"Can't see what possessed him," replied the judge, "unless, unless — Julie," he stammered, changing his tone, "I half suspect he and Lucie quarrelled."
"How could they?"
"Oh, young folks have such inexplicable ways! ' Willard is, like his father used to be, full of crotchets; and Lucie is one of your self-willed little souls, you know."
"You've not caught the right view of the affair," said Miss La Rue, with all a woman's love for being indirect. "I think I know all about it."
"Well, what is it?"
"I have been having an interview with Mr. Cauthorne, from whom I have drawn some news."
"Well?"
"It was not a quarrel between Lucie and Willard."
"Oh! I only suspected that: it was barely possible, not probable! It was a quarrel, however, you seem to mean?"
"Not exactly. Willard feared there might be one."
"Well, why do you not tell me, and be done with it? The thing hangs on my mind. I want to get rid of it."
"Well, the upshot of it all is that Willard is a coward," she said very calmly, "and ran away for fear of having to meet Col. Vance."
"If Cauthorne said that, he is a" —
"Brother! I did not say Mr. Cauthorne told me that."
The old judge's face had grown florid. He was vastly irritated. His old friend's son should not be called a coward. He liked Willard for his own sake, too, as well as for his father's.
The facts in the case were, that Cauthorne had told Miss Julie La Rue just as little as he could, while meeting her persevering questions with perfect politeness. She had, nevertheless, obtained enough to satisfy her mind that Willard, with all a Northern man's dread of a personal encounter, had fled in order to escape the possibility of having to fight. And with what arguments could Lucie or Cauthorne dispute this theory?
Judge La Rue sought a conference with his daughter, who, in a few simple phrases, told him all she knew, withholding nothing. She even minutely stated the trivial circumstances touching the sketch and the fan.
"Now," said the judge, in a tone nearly severe, "I wish you would tell me, Lucie, what right Col. Vance had to get affronted because the boy" (he always said "the boy" in speaking to Lucie of Willard) "would not hand him over the picture. No young man of any spirit would be bullied in that way. The boy is a perfect gentleman, and had a right to be treated as such."
"Oh, papa, I'm so sorry if I did wrong!" Lucie began.
"No, daughter, no: you did no wrong. You had a right to demand the thing. The boy had no right to your picture without your consent; but don't you see it was arrogance, it was high-handed presumption, in Col. Vance to meddle in the affair? and I'll tell him so as soon as he returns. The boy was my guest, under my roof, a part of my household, one of my family almost. It was an insult to you and to me for Col. Vance to arrogate to himself the regulating of any of the affairs of my family or my guest." The old man had spoken slowly, and with great emphasis, like a judge giving an important ruling. Lucie remained silent, her eyes modestly downcast, and her hands toying restlessly with each other.
"What will my dear old friend think," he continued presently, "when the boy goes home, and reports that he was driven from under my roof, and that he had to leave the State of Florida for fear of death at the hands of a Southern" —
"O papa!" interrupted Lucie, looking up at him deprecatingly, "Mr. Willard would not say that."
"What else could he say?" demanded Judge La Rue.
Lucie was silent. She knew very well that nothing akin to cowardice had actuated Willard in going away; but her knowledge was of too subtle and elusive a sort to be explained by words. She had seen him standing in the rose-mist of his passion, so to speak, the beautiful love he bore her beaming from his saddened, manly young face. She was too natural and sweet a girl not to treasure with infinite tenderness those glimpses of a man's heart blown open like a flower for her sake. She had missed him greatly. She could not realize that he was gone from her forever. She hungered for more of those flashes of art-life, those carelessly graphic word-pictures of a world she had never seen, those fragmentary reminiscences of his London and Parisian experiences; his adventures as an art-student, his dallyings at the great watering-places. She stood by one of the windows of his room, and, looking away to the blue, undulating line of the horizon, wondered in what thronged city he was setting his feet. Had he already forgotten Tallahassee, — the little, dull, flower-scented, mocking-bird-haunted city,—and the poorly-cultured Tallahassee girl, who had so greedily caught every crumb of information he had flung to her?
