"He air a havin' a outdacious good time down ther', he air, an' he don't like ter quit off yet. Jest ye wait a day er two an' 'en ye'll see 'm a comin' up yer, Milly, a comin' up yer——" his voice would most usually fail him, but he would go on: "Yes, he air comin' back purty soon, when he hev hed all the shootin' he ken git."
Such statements, reiterated so often, lost a large part of their reassuring power, but Milly liked to hear them, and they were the best that he could do.
CHAPTER XV.
A DISCLOSURE.
The day following that on which Reynolds received his wound brought letters to Moreton from his home in England, with intelligence of the sudden death of his father, and a request for him to come at once. This summons was so urgent and peremptory that nothing short of immediate departure could be thought of. So he went; but not without Cordelia's promise to become his wife, and not before he had reached a full understanding with Mr. Noble on the subject. It was hard for him to break away from the sweet meshes in which he was entangled, and hard for him to leave Reynolds lying there pale and emaciated, with little more than the breath of life in him; but he could not stay. He promised to come back within two months, little thinking at the time that he would never see Birmingham again, or at best for some years to come. But so it was. When he reached England he found that the best interests of his father's estate required the sale of the American property, and that he would have to give his entire attention to the home affairs.
Soon after Moreton's departure Mr. Noble, following the fashion of thrifty Americans, seized upon a most favorable offer and changed his place of abode to New York City, where he became the chief of a strong banking establishment in which he had hitherto held a subordinate interest. So that by the time that Reynolds was beginning to gather strength and to forge well past the point of danger from his hurt, he was left alone with the DeKay household. No invalid ever had more careful nursing or had thrown around him more charming influences. General DeKay gave his entire time and attention to ministering to the needs of his guest, appearing to feel that, in some way, as a host, he had been careless and thus to blame for the almost fatal misfortune to one of his party. He had formed a great liking for Reynolds, beginning no doubt with the young man's excellent shooting in the first day's sport, and made stronger by the manly qualities and magnetic influence he possessed in a marked degree; and this liking shaped itself during Reynolds' illness into an attachment very rarely engendered between men.
Mrs. Ransom, after the first great shock of the adventure had spent its force, exhibited a quiet courage and fortitude in strong contrast to her girlish weakness up at the ruin. She was tireless in her efforts, hopeful, even when the doctors doubted, and cheerful when every one else appeared ready to despair. She seemed to rely, with perfect confidence, on Reynolds' power to overcome the effect of the hurt, and when his enormous vitality began to assert itself, she went about the house with a gentle smile on her lips and a serene light in her beautiful eyes that told how her heart rejoiced. To know that he was under the same roof with her and that he loved her and that he was getting well, filled her with a contentment little short of perfect happiness. She was not an intellectual woman, as the phrase goes; she knew little of the world's philosophies and sophistries, but she was a true woman, full of feminine sentiment, cleverness and earnestness: shy, wary, elusive, and yet outright and artless, at times, as any child. Her beauty was of that rarer Southern type which is the opposite, in most features, of the fiery, passionate, voluptuous, tropical model which has been unjustly copied into art and literature as the representative one.
Beauty that shrinks from self-advertisement and delights in blooming in a sheltered place where the light is never over-strong, secretes such essence and fragrance, takes on such modest and delicate color, and holds about it an atmosphere so subtly individual, that it is not within the power of brush or pen to portray it so easily and effectually as it may that other and coarser and possibly more vital sort. It is this beauty that a pink ribbon to-day or a bunch of violets to-morrow, or any other simple bit of adornment, seems so perfectly suited to as to appear a part of the wearer. If Agnes Ransom was rather below the best womanly stature, the casual observer would not have noticed it, for her bearing was high and her development strikingly balanced, or rather, so evenly balanced as not to be striking, and her movements had the smoothness and rhythm of a perfect lyric. She was a woman whose love would be of lasting value to a true man, and to love whom would generate nothing lawless or short-lived in the masculine nature. If Cleopatra stands as one type of eastern beauty and passion, Ruth stands as another. A woman like Agnes Ransom may be taken as representing very fairly a certain class of Southern women who carry about with them, even in old age, a girlishness and simplicity, combined with a shyness and exclusiveness often mistaken for either prudery or unfriendliness. Plantation life is, to an extent, a lonely one in a climate where it is possible and pleasing to spend much time out of doors, and where all the influences of out-door nature tend to generate repose. One can not but observe what seems to be the effect of these influences in determining the physical and mental contour of the Southern girl. She is slender, well developed, lithe, graceful, rather inclined to repose, not strikingly intellectual, has strong domestic inclinations and bears about with her an air of provincial innocency and naïveté that has a marked flavor of the isolation and the freedom of the plantation. Mrs. Ransom had been very little in city society; a winter in New Orleans and a few visits to Savannah limiting her experience beyond that obtained from a residence in the dreamy, isolated little old place of her birth, Pensacola. She was not a Catholic, but the rudiments of her education had been obtained in a convent, and something of that demure quietness and quaintness of manner characteristic of the nun had remained with her. No doubt her short and trying married experience had modified her charms of person and character to an interesting extent, adding an inexpressible value to her beauty. A trace of lingering sadness, slight but always present, gave a mild emphasis to the purity of her face and the low music of her voice. Such a woman could not fail to touch the heart of a fervid and passionate man like Reynolds, whose whole nature had been introverted for years, and whose life had been so long repressed and stagnant.
During the half delirium of his fever, while the inflammation of his wound was at its worst, he lay and watched her come and go, his heated vision making an angel of her about whose ethereally lovely form halos and rainbow colors played fantastic tricks. Sometimes the apparition was double, and then one of the angels took the form of poor little Milly White, whose haunting, hungry face flashed with a heavenly light. But as he grew stronger and the fever left him, it was Agnes Ransom, the pale, sweet, earnest little woman, that controlled his every thought. He was content to lie there and patiently wait on nature's slow work so long as she hovered near. He felt securely fixed in her love. Every word, that in the stress of agony, she had uttered up there in the ruin, lay like some divine germ in his heart, growing and strengthening with every moment. He did not seek to have her say more and he said little himself. When she fetched flowers from the out-door conservatory, grand cream-white and blush camellias, roses, jasmine and violets, and arranged them on the odd little mahogany table by his bedside, he would whisper some tender phrase of thanks and love, and then she would sit by the window and read aloud to him some forgotten romance, such as is to be found in every ancient Southern library. Happy invalid! to have such balm for his wound! And so the days of his convalescence drew by, not in pain and fretfulness and impatience, but freighted with the richest gifts of love. He was like one in some favored nook of fairy land, realizing the tenderest visions of dreams.
One day, near the first of March, when he had grown able to sit propped up on a sofa by a window, whence he could look out over the broad landscape to where the sky came down to the tufted woods, or turn his eyes upon short silvery bits of the river, he said to her: