“Sullivan.”
3.
I had deferred my call upon Miss Bruce until I should receive Sullivan’s answer to my letter; but when his telegram came I was in a quandary. It struck me as ambiguous. And what could be the extreme haste that made a telegram advisable? Or, perhaps, was the whole thing only one of Jerry Sullivan’s jokes?
Meantime I was wearing Miss Jeanie Bruce’s ring. Once it struck me that if I did not mean to call upon her, I ought to send it back. But I did mean to call upon her. There never was any question about that, from the first. I did not in the least approve of her, but I meant to call upon her, if only to tell her so. Her conversation had revealed a certain indifference to human life, but she had very soft and gentle eyes. Like the face of the boy whom Cousin Kirk had shot, they “haunted me yet.”
Coe noticed my ring. Oddly enough, though a foreigner, he had got into the ways of the people quicker than I had; and I saw him looking at it one day, though he said nothing. That is, nothing of the ring; he did ask me whether I had been to see Miss Bruce. So I went; they boarded in a small frame house that belonged to a Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. I suspect it was this female justice who came to the door; it was a Monday afternoon and the house was odorous with soup; but Miss Jeanie was “very much engaged.” The Friday following she was out, and Wednesday I met her walking on the principal street of Knoxville with a tall young man.
“Try Saturday,” said Coe that evening. “I want you to ask those girls for my trip up over the line.” During the summer, Coe had got some rusty rails spiked upon his right of way; and now wished to invite the youths and ladies of Tennessee to run over them in a trial trip.
That day I found Miss Jeanie alone in the parlor, almost as if awaiting me. “I began to think you had forgotten us,” said she, softly. Dear me, how soft her eyes were! I said that I had called there many times.
“You could scarcely expect me to let you in when another gen’leman was here!” said she. “Especially when——” I saw her look at the ring; but she checked herself. My afternoon calls in Salem had not so exclusively monopolized the lady’s attention, and I looked at her, puzzled. Just then the front door-bell rang; and I was confident I heard Mrs. Judge Pennoyer tell someone that Miss Jeanie “was very much engaged.”
My conversation languished. I think that Miss Bruce was disappointed. “Shall I play to you?” I saw her hesitate between “The Shepherd Boy” and a romance of Brinley Richards; and I hastened to reply, “I would rather talk.”— “But you don’t talk,” cried she. “But I look.”— “You can look while I play.”— “Not so well,” said I.— “I have a new piece—one they sent me from the convent, the Sacré-Cœur, you know, where I was for some years. It is called the ‘Tears of Love.’ The musical instruction of the convent was very good. Sister Ignatia had studied in Italy. I suppose it was better than outside—don’t you?”
I had never studied in a convent, and I don’t think I made much answer, for she went on. “Of course, you know, it is pleasanter in other ways. One has so much more liberty. Yet the most Kentucky ladies are all educated in convents. But I felt that I wished to see more of society. At the Sacré-Cœur they do not allow you to receive your gen’lemen friends except in the presence of the mother superior.”