In the morning he said to Judge La Rue, " I shall start North on the evening train. My time is up, I must go." He tried to speak lightly, and failed. His words fell heavily and almost ill-naturedly from his lips.
"I had hoped, sir," said the judge, "that you would stay a few days longer. I had a special reason for wishing you would."
"It is simply out of the question," replied Willard. "I have used up all the ozone of this region. I am needing a change. I am getting dyspeptic, or homesick, or something."
"You don't look ill, sir: you are the very picture of youthful health and spirits," said the Judge carelessly; then he knocked the ashes from his pipe, and, leaning towards the young man, added in a confidential tone, "We are going to have a pleasant affair soon, and you'd better stay until it's over. You know what I mean."
"No," said Willard almost gruffly.
"Oh! I supposed you were aware of the approach of Lucie's wedding-day," rejoined the old man. " She and the Colonel are to be married within a fortnight. You must stay, and join in the merry-making. There is to be a swarm of guests and a grand time."
"And so it is to end in that way,—a big crowd, a little ceremony, a grand time, and then all that beauty and sweetness and freshness will be snuffed out like a candle!" cried Willard.
The old judge looked shrewdly at the young man, and said, —
"It is a most desirable union. It joins two of the oldest families of the State. Lucie will be the wife of the wealthiest and the most prominent young man in Florida."
Willard strove hard to repress what was rising in him. He tried to say something bright and appropriate; but he could think of none of those clever turns of expression usually at his command. He sat there gazing blankly at the upper end of the little cane Lucie had given him.
"I am sorry you and Col. Vance don't get on well with each other," the judge added: "I had hoped your differences were settled, sir."
Willard smiled a dry, hard smile.
"Our chief difference," he said, "is one you do not seem to understand."
"Ah! I could not fairly understand, I admit; but I disliked asking you to tell me. I hope it is not irreparable, sir?"
Willard shook his head and bit his mustache. "I see no way to an adjustment," he said. "But all the burden comes on me. Vance has the upper hand." He was again trying to speak lightly. It was a dreary failure, but he went on: "I came a little too late to have a fair chance with him."
"Pardon, I don't just get your meaning," said the judge; but the truth was beginning to dawn upon his aged mind. "Your manner disturbs me, sir: I am wretchedly sorry if there's any thing really serious at the bottom of this" —
"Did it never happen to enter your thought, that I might love Lucie?" exclaimed Willard, with the bullet-like directness of intense feeling. "Do I look like a blind, deaf, passionless, unimpressible stick? Don't you know that Lucie is the sweetest, beautifulest, most lovable girl in the whole world? Don't you know I have loved her from the first?" He paused a moment, and then changing his tone, added, "What did you think brought me back here?"
The old man's eyes were wide open. A color had leaped into his face. This discovery, albeit its suddenness was bewildering, opened a vista whose perspective was fascinating. As compared with Herman Willard, Col. Vance was a poor man. The dearest dream of Judge La Rue's declining life was to see Lucie restored to the wealth which had been her birthright. Strange that it had never before entered his mind—but it had; his sister had spoken of it long ago as something to be guarded against.
"I could have lifted her out of this dull life into the world of active pleasures, into a cultured sphere, into her true place, where she would have been the queen of all," Willard continued in the extravagance of his regret and disappointment.
"Well, well," said the judge, "I had not thought of such a thing. I am bewildered. I don't know what to say. Of course there's no remedy."
They were sitting on the broad veranda at the back of the house. They looked away, under the spreading boughs of the trees, to the wooded hills a mile north. The intervening fields shone hot and dry in the sunlight.
"Remedy, no remedy, of course there's no remedy," echoed Willard. "And if there was a remedy, who'd think of applying it? But then one feels all broken up with such a blow. I wish I'd never seen this little old unfortunate and misfortune-breeding city!" He smiled upon the judge in a way half petulant, half doleful. He got up, and went to the railing of the veranda, and leaned against it with one leg bent and the other stretched out. He rested his chin in the hollow of his hand. He whistled in a whisper. Presently he went on, —
"Oh! I shall be more reconciled when I get a long way off, where I can't see her, and where her voice can't reach me. One will not feel this kind of thing always, do you think?"
The judge crossed his legs, tapped his pipe against his shoe, looked thoughtful and excited.
"You'd better not go this evening," he at length said: "there's no hurry, sir, is there?"
"Yes, a mighty hurry," exclaimed the young man. "I should go stark mad if I staid another day. Can't you see how I feel? Don't you understand? It's no boyish love I bear your daughter: I'm a man full grown, an intense and sincere man. I love with all my might; and it's no use trying, I can't stay and see her marry Vance. I can't see her marry any one but me. I feel that she ought to belong to me, that I ought to take her North as my wife and let her see what life really is, let her revel in all the delights and luxuries that wealth and society can give." He walked briskly back and forth with his head high, and his thin nostrils distended. "She's too sweet, and fresh, and beautiful to be forever paled in by the Tallahassee hills, and allowed to wither in the stagnant air of this dull town," he continued, whisking the little cane, and thrusting out his well-turned chin. " I don't see how she ever can be happy with him and shut out from the world."
