience; for he could hardly go about denouncing a man because he happened to play the guitar. But after three weeks of enduring him—for he met him wherever he went—it was great comfort to have caught that gleam of contempt in Miss Carroll's fair gray eyes; he was glad that he had been at just the right spot in the hall to receive it as she came from the drawing-room with that alluring voice floating forth behind her.

"It is a beautiful evening," he said, dropping the subject of the musician; "the moonlight is so bright that one can see all the mountains. Shall we go out and look at them?"

And Miss Carroll was so displeased with the scene within that she consented to withdraw to the scene without; and there they remained as long as the singing lasted. They walked up and down the broad piazza; he talked about the mountain scenery, and the waterfalls. She did not appear to be much interested in them. Her companion, however, was not so much chilled by this manner of hers as he had sometimes been; he had had a glimpse behind it.

CHAPTER V.

EARLY in the week following the reception, Frederick Owen learned that Dupont was about to take his departure from Far Edgerley, and with no expectation of returning. This was good news. He was beginning to have the feeling that the fellow would never go away, that he and his guitar would become a permanent feature of Madam Carroll's receptions, his lounging figure under the cream-colored umbrella a daily ornament of the centre of Edgerley Street. Was he really, then, going? It seemed too good to be true. But the tidings had been brought by Miss Dalley, who was both good and true, and who was accurate as well; she had the very hour—"On Friday, at nine."

"Hangman's day!" thought Owen, with satisfaction, doing his thinking this time with the remnants of boyhood feelings; for though he was in his third decade—the beginning of it—and a clergyman, the boy in him was by no means entirely outgrown. Miss Dalley had come to return a book, Longfellow's "Outre Mer," and to borrow anything he might have about Ferrara.