"Stowed away somewhere," the Captain mildly responded.
Dr. Blecker was testy.
"You know Joseph, her brother? I mean our candidate for Congress next term?"
"Yes. Democratic. J. Schuyler Gurney,—give him his name, Mac. Republican last winter. Joseph trims to wind and tide well. I heard him crow like a barn-yard fowl on the Capitol-steps at Washington when Lincoln called for the seventy-five thousand: now, he hashes up Breckinridge's conservative speech for your hickory-backed farmers. Does he support the family, Mac?"
"His election-expenses are heavy."
"Brandy-slings. I know his proclivities."
McKinstry colored. Dr. Blecker was coarse, an ill-bred man, he suspected,—noting, too, the angry repression in his eyes, as he stood leaning on the gate, looking in at the Fort, for they had reached it by this time. The Captain looked in, too, through the dusky clumps of altheas and plum-trees, at the old stone house, dyed tawny-gray in the evening light, and talked on, the words falling unconscious and simple as a stream of milk. The old plodder was no longer dumb. Blecker had hit on the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and sunflowers,—this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare swamped stretch of the man's years, their solitary bit of enchantment. They were bare years,—the forty he had known: Fate had drained them tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in;—the duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-faced man, had gone through it for nearly half a century, pleasantly,—never called it heroism. It was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief,—to see that Duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him. A man, with an adult's blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and patient habit;—he claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it, and all that it touches. We call that love, you remember. A secular affair, according to McKinstry's education, as much as marketing. So when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear, were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty, aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never known, he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there forever. But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled just as he did long ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.
He never had told little Lizzy that he loved her,—hardly told himself. Why, he was forty-five,—and a year or two ago she was sledding down the street with her brothers, a mere yellow-haired baby. He remembered the first time he had noticed her,—one Christmas eve; his mother and Sarah were alive then. There was an Italian woman came to the village with a broken hand-organ, a filthy, starving wretch, and Gurney's little girl went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols, and handing the tambourine. Everybody said, "Why, you little tot!" and gave her handfuls of silver. Such a wonderful voice she had even then, and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood; and going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do. She danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine, he remembered; the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing till her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red cheeks. She could not help but do it, he believed, for at other times she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not seen her dance then, though she was only a child: dancing, he thought, was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell. After that day she used often to come to the farm to see his mother and Sarah. They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he remembered, with an indulgent smile. And he was "Uncle Dan." So now she was grown up, quite a woman: in those years, when she had been with her kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing. Well, well! McKinstry reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest daughter of Gurney's had one of the purest contralto voices in the States. She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care: no one could look in Lizzy Gurney's face without wishing to comfort and help the child. The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the cause of her look. She was a woman now. Well, and then? Why, nothing then. He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any other living creature; that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made havelock that morning. "You're always so kind to me," she said. "So I am kind to her," he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind their spectacles; "so I will be."
The Doctor opened the gate, and went in, turning into the shrubbery, and seating himself under a sycamore.
"Don't wait for me, McKinstry," he said. "I'll sit here and smoke a bit.
Here comes the aforesaid Joseph."