Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

And she really was very happy during those first days following the fright. Her happiness always came at second hand, as perhaps the purest happiness always comes. She was happy because Doris was happy—young, beautiful, joyous, sparkling with health and spirits. Seeing this, Miss Judy found nothing lacking in her own life. And then she was so delightfully busy in building air-castles. She was, to be sure, nearly always busy in doing this, but she seemed now to have a firmer foundation to build upon than usually came within her reach. Doris and Lynn met at her house on these bright summer days, almost every day, and sometimes twice a day. Doris came at first oftener than she had ever come before, and stayed longer, on account of her own and her mother's anxiety about the effect of the shock upon Miss Judy's health. They knew how frail was the small tenement housing Miss Judy's quenchless spirit. They almost held their breath for days after that unmentionable night. The entire community, indeed, was alarmed; even old lady Gordon thought it worth while to send her grandson to see how Miss Judy was, and to warn him against saying why he came lest he frighten her. Finding Doris with Miss Judy, the young man naturally went again on the next day—and the next and the next—without being sent. Thus gradually it came about in the natural order of events that Doris and Lynn met daily in Miss Judy's house; that she saw them constantly together, and that her greatest, loveliest air-castle thus grew apace. Every day added to its height and its beauty, till its crystal minarets, towering through rainbow clouds, touched at last the sapphire key-stone of the arching heavens.

Doris and Lynn knew nothing of all this. They were merely drifting—as youth usually drifts—with the sweet summertide. In those glowing, fragrant days the season was at its greenest and sweetest. The crystalline freshness of spring still lingered in the dustless air, which was just beginning to gather the full fervor of the summer sunshine. Nature now was at her busiest, her kindest, and her cruelest—glad, blossoming, bewildering, alluring—wreathing her single relentless purpose with gayest flowers and most intoxicating perfume. The vivid beauty of the full leafage, gold-flecked by the glorious flood of sunlight, was not yet dimmed to the browning of a leaf's tip; every emerald blade of grass held its brimming measure of sap; the rank grass under foot, the thick foliage overhead, the earth and the air alike, teemed with life and pulsated with wings. And every living thing, seen or unseen, high or low, was being swept onward by the same resistless power toward the common altar. The lacelike white of the flowering elder covered the whole earth with a delicate bridal veil. Here, there, everywhere, floated the snowy foam of myriad blossoms—the crest of creation's tidal wave.

And the young man and the young maid also went the way of all innocent healthy young creatures in ripening summer, thinking little more of the titanic forces moving the world, than the birds and the bees and the butterflies. Lynn was wiser and older than Doris; yet he too was still young, and still far from any real maturity of wisdom. His knowledge of life was such as may be gained by a student who goes through a great university with a definite ambition steadily before him; and who comes from it into the world with a clear, clean, and upright conception of what a man who earnestly means to hold a high place in it should be and should do. But he was only a boy grown tall after all, and he had never seen so beautiful a girl as Doris was, or any one of such indefinable charm or of such ineffable grace.

He looked down at her as she walked by his side one day, going up the big road. They took daily walks together now without objection from any source. Only dear little Miss Judy, with her funny notions of chaperonage—which nobody understood any more than many other of the little lady's dainty whims, and which everybody indulged and quietly smiled at, as at many another of her odd, sweet ways—would ever have thought of objecting. It was, indeed, an old, well-established, and highly respected custom of the country for young men and young maids to walk alone together. Seeing them do this, the Oldfield people merely smiled kindly, as kind people do at young lovers anywhere—and sometimes nodded at one another, thus silently saying that all was well, that this was just as it should be. The very fact of these daily walks alone together made everything perfectly open and clear. Even Miss Judy's rigid scruples on the score of propriety gradually relaxed, as Doris and Lynn went so openly and frankly from her side to stroll toward the graveyard, day after day.

