The Gentleman From Indiana

B >> Booth Tarkington >> The Gentleman From Indiana

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Ever since his university days the image of her had been growing more and
more distinct. He had completely settled his mind as to her appearance and
her voice. She was tall, almost too tall, he was sure of that; and out of
his consciousness there had grown a sweet and vivacious young face that he
knew was hers. Her hair was light-brown with gold lustres (he reveled in
the gold lustres, on the proper theory that when your fancy is painting a
picture you may as well go in for the whole thing and make it sumptuous),
and her eyes were gray. They were very earnest, and yet they sparkled and
laughed to him companionably; and sometimes he had smiled back upon her.
The Undine danced before him through the lonely years, on fair nights in
his walks, and came to sit by his fire on winter evenings when he stared
alone at the embers.

And to-night, here in Plattville, he heard a voice he had waited for long,
one that his fickle memory told him he had never heard before. But,
listening, he knew better--he had heard it long ago, though when and how,
he did not know, as rich and true, and ineffably tender as now. He threw a
sop to his common sense. "Miss Sherwood is a little thing" (the image was
so surely tall) "with a bumpy forehead and spectacles," he said to
himself, "or else a provincial young lady with big eyes to pose at you."
Then he felt the ridiculousness of looking after his common sense on a
moonlight night in June; also, he knew that he lied.

The song had ceased, but the musician lingered, and the keys were touched
to plaintive harmonies new to him. He had come to Plattville before
"Cavalleria Rusticana" was sung at Rome, and now, entranced, he heard the
"Intermezzo" for the first time. Listening to this, he feared to move lest
he should wake from a summer-night's dream.

A ragged little shadow flitted down the path behind him, and from a
solitary apple-tree, standing like a lonely ghost in the middle of the
field, came the _woo_ of a screech owl--twice. It was answered--twice--
from a clump of elder-bushes that grew in a fence-corner fifty yards west
of the pasture bars. Then the barrel of a squirrel rifle issued, lifted
out of the white elder-blossoms, and lay along the fence. The music in the
house across the way ceased, and Harkless saw two white dresses come out
through the long parlor windows to the veranda.

"It will be cooler out here," came the voice of the singer clearly through
the quiet. "What a night!"

John vaulted the bars and started to cross the road. They saw him from the
veranda, and Miss Briscoe called to him in welcome. As his tall figure
stood out plainly in the bright light against the white dust, a streak of
fire leaped from the elder-blossoms and there rang out the sharp report of
a rifle. There were two screams from the veranda. One white figure ran
into the house. The other, a little one with a gauzy wrap streaming
behind, came flying out into the moonlight--straight to Harkless. There
was a second report; the rifle-shot was answered by a revolver. William
Todd had risen up, apparently from nowhere, and, kneeling by the pasture
bars, fired at the flash of the rifle.

"Jump fer the shadder, Mr. Harkless," he shouted; "he's in them elders,"
and then: "Fer God's sake, comeback!"

Empty-handed as he was, the editor dashed for the treacherous elder-bush
as fast as his long legs could carry him; but, before he had taken six
strides, a hand clutched his sleeve, and a girl's voice quavered from
close behind him:

"Don't run like that, Mr. Harkless; I can't keep up!" He wheeled about,
and confronted a vision, a dainty little figure about five feet high, a
flushed and lovely face, hair and draperies disarranged and flying. He
stamped his foot with rage. "Get back in the house!" he cried.

"You mustn't go," she panted. "It's the only way to stop you."

"Go back to the house!" he shouted, savagely.

"Will you come?"

"Fer God's sake," cried William Todd, "come back! Keep out of the road."
He was emptying his revolver at the clump of elder, the uproar of his
firing blasting the night. Some one screamed from the house:

"Helen! Helen!"

John seized the girl's wrists roughly; her gray eyes flashed into his
defiantly. "Will you go?" he roared.

"No!"

He dropped her wrists, caught her up in his arms as if she had been a
kitten, and leaped into the shadow of the trees that leaned over the road
from the yard. The rifle rang out again, and the little ball whistled
venomously overhead. Harkless ran along the fence and turned in at the
gate.

A loose strand of the girl's hair blew across his cheek, and in the moon
her head shone with gold. She had light-brown hair and gray eyes and a
short upper lip like a curled rose-leaf. He set her down on the veranda
steps. Both of them laughed wildly.

"But you came with me!" she gasped triumphantly.