Judge La Rue was a man of action. He immediately wrote the following letter, and sent it to Willard's home address: —
"My Dear Boy, — I have found out the secret of your flight from here. You are all wrong: there is no danger. I will not let Col. Vance hurt you. Everybody here thinks you went away because you were afraid of him. I hardly think this is just to you. If I were you I would come back at once. Vance is not especially dangerous. Hoping for your return at once,
"Very sincerely your friend,
"La Rue."
When the judge had sent a colored boy to post this letter, he smiled grimly. He even chuckled all to himself. "If that missive doesn't fetch him back I'm mistaken," he thought, as he lighted his big brown meerschaum pipe, and leaned back in his easy-chair for a philosophical smoke.
Cauthorne came every day. He showed Lucie the letters he received from Vance, whose stay was likely to be protracted, owing to the lingering, doubtful condition of his father. He knew full well that Willard's undue sensitiveness, and its consequences, had placed Lucie in a position which demanded the most delicate action on his part. He set himself to amuse her in every way which would not make his purpose obvious. He drew upon her sweet and lovable character for its best-guarded beauties, and with patient art set them in his book; but he was aware that the finest essence was escaping him. It was for him so hard a task to determine the boundary of hereditary, climatic, and sectional peculiarities, as contradistinguished from those arising out of the new order of social forces. He often asked himself the question, What manner of girl would Lucie La Rue have been had she been reared under the old Southern social régime? He as often could frame no satisfactory answer.
As the time for his departure drew near, he began to grow unwilling to leave Tallahassee. He had the excuse that his novel was far from finished; but the directors of the newspaper would have a new field mapped out for him, and, without doubt, he would have to go.
The legislature adjourned, its members going away to their widely-scattered homes, leaving Tallahassee to its old dreamy quietude and languor. A warmer swell of weather came in from the Gulf. The sky grew bluer. The smoke of Wakulla became a more frequent spectre, wavering on the southern horizon. The weather-beaten and crumbling warehouses, once the receptacles of many thousand cotton-bales, took on a more ragged appearance, as the trees overshadowing them grew grayer and duskier in the heat. The grand old homes up in the higher parts of the city seemed to withdraw themselves deeper into their groves and embowering vines.
Cauthorne began to drive with Lucie every afternoon, when the sun was low and the breeze was fine. They went out along the western road to the old Murat homestead. It is a small frame-house, but a story and a half high, with heavy brick chimneys at the ends, and a low veranda across the front. It stands some distance back from the road, with two stately oaks near its western end, and crowns a high hill overlooking the distant city and several small lakes, while to the north, west, and south, vast fertile plantations of red rolling land sweep away to the horizon.
There was no one living in the place. It was silent, dingy, out of repair. The fences were ragged, the ornamental shrubbery needed pruning. A rude trellis, overgrown with scuppernong vines, stood a little westward from the house.
Cauthorne and Lucie, leaving the driver to hold the horses by the roadside, got out of the carriage, and went up and sat on a bench under one of the oaks.
"If you will suffer it, I will smoke," said he, taking out a curious cigar-case of very fine workmanship.
"It does not even amount to a kindness if I consent," she replied; "for I enjoy the fragrant smell of a good cigar out of doors."
"Thank you. .I never can fully appreciate an open-air chat without the company of this Indian luxury. But really, I'm no great smoker. Two or three a day are all I take."
"You must be an exception. Papa smokes twenty pipes a day; and — and most gentlemen who smoke are always indulging."
"Yes: they lose sight of the exquisite part of the thing, which is a subtle pleasure coming only to those who use tobacco of the finest quality, and sparingly. Sometimes I abstain for several days in order to get the full benefit of a slow-burning Havana."
He lighted a dark cigar, and began that leisurely puffing so in accord with a warm afternoon in the dreamy South.
"Don't you miss Willard?" he presently went on to say. "You and he used to ride and drive together so much."
