The Tempering Part 37

He foresaw what was coming, yet there was no escape, for the hour had struck. He listened stolidly to the ticking clock until several officers in shoulder straps trooped in and lined up, also waiting, then his superior's voice again sounded:

"Keefe, your club!"

The officer laid it on the desk.

"Your revolver." The weapon followed the night-stick. Then the chief rose from his seat.

"You have failed to meet the charges preferred against you. You have used the city's uniform as a protection for law-breaking and violence.

Now in the presence of these officers I publicly break you." He ripped the s.h.i.+eld from the patrolman's breast and the disgraced man stood a moment unsteadily--almost rocking on his feet as his lips stirred without articulate sound. Then he turned away. His lowering eyes fell upon Morgan Wallifarro, who sat without a word or a change of expression in his chair against the wainscoted wall. For an instant the patrolman seemed on the point of bursting into a valedictory of abuse--even of attack--but he thought better of it, and as he went out there was a shamble in the step that had swaggered.

Colonel Wallifarro's country place had been opened for the summer, and a series of house parties were to follow in Anne's honour, but as yet the season was young and, except for Boone, Victor McCalloway was the family's only guest.

One evening near to sunset the soldier was sitting alone with Anne under the spread of tall pines that swayed and whispered in the light breeze.

Before them, graciously undulating to the white turnpike a quarter of a mile distant, went the woodland pasture where the bluegra.s.s lay dappled with the shadows of oak and walnut. It was a land of richness and tranquil charm: the first reward of the pioneers in their great nation-building adventure beyond the unknown ranges. McCalloway's eyes were full of appreciation. They dwelt lingeringly on blooded mares nibbling at rich pasturage, with royally sired foals nuzzling at their sleek flanks. Filling in the distance of a picture that seemed to sing under a singing sky, were acres of wheat waving greenly and of the young hemp's plumed billowing: of woodland stretches free of rock or underbrush. In the branches of the pines a red cardinal flitted, and from a maple flashed the orange and black gorgeousness of a Baltimore oriole. Then the man's eyes came back to the girl.

The figure in its simple summer dress was gracefully lissome. The features, chiseled to a pattern of high-bred delicacy, were yet instinct with strength. As Boone was the exponent of the hills of hards.h.i.+p, which had been the barriers the pioneers had to conquer, so, he thought, was she the flower of that nurture that had bloomed in the places of their victory.

Just now the violet eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with grave thoughtfulness, like the shadow of a cloud upon living colour. When McCalloway looked at those eyes he recalled the water in the Blue Grotto, whose sc.r.a.p of vividness transcends all the other high-keyed colour of Naples Bay--Naples Bay, which is itself a saturnalia of colour!

Without doubt his protege had set his heart on a patrician--but at the moment there was more wistfulness than joyousness in her face, causing the subtle curvature of her lips to droop where so often a smile flashed its brightness.

"Anne," he slowly asked, "would it be impertinence for an old fellow to question that look of dream--almost of anxiety--that seems an alien expression on your face?"

The preoccupation vanished, and she turned her smile upon him.

"Was I looking as dismal as all that?" she demanded. "I guess it was the unaccustomed strain of thinking."

"You remind me," he went on thoughtfully, "of a woman I once thought--and I have never changed my mind--the most charming in Europe.

Of course that means no more nor less than that I loved her."

Anne flushed at the compliment and, quickly searching the gray eyes for a quizzical twinkle, found them entirely grave.

"How do I remind you of her, Mr. McCalloway?" The question was put gently.

"I've been asking myself that question, and an exact answer eludes me."

He paused a moment, then went soberly on: "Your hair is a disputed frontier, where brown and gold contend for dominion, and hers is midnight black. Your eyes are violet and hers are dark, flecked, in certain lights, with amber. Your colour is that of an old-fas.h.i.+oned rose garden--and hers that of a poppy field."

"It must be only by contrast, then, that I make you think of her," mused the girl. "We are absolute opposites."

"In detail, yes; in essentials, no," protested the man who was old enough to compliment boldly and directly. "You share the quality of goodness, but in itself that's as requisite to character and as externally uninteresting as bones in a body. You share a rarer gift, too. It's not so essential, but it crowns and enthrones its possessor and is life's rarest gift: pure charm. Relative charm we find now and again, but sheer, unalloyed charm is a flower that blooms only under the blue moon of magic."

The pinkness of Anne's cheeks grew deeper.

"Where is she now, sir?"

