THE two or three half-drunken members of the legislature who chanced, between potations, to be sauntering back and forth on the concrete floor of the City Hotel veranda, witnessed the arrival of the "hack" from Thomasville, and saw the unexpected meeting of two warm but long-separated friends.
Willard had scarcely alighted when Cauthorne pounced upon him. They held each other off at arm's-length, and gazed in a rapture of pleased surprise.
"Cauthorne! Is it really you?" "Willard! Willard! My dear boy!" Their tones, husky with emotion, meant a great deal. Neither could formulate any definite phrase. Silence and mere ejaculations alternated most expressively. Their embarrassment was really schoolboyish in its outward manifestations.
They had been apart for four years, and this meeting was the offspring of the merest chance. As they stood there, the contrast in their physiques was very striking. In fact, no two men could less resemble each other. Cauthorne very tall, broad-shouldered, powerful in body and limb, looked like a bronze Hercules beside Willard, whose medium stature, and lithe, light gracefulness of build was emphasized by the comparison.
As they went into the hotel, they met Arthur Vance coming out. His fine dark face and courtly bearing impressed Willard, as they did every one who came in contact with him. He was so different from ordinary men in person and in manners. He bowed to Cauthorne, and passed on.
A day or two later, when Willard had become well settled in the old hotel, he knocked at the door of Cauthorne's room. He was admitted, and found his friend in the midst of scattered sheets of manuscript, toiling away at his novel.
"I am in a hobble, Cauthorne," he said, half lightly, half despairingly.
"Well, what now?" inquired Cauthorne, looking up, with a pen behind his ear.
"A deuced hobble," continued Willard, dropping into a chair. "It all comes of an ante-bellum friendship of the dearest sort betwixt my father and one of the old nabobs here. I didn't dream, when I sent up my card, that I should go and run into such a dilemma."
Cauthorne preserved an attitude of expectant, interested inquiry.
"Really the intimacy was before I was born, I suppose. I have heard my father speak of it, over and over, ever since I can remember. Those visits he used to make every winter to the house of his Tallahassee friend were his favorite theme. The last thing my dear father said to me, when I was setting out from home to come here, was to be sure and call on this dear old Tallahassee friend. You know my father is past travelling now, — partial paralysis."
"As yet the startling difficulty of your situation fails to impress me," said Cauthorne, pushing a half-empty box of cigars across the table to his friend.
"I know," exclaimed Willard impatiently, "I know; but there's more to come. The old nabob has called upon me; in fact, he has rushed upon me, and overwhelmed me. You cannot imagine how completely he has me in his power."
"There's a point to all this, I imagine," said Cauthorne, — "a startling point, which you will uncover directly, like disclosing a masked battery."
"It was worse than a torpedo under one's feet," said Willard, nervously lighting a cigar. "If there's any one thing I abhor, it's becoming a part of some one's family. I can't bear it. Now, my father used to delight in such a thing. He used to come here, and stay for three months at a time in the old judge's mansion."
"Judge who?" demanded Cauthorne, in a tone of suddenly aroused interest.
"Judge La Rue," replied Willard, — "a stately old-timer, who, in the days of slavery, lived like a lord, dispensing absolutely unlimited hospitality."
"Judge La Rue," repeated Cauthorne in a wholly inconsequent way.
"Yes," said Willard; "and nothing will satisfy him but that I shall go to his house, baggage and all, and make it my home so long as I stay here. He puts it on high ground, and I see that I cannot refuse him."
"Of course you cannot," said Cauthorne: "you ought not to think of refusing." Then, with the air of one who has the right to speak as an expert, he added, "These Southern folk have very high and very queer notions of hospitality. It would be a mortal offence, an unspeakable breach of etiquette, under the circumstances, for you not to take the judge's house for your hotel. So you may order a dray, and move in."
Willard laughed at his friend's severe levity, little dreaming how joyfully Cauthorne would have accepted such an offer with such a plea to back it. As for the latter gentleman, he gazed abstractedly at the queer old mantle over the queer little fireplace. He drummed on the table with his fingers.