"I do miss him," she said, elevating her face to gaze at the blue, cloudless arch of the sky. "He was so full of interesting things, — so different from" —
"From me or Vance, for instance," said Cauthorne, interrupting her.
She smiled, and nodded her head.
"You are kind to relieve me of a difficult task. I hated to say that," she said.
He looked quizzically at her, and exclaimed with a short laugh, —
"That is well-turned. You have been learning of him. Beware, or you will lose the fragrance your isolation has given you."
"If the crudeness and wildness could be lost with it, one could bear it. Besides, Mr. Willard's teachings are all safe, don't you think?"
"I am not sure; I don't know. At least he would not wilfully give you wrong views of life. I do not accept his art-notions. He is too much of an impressionist."
"An impressionist?" she very innocently inquired.
"Oh! that means one who cares nothing about elaborateness and precision in expressing an idea, so that the idea really be expressed. For instance, he would make a symphony out of" —
"That will do," exclaimed Lucie, laughing a little: "I know what his symphonies are."
"Yes, you know and you don't know," said Cauthorne. "His combinations are many and difficult, and they are all fascinating. You found him getting a great hold on you, did you not?"
"I liked him," she curtly and naïvely replied.
"Of course. They all do. He gains smiles and favors from them wherever he goes. He makes no effort to win: they smile to know they lose."
"He is a lost subject," said Lucie: "suppose we turn away from him. He always told about what he had seen and done. Why don't you talk about your past? it is interesting, from what Mr. Willard hinted."
"When I was a boy I ploughed on a stony hillside in Vermont," he said. "I remember the horse was blind of an eye, and the plough had one handle bound on with a leather strap. Sometimes when the point hit a stone, that handle would punch me in the side, and make my ribs ache for the rest of the day."
"But when you were a man?" suggested Lucie.
"I came to fight the South, and got into Andersonville prison-pen. I died there every hour for months and months."
"Well, and after that?"
"Oh, after that I went to Iceland, and wrote letters for 'The Herald.' I froze my skin all over me, and it has never been quite the same since."
"And then?"
"Then I went to France, to report the dying struggle of Napoleon with Prussia. I got a three-cornered piece of shell through my thigh at Sedan. I saw the Red Republican doings in Paris. A woman shot me in the shoulder, thinking I was a Prussian."
"Well, go on, please: what next?"
"I have just fairly come out of service in the Russo-Turkish struggle. That was the roughest of all my experiences, excepting Andersonville."
"Was Andersonville really so horrible? I have heard our soldiers say the Northern prisons were unbearable."
"I guess that is dangerous ground," said Cauthorne, with a doleful smile. "Let's get off the subject right at once. Whenever I think of the hideous old doctor who pretended to wait on me there, I feel like" —
"There, I accept your proposition to change the subject," she exclaimed. "See how beautiful our little city looks from here."
"It is a happy, dreamy-looking place," he responded; "it reminds one of an old-fashioned bee-hive, under an apple-tree, when the bees are lying around resting. The bees always are resting in Tallahassee, aren't they?"
She looked at him as if slowly turning over and examining his phrases, then, —
"You mean that we are lazy?" she said.
"Not in the ordinary sense. I think it is the climate. People bask here. They have no time to bask in the North."
"We are dull and uninteresting to you, because we are — are ruined by the war?" she rejoined, with just the most distant hint of bitterness in her tone.
"No," he said, looking down at her with a sudden tenderness in his eyes. "You are very interesting, and you are not ruined by the war. You do not even resemble a ruin."
She laughed.
"That sounds like Mr. Willard," she said. "You must have a care, or you will be losing your — your soldierly brusqueness."
"I am losing it. I am losing a great deal else that I can spare. But I am beginning to find something to take the space, something so new and sweet and strange. It has stolen into me and filled me, like a perfume."
Lucie rose, and went to a little unkempt shrub, whose scattering flowers gave out uncertain color. She stood there in silence, with her back to Cauthorne. He elevated his voice, and continued, "You needn't run from me: I can talk enormously loud. I have a voice which can startle Tallahassee out of its summer sleep."