"I always thought you were tall," he answered; and there was afterward a
time when he had to agree that this was a somewhat vague reply.

CHAPTER VI

JUNE

Judge Briscoe smiled grimly and leaned on his shot-gun in the moonlight by
the veranda. He and William Todd had been trampling down the elder-bushes,
and returning to the house, found Minnie alone on the porch. "Safe?" he
said to his daughter, who turned an anxious face upon him. "They'll be
safe enough now, and in our garden."

"Maybe I oughtn't to have let them go," she returned, nervously.

"Pooh! They're all right; that scalawag's half-way to Six-Cross-Roads by
this time, isn't he, William?"

"He tuck up the fence like a scared rabbit," Mr. Todd responded, looking
into his hat to avoid meeting the eyes of the lady. "I didn't have no call
to toller, and he knowed how to run, I reckon. Time Mr. Harkless come out
the yard again, he was near out o' sight, and we see him take across the
road to the wedge-woods, near half-a-mile up. Somebody else with him then
--looked like a kid. Must 'a' cut acrost the field to join him. They're
fur enough towards home by this."

"Did Miss Helen shake hands with you four or five times?" asked Briscoe,
chuckling.

"No. Why?"

"Because Harkless did. My hand aches, and I guess William's does, too; he
nearly shook our arms off when we told him he'd been a fool. Seemed to do
him good. I told him he ought to hire somebody to take a shot at him every
morning before breakfast--not that it's any joking matter," the old
gentleman finished, thoughtfully.

"I should say not," said William, with a deep frown and a jerk of his head
toward the rear of the house. "_He_ jokes about it enough. Wouldn't even
promise to carry a gun after this. Said he wouldn't know how to use it.
Never shot one off since he was a boy, on the Fourth of July. This is the
third time he's be'n shot at this year, but he says the others was at a--
a--what'd he call it?"

"'A merely complimentary range,'" Briscoe supplied. He handed William a
cigar and bit the end off another himself. "Minnie, you better go in the
house and read, I expect--unless you want to go down the creek and join
those folks."

"_Me_!" she responded. "I know when to stay away, I guess. Do go and put
that terrible gun up."

"No," said Briscoe, lighting his cigar, deliberately. "It's all safe;
there's no question of that; but maybe William and I better go out and
take a smoke in the orchard as long as they stay down at the creek."

In the garden, shafts of white light pierced the bordering trees and fell
where June roses lifted their heads to breathe the mild night breeze, and
here, through summer spells, the editor of the "Herald" and the lady who
had run to him at the pasture bars strolled down a path trembling with
shadows to where the shallow creek tinkled over the pebbles. They walked
slowly, with an air of being well-accustomed friends and comrades, and for
some reason it did not strike either of them as unnatural or
extraordinary. They came to a bench on the bank, and he made a great fuss
dusting the seat for her with his black slouch hat. Then he regretted the
hat--it was a shabby old hat of a Carlow County fashion.

It was a long bench, and he seated himself rather remotely toward the end
opposite her, suddenly realizing that he had walked very close to her,
coming down the narrow garden path. Neither knew that neither had spoken
since they left the veranda; and it had taken them a long time to come
through the little orchard and the garden. She rested her chin on her
hand, leaning forward and looking steadily at the creek. Her laughter had
quite gone; her attitude seemed a little wistful and a little sad. He
noted that her hair curled over her brow in a way he had not pictured in
the lady of his dreams; this was so much lovelier. He did not care for
tall girls; he had not cared for them for almost half an hour. It was so
much more beautiful to be dainty and small and piquant. He had no notion
that he was sighing in a way that would have put a furnace to shame, but
he turned his eyes from her because he feared that if he looked longer he
might blurt out some speech about her beauty. His glance rested on the
bank; but its diameter included the edge of her white skirt and the tip of
a little, white, high-heeled slipper that peeped out beneath it; and he
had to look away from that, too, to keep from telling her that he meant to
advocate a law compelling all women to wear crisp, white gowns and white
slippers on moonlight nights.

She picked a long spear of grass from the turf before her, twisted it
absently in her fingers, then turned to him slowly. Her lips parted as if
to speak. Then she turned away again. The action was so odd, and somehow,
as she did it, so adorable, and the preserved silence was such a bond
between them, that for his life he could not have helped moving half-way
up the bench toward her.

"What is it?" he asked; and he spoke in a whisper he might have used at
the bedside of a dying friend. He would not have laughed if he had known
he did so. She twisted the spear of grass into a little ball and threw it
at a stone in the water before she answered.