"To be explicit," said Willard, "I have accepted Judge La Rue's offer, and shall, as you say, 'move in' to-morrow."
"You are a lucky dog," exclaimed Cauthorne earnestly. But Willard thought it was sarcasm; for Cauthorne immediately added, "You get out of a dilemma so easily. I thought you had come to me for counsel."
"So I have."
"Yes, after the fact. Little good advice can do you now."
"I am afraid you are right."
"No, I am not. I never was exactly right. I always get there too late. The key is always lost. Some one always gets in ahead of me," cried Cauthorne, with a vehemence which seemed to Willard absurdly out of place. But a moment later he radically changed his tone and manner, and with his old gentle laugh said, —
"You will better understand my feelings in a day or two. You are going into green pastures which I have long been viewing from afar."
Of course Cauthorne's real meaning was lost on Willard, who had not even the slightest knowledge of his friend's troubles. For a time silence fell between them; Willard lazily smoking, Cauthorne still softly drumming on the table with the fingers of his left hand.
"Well, it's nothing serious, after all," said Willard, as if resolutely shaking off the disagreeable impression of the moment. "I suppose one must cast about for some pleasant antidote. By the way," and he smiled like a suddenly pleased boy, "by the way, I came over from Thomasville with a Tallahassee girl of wonderful beauty. She and her one-legged brother — an ex-Confederate soldier, I suspect — had been visiting an aunt up there. Now, if I could" —
"If you could," interrupted Cauthorne with peculiar emphasis. "How can you help it? Will you shut your eyes, stop your ears, and bridle your tongue?" He had kept all Miss La Rue's comings and goings well in view. He knew all that Willard could tell him, and more. "The judge's daughter is the handsomest, loveliest, most noteworthy girl in Florida. It was she who came in the ' hack' with you. You are going to be one of the family, her father's guest, her intimate friend, her frantic lover."
The next day Willard took possession of a grand airy room in the La Rue homestead, from whose many-mullioned windows he could look away over a rolling landscape, dotted with old weather-beaten plantation houses, to the vast forests in the mysterious regions of Wakulla.
This room pleased him. Its floor was of white hard wood, smooth as glass, with a worn rug in the centre. A tall mahogany bedstead stood in an airy niche. The walls were papered in dull gray, without border or dado. A round table of heavy workmanship, richly veneered, stood on the rug. A small ebony-framed looking-glass leaned forward above a curious chest of drawers. A landscape in oil, very old, but not valuable, and one of those French lithographic reproductions of the blue-veiled Madonna of Correggio, hung flat and high by dull gold ropes. The windows and the bedstead were curtained in costly lace, yellow with age. The ceiling, grayish sky-blue, had a central rosette of stucco-work, from which depended a brass chandelier bedecked with hexagonal glass crystals. A small fireplace, containing tall yellow andirons and a curious wire fender, was surmounted by a black mantle of fluted and carved wood. The room had a look of fixedness and amplitude, an old-time scarcity of decoration, a cool soberness of tint, an indescribable atmosphere of broad serenity and changeless repose. It was, in fact, a guest-chamber of the ante-bellum, King-Cotton days.
Willard sat by a window across which a magnolia had flung a glossy spray of rich green leaves. The balmy wind from the Gulf came in upon him with the fragrance of yellow jasmine. He heard a mocking-bird. He looked happy.
One morning, not long after, Cauthorne walked the whole length of that broad street of Tallahassee which runs north and south along the highest ground in the city.
He moved slowly, studying the trees, the fences, the houses, the curiously arranged, lozenge-shaped flower-beds, the tall windmills for pumping water, the long verandas, the rows of dormer-windows.
When he came to Judge La Rue's place, he saw, through a rift in the foliage, Willard and Miss La Rue sitting on a bench under a mossy live-oak. The stately judge in an easy-chair sat conveniently near. They seemed as contented and smiling as the cloudless sky that shimmered overhead.
"He is inside the pale," thought Cauthorne.