"For many years she has been where magic is the common law: in Paradise."

"Oh, forgive me. You spoke of her--"

"In the present tense," interrupted the soldier. "Yes, I always do. It is so that I think of her." He broke off, then went on in a changed voice, "But the gravity in eyes that laugh by divine right calls for explanation."

For an instant a tiny line of trouble showed between her brows, and the seriousness returned.

"I think perhaps, Mr. McCalloway, you are the one person I can tell."

She paused as though trying to marshal the sequences of a difficult subject, then spoke impulsively:

"Boone doesn't realize it," she said slowly. "I don't want him to know, because there's nothing he can do about it--yet. Since I made my debut--and that was almost three years ago--I've been under a pressure that's never relaxed. It hasn't been the sort of coercion one can openly fight, but the harder, more insidious thing. It's in mother's eyes--in everything--the unspoken accusation that I'm an ingrate: that I'm selfishly thinking only of myself and not at all of my family."

"You mean in not marrying Morgan?"

The girl nodded. "And in refusing to give Boone up. When he was in Louisville all the time, it was easier. I had his courage to lean on--but since he went back to plan his race for the legislature, I've felt very much alone and outnumbered. They are all so gently immovable.

It's terrible to feel that your family are your enemies."

"And your heart refuses the thought of surrender?"

Anne looked at him quickly, and for her eyes he could no longer employ the Blue Grotto as a simile. The waters there are shallow, and in that moment of soul-unmasking he looked through her irises into deeps of feeling, sincere and unalterable, and far down under fathoms of slighter things into the basic pools of pa.s.sion.

"You can hardly call it refusal," she said in a low voice, shaded with a ghost-touch of indignation. "I have never considered it."

"So I had hoped," he responded gravely, "but I owe you the frankness of admitting that I wasn't sure. On such subjects the boy has naturally been reticent. I could be sure only of how _he_ felt. I wanted to see him get on, and I knew what your influence would mean to him. It has been what sunlight is to a place where the shadows lie too thick. In the mountains, my dear, cows that browse where the sun doesn't penetrate get 'dew poisoning.' Human beings get it from the milk. To both it is often fatal. There's dew poisoning in Boone's blood, too, from generations of brooding shadows. He needed you."

He paused, and she bent forward. "Yes," she prompted softly.

"So I was glad for every moment he had with you--glad enough, even, to endure the thought of what it might ultimately cost him in the usury of heartache."

"And you were willing to let him undergo the heartache?" Her voice perceptibly hardened. "I'm afraid that's a loyalty I can't understand."

"It's the loyalty of a soldier's faith in him," he responded briefly. "I believed that if he must go through the fire he would come out of it not slag, but good metal."

"If his heart has to ache,"--the girl's eyes were tender again--"it won't be because I fail him."

"And, for the present, it is you who are paying the a.s.sessments of heartache?"

"I guess it's not quite that bad,"--but her smile was forced. "I'm merely being gloomed on by melancholy in the family circle as a life-hope going to wreck. By a nod of my head--an acquiescent one to Morgan--I could set the broken family fortunes up again beyond danger and make everybody happy--except myself and Boone. They can't see anything but sheer perversity in my refusal. They see me, as they think, drifting on a sea of poverty and spinsterhood when the port lies open; they see me as a bridesmaid to my friends getting married--even as a G.o.dmother to their children--and they shake gloomy heads because the water is all running by the mill!"

"And you are--how old?"--McCalloway's eyes were twinkling with the question, "--in your hopeless celibacy?"

"Twenty-one," came the exact answer. "But it's not just that. Boone still has his way to make. This fall the legislature--two years hence a race for Congress. It's all a very long road."

The soldier nodded his head in understanding. "Yes, it's the waiting game that strains the staunchest morale," he admitted. "And you realize that it won't grow easier. But what of Morgan himself?"

"I guess if there were no Boone," she made candid admission, "Morgan would have won. He has force and power--and I am a wors.h.i.+pper of those things in a man. I thought at first he was a prig, but he's developed.

It may be generosity or it may be calculation, but he will neither consent to give me up--nor try to hurry me. He plays the game hard, but he plays it fair."

McCalloway rekindled the pipe that had died, and his next words followed a meditative cloud of smoke from his lips. "It's not hard to understand any man's loving you. I happen to know that more than a few have. Yet if any one might escape, I'd pick Morgan. For him social values and externals are ruling pa.s.sions. For you they are incidental only."