"A lifelong misfortune for you that you did not," answered the farmer.
"No, no. The sequel justified all. To turn to England to settle the rights of man in the Colonies would have been an insane act in those days. Your Government was not then competent to approach such a question as the rights of man."
"No politics, gentlemen," said Annabel; whereupon Cecil Stark begged for pardon, and with sufficient tact turned to matters of more personal interest. He told of sheep and the success attending their breeding in Vermont.
"A wether of three years will weigh one hundred and twenty pounds with us, and yield you three or four pounds of wool," he said. Then he discussed flax—a crop at that time grown also upon Dartmoor—and he fascinated Grace with a description of the maple sugar manufacture, of the precious juice flowing from ancient trees, and of the gorgeous pageant of the maples when Autumn's breath touched their foliage and lighted their aboriginal forests with scarlet and purple and flaming gold.
At other times the lad awakened sorrow in sympathetic hearts by his descriptions of the War Prison and the pitiful life there. But he did not guess the secret pain he thus occasioned; he did not know that Annabel Malherb often sighed when she looked into the wintry Moor. Soon a journey to Prince Town would be again possible, and Maurice Malherb much desired it. Neither did the American imagine that Grace suffered dire unrest at this period; nor dream that her maiden happiness slowly foundered in a sea of new sensations, mostly miserable. Yet such was the simple case. Sometimes she shook herself out of these amazing and unprecedented trances with a blushing face and beating heart. Then to the night she would cry softly, "I love John Lee—I love dear John!" But why the fact needed this nocturnal declaration oft repeated, and what antithesis of ideas called it forth under the darkness, Grace Malherb as yet imperfectly perceived.
CHAPTER XV
STARK RIDES AWAY
Within the space of ten short days Cecil Stark was turned from supreme indifference concerning life or death to the contrary emotion. Existence for him had become endowed with a lively charm, and if Grace Malherb's heart fluttered in secret, the sailor's also now beat less steadily, and played him pranks at her approach. He found in the maiden all that love asks, and more by much than ever he had seen in any other woman. Here did beauty, spirit, force of soul, music of voice and graciousness of mien all merge in one lovely girl; and Stark very rightly and properly went down like a man before the irresistible. Now greedily he counted the hours and prayed that the snow might endure. He hated the red sun that daily crept above Cater's Beam and sank where Prince Town lay, for it touched the drifts and changed their character. The expanses of white glittered and settled down, while from their bowels snow-water eternally trickled until the rivers roared, and black, boiling streams, all splashed with yellow spume, thundered from each great hill. Now sunlit streaks and spots of stone, heath and bog broke the huge whiteness of the mountains, and Stark's glimpse of Paradise was nearly over. Each morning at the breakfast-hour he waited in fear for Maurice Malherb to pronounce sentence of departure; each day he breathed again to find a few hours were still left to him.
Grace Malherb proved such a listener as sailors love. She had not imbibed many of her father's prejudices, and was too full of the delight of life on one side, its personal problems and puzzles on the other, to concern herself with politics or abstract ideas touching the welfare of nations. Cecil Stark did what Grace's father was powerless to do, and wakened in her an active interest concerning war. She listened attentively while he rose to the occasion and, inspired by her advertance, painted with all an earnest lad's enthusiasm the cause for which he fought. She watched from under lowered lids, and while he fancied that her heart must throb to the cannon's roar or the crash of falling spars, she was either comparing his powerful face with the more delicate and more classic features of her lover, or contrasting the fire of the fighting man with the dreamy disposition of John Lee. But John Lee would presently be a fighting man also.
Little basenesses crept into the soul of poor Grace under this ordeal. By night she wept bitterly at herself and marvelled to behold her own meanness. She found herself secretly thankful that Cecil Stark knew nothing of her engagement; then, heartily ashamed, she probed this instinct, and imagined that it must be caused by the American's superiority of position and of rank. In reality she erred and the truth was far different; but this the girl had not as yet discovered. Her misery was extreme, and she blamed herself bitterly when she reflected how much of her thoughts the American prisoner already owned. Indeed, all other concerns swept headlong into a remote, unimportant past. And it was so with the man; for his first love now lighted life with wild, unrestful glory. Of the maiden's heart, indeed, he knew nothing, but, impelled to do so by a vague hope as to the future, he had made a clean breast of his own affairs and dwelt egotistically upon them. Not seldom Mr. Peter Norcot's former assertion clouded those moments in which Stark had sense to pause and reflect, yet the other's name was never mentioned by Grace, and he began presently to hope that the wish was father to Peter's thought and declaration. There seemed no evidence that Miss Malherb's future was already determined.