"Do you know, Mr. Harkless, you and I haven't 'met,' have we? Didn't we
forget to be presented to each other?"

"I beg your pardon. Miss Sherwood. In the perturbation of comedy I
forgot."

"It was melodrama, wasn't it?" she said. He laughed, but she shook her
head.

"Comedy," he answered, "except your part of it, which you shouldn't have
done. It was not arranged in honor of 'visiting ladies.' But you mustn't
think me a comedian. Truly, I didn't plan it. My friend from Six-Cross-
Roads must be given the credit of devising the scene-though you divined
it!"

"It was a little too picturesque, I think. I know about Six-Cross-Roads.
Please tell me what you mean to do."

"Nothing. What should I?"

"You mean that you will keep on letting them shoot at you, until they--
until you--" She struck the bench angrily with her hand.

"There's no summer theatre in Six-Cross-Roads; there's not even a church.
Why shouldn't they?" he asked gravely. "During the long and tedious
evenings it cheers the poor Cross-Reader's soul to drop over here and take
a shot at me. It whiles away dull care for him, and he has the additional
exercise of running all the way home."

"Ah!" she cried indignantly, "they told me you always answered like this!"

"Well, you see the Cross-Roads efforts have proved so purely hygienic for
me. As a patriot I have sometimes felt extreme mortification that such bad
marksmanship should exist in the county, but I console myself with the
thought that their best shots are unhappily in the penitentiary."

"There are many left. Can't you understand that they will organize again
and come in a body, as they did before you broke them up? And then, if
they come on a night when they know you are wandering out of town----"

"You have not the advantage of an intimate study of the most exclusive
people of the Cross-Roads, Miss Sherwood. There are about twenty gentlemen
who remain in that neighborhood while their relatives sojourn under
discipline. If you had the entree over there, you would understand that
these twenty could not gather themselves into a company and march the
seven miles without physical debate in the ranks. They are not precisely
amiable people, even amongst themselves. They would quarrel and shoot
each other to pieces long before they got here."

"But they worked in a company once."

"Never for seven miles. Four miles was their radius. Five would see them
all dead."

She struck the bench again. "Oh, you laugh at me! You make a joke of your
own life and death, and laugh at everything! Have five years of Plattville
taught you to do that?"

"I laugh only at taking the poor Cross-Roaders too seriously. I don't
laugh at your running into fire to help a fellow-mortal."

"I knew there wasn't any risk. I knew he had to stop to load before he
shot again."

"He did shoot again. If I had known you before to-night--I--" His tone
changed and he spoke gravely. "I am at your feet in worship of your
philanthropy. It's so much finer to risk your life for a stranger than for
a friend."

"That is rather a man's point of view, isn't it?"

"You risked yours for a man you had never seen before."

"Oh, no! I saw you at the lecture; I heard you introduce the Honorable Mr.
Halloway."

"Then I don't understand your wishing to save me."

She smiled unwillingly, and turned her gray eyes upon him with troubled
sunniness, and, under the kindness of her regard, he set a watch upon his
lips, though he knew it might not avail him. He had driveled along
respectably so far, he thought, but he had the sentimental longings of
years, starved of expression, culminating in his heart. She continued to
look at him, wistfully, searchingly, gently. Then her eyes traveled over
his big frame from his shoes (a patch of moonlight fell on them; they were
dusty; he drew them under the bench with a shudder) to his broad shoulders
(he shook the stoop out of them). She stretched her small hands toward him
in contrast, and broke into the most delicious low laughter in the world.
At this sound he knew the watch on his lips was worthless. It was a
question of minutes till he should present himself to her eyes as a
sentimental and susceptible imbecile. He knew it. He was in wild spirits.

"Could you realize that one of your dangers might be a shaking?" she
cried. "Is your seriousness a lost art?" Her laughter ceased suddenly.
"Ah, no. I understand. Thiers said the French laugh always, in order not
to weep. I haven't lived here five years. I should laugh too, if I were
you."

"Look at the moon," he responded. "We Plattvillains own that with the best
of metropolitans, and, for my part, I see more of it here. You do not
appreciate us. We have large landscapes in the heart of the city, and
what other capital possesses advantages like that? Next winter the railway
station is to have a new stove for the waiting-room. Heaven itself is one
of our suburbs--it is so close that all one has to do is to die. You
insist upon my being French, you see, and I know you are fond of nonsense.
How did you happen to put 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' at the bottom of
a page of Fisbee's notes?"