Judge La Rue sat there flushed and silent, his thoughts whirling through his brain in a crush of confliction. Lucie was his idol. Willard, without dreaming of such a thing, had aroused the old man's pet ambition in thus egotistically parading his ability to better that idol's condition.
"It is for her to choose," the judge said at last; "and a girl rarely looks ahead to calculate the chances of matrimony. Lucie is hardly a woman yet."
"I didn't want her to calculate the chances, it would be horrible," cried Willard, stopping, and actually glaring at Judge La Rue. " When a woman in love stops and calculates, she sinks to the level of a self-selling auctioneer. She seems to say, 'Here I am, going, going, going at half a million, who will say the million?' It's too beastly mean for any thing!"
"So it is, so it is!" exclaimed the old man, as though he found sudden relief in the idea. "A girl must make her own choice. Vance is a fine man, sir, a fine man; and his is a good family."
Willard had often heard this phrase, "a good family," skipping through the talk of such Tallahassee people as he had met; and whenever he had been able to trace it to its final meaning it was connected with the idea of owning many slaves "befo' the wa'," and of possessing broad estates of chocolate-colored cotton-land.
Lucie touched the grand piano in the parlor, idly at first, then she played a familiar prelude, and presently began singing, in the sweetest way imaginable, the ballad beginning,—
"Oh! the Tallahassee girl is a charmer:
She sings like the mocking-bird in May."
She had no thought that Willard or any one was listening. Doubtless she was scarcely aware what she was singing. It was an unpremeditated burst of girlish music, as sincere and earnest as it was light and careless.
The old man and the youth looked at each other, and smiled, despite the perplexing nature of their interview.
"Yes," said Willard,—"a charmer and a sorceress. She sings like the sirens. There is nothing here but the bones of the victims she has lured to death. She has scorched the fields, and filled the air with deliriums! " He had at last succeeded in finding his old light manner and his old bantering tone of voice. He stood in an attitude of attention, his head a little to one side, his eyes half closed.
"One thing is plain," said the judge, arching his eyebrows: "she's in fine spirits, sir."
Willard actually laughed outright.
"Shall I go and deposit my adieus and congratulations together?" he asked; and, without waiting for a response, he went through the hall into the parlor, leaving the old judge to his reflections and his tobacco.
Lucie had finished the song, and had turned half about on the piano-stool, with one forearm resting along the keys, the other slanting down across her lap. Her head drooped, and there was a pensive smile on her lips. She was a picture to distract and bewilder an artist, a girl to set a youth wild with love.
Willard stood still a moment in the door. She looked up, and blushed to see him there, as if she were afraid he had heard her thoughts. The rosy blood shining through her cheeks gave her an extremely girlish, almost childish, look, for the few seconds that her face was turned towards him. She rose quickly, as if to go out of the room. He stepped in front of her, and said, in the airiest tones he could command, —
"Oh! don't run: I'm only going to say farewell, and leave you my best wishes for your married life, and all that. I'm not going to—to"—
She covered her face with her hands, but only for the merest point of time. Then she came bravely to him, and, putting one of the trembling hands in his, exclaimed, —
"You are not going to-day?"
"Yes: my time is up."
"Can't you stay and see me—see me go?" she faltered, smiling radiantly. "It would please us very much."
That us had a sound which grated on every molecule in Willard's body and soul. He let go her hand, as if it had given him an unbearable galvanic shock.
"I cannot," he said: "I must go at once. I am saying good-by. When I see you again—but no, I shall not see you again. I shall not come South any more."
"But I am coming North," she said quickly. "We are to spend July and August on Grand Traverse Bay, in Michigan. Do you ever go there? Is it a nice place?"
"Oh! a nice enough place; a cool, breezy, lost, lonely region," he replied. " In summer it is a good deal like what this is in winter. Shall you be at Petoskey?"
"I believe that is the place," she said.
"There's a Methodist camp-meeting there every summer, and lots of good fishing," he added.
"That will be ever so pleasant," she rejoined. "You know we are Methodists, and Col. Vance likes angling."
Willard looked at her with the feeling of one who sees all the value going out of his life. He felt every moment a rush of wild prayers struggling for utterance; but he talked lightly on, smothering his desperate passion.
When the hour for his' departure arrived he went. It was a very commonplace good-by. Judge La Rue insisted upon a promise of a visit the next winter; but Willard said he should go to Europe.
He shook hands with Lucie, and said,—"While you are on Traverse Bay, go over to Northport, and stay a while. It will remind you of Tallahassee. Not that it looks like it; but it is so isolated, so sandy, and so—desolate."
When he got into the carriage to be driven to the railway-station, he turned and took a long look at the old house. There was a breeze blowing, and he heard the magnolia-bough brushing against the window of his room.