She did not look around. She put her hands up, and covered her ears, prettily shrugging her shoulders.
Cauthorne got up, and went to her side. He had intended to say something suiting his mood; but she turned to him, and pointing toward the city with her hand, —
"Now, from here, isn't it a lovely sight?" she cried, her voice trembling as if with the emotion aroused by the beautiful prospect.
And it was a charming view. A deep valley lay below them, beyond which rose a vast mound, whereon the houses of Tallahassee were sown, gleaming white and gray and brown among the waving groves, from top to base. The old-fashioned Capitol building stood on nearly the highest swell. Just below it, on the hither side, the old inn, the City Hotel, with all its little gabled roof-windows and dilapidated verandas, slept among its trees. Farther northward the low lines of business houses, the forsaken cotton yards and warehouses, and then the little market-house and sunny square; still beyond, and a little higher, the broad-winged, roomy, old residences looking out from among the grandest and beautifulest trees in the world. They could see the color of the foliage change with many a scintillation, as the waves of the breeze swept over those undulated groves.
"And see! Look!" she continued. "Wakulla is at full blast! "
He followed her hand with his eyes, and saw, far in the south-east, a slim, mysterious, dark column of smoke spouting straight up to the sky. It seemed actually to strike the empyrean, and rebound from its surface in dense fleeces and flakes.
"It is a great mystery, — that lonely smoke-jet in the vast Wakulla swamp," said Cauthorne musingly: "why doesn't some one undertake to reach it?"
"I don't know," she replied. Then she added quickly, "Oh, Judge White did try it, but he failed!"
"I was talking with Col. Brevard and Mayor Lewis about it yesterday," said Cauthorne; "and I have written to the proprietors of our paper suggesting that they send me to look after this inveterate smoker."
"You will find nothing," she said, with a little contempt of the scheme in her voice: "there is nothing to find. Judge White says the swamp is absolutely impenetrable. And see, while we've been talking the smoke has vanished!"
Sure enough, it had. Cauthorne turned to Lucie with a sort of incredulous cloud on his face, and said, —
"You will be fading from my sight next, and a ghost will come out of the Murat palace yonder. By the way, tell me something of Murat and his wife, will you?"
"Oh! I know absolutely nothing about them. They have fallen out of the memory of most people here. The war was such a sponge. It obliterated every thing."
"Is there nothing of them left over? Were their lives a blank here?"
"There is a curious old chair in the Supreme Court room at the Capitol," she said. "I have wanted it ever since I first saw it. It was the Prince Achille Murat's favorite chair, brought by him from France out of a palace of Louis XVI. The fleur-de-lis is carved upon its gilded wood-work. It is curiously upholstered in green velvet and satin."
They drove homeward along the red road, down the bold hill, to the flats where the car and repair shops of the railway gave forth their black coal-smoke and clang of machinery; across an attenuated streamlet, and then up the slopes of the city to the level, sandy, shady streets.
They passed by a grand mansion of former limes, — a great square building, with broad verandas and stately chimneys, which seemed unoccupied, so bare and staring its windows, so unused its doors.
"I should like to buy this place," said Cauthorne, "and come here to live. Who is the owner?"
"It belongs to an order of Catholic sisters," replied Lucie: "two ladies of the city, charitably inclined, bought it, and gave it for a religious school."
"How silly!" he said. "Such a mansion for a schoolhouse!"
"We are too poor," she replied ruefully: "we cannot keep up such places any more. It would cost so much to furnish, so much for servants, and I don't know what all. We are too poor."
This made him thoughtful for a time; and when he looked up they were at the gate of the La Rue premises, and every mocking-bird in all that tangled wilderness was an active fountain of song.
By the side of the carriage-way, between the house and the gate, a negro girl, about fourteen years of age, lay asleep, her face in a hot space of sunshine, her body and feet in the shade. She was as happy as a princess in a palace on a bed of down, fanned by perfumed attendants. She grinned lazily, half waking, as they passed.