"Was it? How were you sure it was I?"

"In Carlow County!"

"He might have written it himself."

"Fisbee has never in his life read anything lighter than cuneiform
inscriptions."

"Miss Briscoe----"

"She doesn't read Lewis Carroll; and it was not her hand. What made you
write it on Fisbee's manuscript?"

"He was with us this afternoon, and I teased him a little about your
heading. 'Business and the Cradle, the Altar, and the Tomb,' isn't it? And
he said it had always troubled him, but that you thought it good. So do I.
He asked me if I could think of anything that you might like better, to
put in place of it, and I wrote, 'The time has come,' because it was the
only thing I could think of that was as appropriate and as fetching as
your headlines. He was perfectly dear about it. He was so serious; he said
he feared it wouldn't be acceptable. I didn't notice that the paper he
handed me to write on was part of his notes, nor did he, I think.
Afterward, he put it back in his pocket. It wasn't a message."

"I'm not so sure he did not notice. He is very wise. Do you know, somehow,
I have the impression that the old fellow wanted me to meet you."

"How dear and good of him!" She spoke earnestly, and her face was suffused
with a warm light. There was no doubt about her meaning what she said.

"It was," John answered, unsteadily. "He knew how great was my need of a
few moments' companionableness with--with----"

"No," she interrupted. "I meant dear and good to me, because I think he
was thinking of me, and it was for my sake he wanted us to meet."

It would have been hard to convince a woman, if she had overheard this
speech, that Miss Sherwood's humility was not the calculated affectation
of a coquette. Sometimes a man's unsuspicion is wiser, and Harkless knew
that she was not flirting with him. In addition, he was not a fatuous man;
he did not extend the implication of her words nearly so far as she would
have had him.

"But I had met you," said he, "long ago."

"What!" she cried, and her eyes danced. "You actually remember?"

"Yes; do you?" he answered. "I stood in Jones's field and heard you
singing, and I remembered. It was a long time since I had heard you sing:

"'I was a ruffler of Flanders,
And fought for a florin's hire.
You were the dame of my captain
And sang to my heart's desire.'

"But that is the balladist's notion. The truth is that you were a lady at
the Court of Clovis, and I was a heathen captive. I heard you sing a
Christian hymn--and asked for baptism." By a great effort he managed to
look as if he did not mean it.

But she did not seem over-pleased with his fancy, for, the surprise fading
from her face, "Oh, that was the way you remembered!" she said.

"Perhaps it was not that way alone. You won't despise me for being mawkish
to-night?" he asked. "I haven't had the chance for so long."

The night air wrapped them warmly, and the balm of the little breezes
that stirred the foliage around them was the smell of damask roses from
the garden. The creek tinkled over the pebbles at their feet, and a drowsy
bird, half-wakened by the moon, crooned languorously in the sycamores. The
girl looked out at the flashing water through downcast lashes. "Is it
because it is so transient that beauty is pathetic?" she said; "because we
can never come back to it in quite the same way? I am a sentimental girl.
If you are born so, it is never entirely teased out of you, is it?
Besides, to-night is all a dream. It isn't real, you know. You couldn't be
mawkish."

Her tone was gentle as a caress, and it made him tingle to his finger-
tips. "How do you know?" he asked in a low voice.

"I just know. Do you think I'm very 'bold and forward'?" she said,
dreamily.

"It was your song I wanted to be sentimental about. I am like one 'who
through long days of toil'--only that doesn't quite apply--'and nights
devoid of ease'--but I can't claim that one doesn't sleep well here; it is
Plattville's specialty--like one who

"'Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.'"

"Those blessed old lines!" she said. "Once a thing is music or poetry, all
the hand-organs and elocutionists in the world cannot ruin it, can they?
Yes; to live here, out of the world, giving up the world, doing good and
working for others, working for a community as you do----"

"I am not quite shameless," he interrupted, smilingly. "I was given a life
sentence for incompetency, and I've served five years of it, which have
been made much happier than my deserts."

"No," she persisted, "that is your way of talking of yourself; I know you
would always 'run yourself down,' if one paid any attention to it. But to
give up the world, to drop out of it without regret, to come here and do
what you have done, and to live the life that must be so desperately dry
and dull for a man of your sort, and yet to have the kind of heart that
makes wonderful melodies sing in itself--oh!" she cried, "I say that is
fine!"