From time immemorial the graveyard had been the favorite trysting-place of Oldfield lovers. Perhaps the graveyard of every far-off old village always is the lovers' chosen resort. It is certainly nearly always the most beautiful and the most retired spot, yet it is also usually close by, for in death, as in life, humanity holds closer together in the country than in town, and the dead are not laid so far from the living. And then, to the young everywhere, death itself always seems so distant that its earthly habitations have no real terrors. No sadness ever comes to happy youth from the mere nearness to the Eternal Silence; nothing of the Great Mystery, vast as the universe and inscrutable as life, ever sounds for the happy young with the sighing of the wind over the long, long, green, green grass growing only over country graves, the saddening sound which older and less happy ears always hear. None of that unutterable feeling of the pain of living, and the peace of dying, ever wrings the hearts of happy lovers at the moan of the gentlest breeze through the graveyard cedars, where it seems to those who are older and sadder to moan as it never does elsewhere.

Certainly, neither of the two young people, sitting that day on the rustic benches under the tallest cedar, either heard or thought of any of these sad things. Lynn heard mainly the music of the mating birds, and thought mostly of the exquisite curve of the fair cheek almost touching his arm. It was so satiny in its smoothness, so velvety in its softness, and so delicately tinted with the faint, yet warm, glow of rich, rare red, which gleams out of the deep heart of a golden tea-rose. And the glory of her wonderful hair! He felt, as he looked down upon her radiant head, so close to his shoulder, that he had never realized how wonderful its dazzling crown was, until he saw it now with the wondrous light of the sunset re-gilding its fine gold, and with the south wind ruffling its loveliness into more bewitching disorder. As he gazed, a sudden gust leaped over the far green hilltops and lifted the wide brim of her white hat, thus revealing the full beauty of her face.

Lynn saw it, with a sharp indrawing of his breath. A yearning so keen, so deep and tender, as to cross the narrow border between pleasure and pain, rushed into the young man's heart. It has been said what an ardent lover of beauty he was. The feeling which swept over him now was the yearning that every true lover of the beautiful feels at the sight of great beauty: the hopeless desire to hold it forever unchanged—be it the delicate flush on an exquisite cheek, which must go as quickly as it comes, the freshness of a perfect flower which must fade with the rising of the sun, or the miracle of the dawn which must soon vanish before the noontide glare. Doris seemed to him Beauty's very self, to be worshipped with all his beauty-worshipping soul, not merely a beautiful girl to be loved with all his human young heart.

She wore that day a dress of faded pink muslin, very thin, very soft, very scant, so that it clung close to her slender, supple form—a poor old dress, so old that no one could remember whose it had been first. The bodice opened daintily at the throat in the pretty old fashion known as "surplice" to the Oldfield people; and on the glimpse of snow which drifted between the modest edges of the opening—where the lily of her fairness lay under the rose of the muslin ruffles, just where the sweet curve of her throat melted into the lovely roundness of her bosom—there nestled a little cross of jet held by a narrow band of black velvet, tied around her neck and whitening its whiteness as jet whitens pearl. Such a poor little ornament! Such a poor old dress! And yet the picture that they made when Doris wore them!

Looking at her, Lynn knew well enough that he had but to loose his firm hold upon himself ever so little, to love her as he might never be able to love another woman. He never had seen, and never expected to see, such beauty as this of Doris's, for the true lover of beauty knows its rarity. And nothing else in the world so appealed to him; no charm of mind, or heart, or spirit, could ever quite make up for the lack of it, notwithstanding that he valued these qualities also, and held them higher than thoughtless youth often holds them. And yet, despite his frank recognition of the truth, he still had no thought of allowing himself to love Doris Wendall. Perhaps, all unsuspected even by himself, the instinct of the Brahmin was in him too; of a certainty, what is bred in the bone is apt to come out in the flesh. But if this were true, if he were influenced by any feeling of caste, he certainly did not suspect it. He was not vain, with the common, harmless vanity of most young men; nor was there in him any unbecoming pride of birth or position. He thought that he was held back solely by his determination to let nothing turn him from his life plans. He was wholly sincere in believing that he was strong enough to stand firm, to keep himself from loving Doris, as he knew he could love her. The thought that she might love him had never crossed his mind. The thought of being able to win her was as far from him as the thought of reaching out his arms to gather a star—so high above all earthly things had his beauty-worship enshrined her.

"I wonder what you are thinking about," he said suddenly, that day, with his eyes still on the curve of her cheek. "Of late I have begun to believe that you don't any longer think Miss Judy's thoughts exclusively," he went on, banteringly, in the freedom which now existed between them. "More than once I have seen unmistakable signs of thoughts of your own, thoughts which, moreover, were not in the least like Miss Judy's."