“Still criminal,
“Allen Blynn.”
The next letters were full of vindictive hatred of Bardek. Allen had gone to the old mill and found it deserted. He told how all his talk on Elizabethan love with Kate as they drove along the Wissahickon was only the outward voice speaking; within were throbbing anxious cries for a little child off in the woods with—what sort of a man? The Lord only knew. Elizabethan love—contagion, infection, plague and what not—he had them all, a virulent case. With wide eyes Gorgas read of his tramp back into the dark of Cresheim Valley and how he had seen her forlorn little figure pacing thoughtfully beside “Gyp.” Only vigorous conscience withheld his hands from touching her as she passed by.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—terrible! a life-time of exile. Perhaps one might make it nineteen—No! said Conscience, roaring outrageously. Well, twenty, then.
The “German days,” “French days,” and “Italian days” followed in review, while Gorgas passed from thirteen to fourteen. His joy at the discovery of the simple sincerity of Bardek flowed through the pages, with just a hint of watchfulness. “He is a man, a free-thinker, a free-lover, too, I suspect,” he warned her. “Look out for him, child; but you need not do that. I am on eternal guard, now. He has no conscience, that is certain; but in some matters neither have I. If he makes a step toward you ‘I would eat his heart out in the market-place!’ But I have faith in Bardek, an unreasoned thing, but clear enough. Time will tell.
“And I’m watching you, too, Golden Child. Your brown eyes do not behave themselves. They explore, explore, explore, until I am ready to reach out my hand and close them against myself. And you continually do pluck at my sleeve and touch my wrist nervously with the tips of your hot fingers and send my blood slamming and jamming and ramming and cramming like the waters go down at Lodore. You have no conscience, either; that’s plain. Well, here’s where I begin my long vigil. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—it is life imprisonment. I’ll be an old man! Shall we say nineteen then? Golly! What a racket Conscience sets up!”
At another time he wrote briefly. “You stood in the narrow path today, when we found that Bardek had gone, and reached out your arms to me. By the Great Horn Spoon! By the Dipper and the Little Bear! And the Pole Star! And the Pleiades! Don’t ever do that again! Zounds! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of! Fra Lippo Lippi said that. Fortunately for you and me I’m flesh and blood plus a Conscience.”
“And I never guessed it!” Gorgas communed with herself. “If I had—” The first touch of remorse seized her for the lost chances of life, and a little anger at the laws of polite society, and a pang of jealousy for that “other” whom he had so dubiously confessed.
“Why does he torture me with this book of letters?” she marvelled. A few leaves slipped through her fingers; she turned impatiently toward the concluding pages, but stopped. “I’ll play fair,” she said. “Straight! straight! straight! straight!”
Morris came into the letters. Allen had noticed greedily their intimacy and lamented the early bookishness that had prevented his ever being more than a spectator at athletics. Some of the fierce passions of envy seized him. He was gloriously frank. “I’m a half-man,” he exclaimed. “They let me sit and spell out books and praised me until my vanity led me further and further away from real life. Why couldn’t they have driven me off to baseball and football and all that! The world praises the pedant, but the young woman goes straight to a man. I have had the education of a woman—and even women are repudiating it, nowadays.”
He was very unfair to himself in these despondent pages. Gorgas quarreled with every line. She scolded him; told him what his real qualities were and advised him to have more sense or she would skip. It was the “Sorrows of Allen Blynn,” the aching of strong youth before he has found his place, when he cries out upon his own unfitness for any place at all. “These are just my growing pains, child,” he was wise enough to write. “Don’t bother your little head about them; it’ll come out all right eventually.” But it made her uncomfortable and weepy.