"You do not understand," he returned, sadly, wishing, before her, to be
unmercifully just to himself. "I came here because I couldn't make a
living anywhere else. And the 'wonderful melodies'--I have known you only
one evening--and the melodies--" He rose to his feet and took a few steps
toward the garden. "Come," he said. "Let me take you back. Let us go
before I--" he finished with a helpless laugh.

She stood by the bench, one hand resting on it; she stood all in the
tremulant shadow. She moved one step toward him, and a single, long sliver
of light pierced the sycamores and fell upon her head. He gasped.

"What was it about the melodies?" she said.

"Nothing! I don't know how to thank you for this evening that you have
given me. I--I suppose you are leaving to-morrow. No one ever stays
here.--I----"

"What about the melodies?"

He gave it up. "The moon makes people insane!" he cried.

"If that is true," she returned, "then you need not be more afraid than I,
because 'people' is plural. What were you saying about----"

"I _had_ heard them--in my heart. When I heard your voice to-night, I knew
that it was you who sang them there--had been singing them for me always."

"So!" she cried, gaily. "All that debate about a pretty speech!" Then,
sinking before him in a deep courtesy, "I am beholden to you," she said.
"Do you think that no man ever made a little flattery for me before
to-night?"

At the edge of the orchard, where they could keep an unseen watch on the
garden and the bank of the creek. Judge Briscoe and Mr. Todd were
ensconced under an apple-tree, the former still armed with his shot-gun.
When the two young people got up from their bench, the two men rose
hastily, and then sauntered slowly toward them. When they met, Harkless
shook each of them cordially by the hand, without seeming to know it.

"We were coming to look for you," explained the judge. "William was afraid
to go home alone; thought some one might take him for Mr. Harkless and
shoot him before he got into town. Can you come out with young Willetts in
the morning, Harkless," he went on, "and go with the ladies to see the
parade? And Minnie wants you to stay to dinner and go to the show with
them in the afternoon."

Harkless seized his hand and shook it fervently, and then laughed
heartily, as he accepted the invitation.

At the gate, Miss Sherwood extended her hand to him and said politely, and
with some flavor of mockery: "Good-night, Mr. Harkless. I do not leave
to-morrow. I am very glad to have met you."

"We are going to keep her all summer if we can," said Minnie, weaving her
arm about her friend's waist. "You'll come in the morning?"

"Good-night, Miss Sherwood," he returned, hilariously. "It has been such a
pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for saving my life. It was very
good of you indeed. Yes, in the morning. Good-night--good-night." He shook
hands with them all again, including Mr. Todd, who was going with him.

He laughed most of the way home, and Mr. Todd walked at his side in
amazement. The Herald Building was a decrepit frame structure on Main
Street; it had once been a small warehouse and was now sadly in need of
paint. Closely adjoining it, in a large, blank-looking yard, stood a low
brick cottage, over which the second story of the warehouse leaned in an
effect of tipsy affection that had reminded Harkless, when he first saw
it, of an old Sunday-school book wood-cut of an inebriated parent under
convoy of a devoted child. The title to these two buildings and the blank
yard had been included in the purchase of the "Herald"; and the cottage
was Harkless's home.

There was a light burning upstairs in the "Herald" office. From the street
a broad, tumble-down stairway ran up on the outside of the building to the
second floor, and at the stairway railing John turned and shook his
companion warmly by the hand.

"Good-night, William," he said. "It was plucky of you to join in that
muss, to-night. I shan't forget it."

"I jest happened to come along," replied the other, drowsily; then, with a
portentous yawn, he asked: "Ain't ye goin' to bed?"

"No; Parker wouldn't allow it."

"Well," observed William, with another yawn, which bade fair to expose the
veritable soul of him, "I d'know how ye stand it. It's closte on eleven
o'clock. Good-night."

John went up the steps, singing aloud:

"For to-night we'll merry, merry be,
For to-night we'll merry, merry be,"

and stopped on the sagging platform at the top of the stairs and gave the
moon good-night with a wave of the hand and friendly laughter. At that it
suddenly struck him that he was twenty-nine years of age; that he had
laughed a great deal that evening; that he had laughed and laughed over
things not in the least humorous, like an excited schoolboy making his
first formal call; that he had shaken hands with Miss Briscoe when he left
her, as if he should never see her again; that he had taken Miss
Sherwood's hand twice in one very temporary parting; that he had shaken
the judge's hand five times, and William's four!

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