Southern Lights and Shadows Part 2

But to-day seemed pleasantly momentous; it called for the unusual. "I say, Bibi, when a knight went off to fight, you know, his lady used to give him a stirrup-cup at good-by. Don't you think it would be really sweet of you--"

She held off, only to be provoking. She would have thought no more of kissing Guy than a brother--or she thought she wouldn't. To be sure, she hadn't for years; there was no occasion; and then, of course, one didn't.

She laughed and shook her head, and retreated laughing. And he promptly captured her.... She freed herself, suddenly serious. And Guy stood sobered--sobered not at going to the war, but at leaving her.

"There now, run along."

"Well, good-by." But he lingered. There was nothing more to say, but he lingered. "Well, good-by. Be good, Bibi."

"It looks as if that was all I'd have a chance to be." The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was so engaging, no one called it nasal. "And it's so much more difficult and important to be charming!"

He was sobered at leaving her, but he never thought of not going with the rest. He went, and all the rest. And Bessie found herself, just when nature had crowned her with womanhood, a princess without a kingdom. To be sure, living on the border gave her double opportunities, and for contrasting romances. There were episodes that comforted her with the reflection that she was not getting wholly out of practice in the arts. And there was real adventure in flying and secret visits from Guy and the rest--Guy, who was never again just the same with her; but, for that matter, neither was she just the same with him. But, on the whole, as she pouted to him afterward, she wouldn't call that four years' war exactly entertaining!

The Halls personally did not suffer so deeply as their neighbors except from property loss. All they could afford, and more, they gave to the South, and the Northern invader took what was left. When there was nothing left, he hacked the rosewood furniture and made targets of the family portraits, in the mere wantonness of loot that, as a recriminative compliment, cannot be laid to the charge of any one period or section. Most of the farm negroes crossed the river. Funds ran low.

There had been ease and luxury in the family always, and just when Bessie reached the time to profit by them she remarked that they failed.

Even if the Halls were not in mourning, no one lives through such a time without feeling the common humanity. But Bessie, though she lingered on the brink of love as of all the other deeps of life--curious, adventurous, at once willing and reluctant--was still, in the end, quite steady.

When the war was over, the Halls were poor, on a competence of land run to waste, with no labor to work it, and no market to sell it. And Mr. Hall, like so many of his generation, was too hampered by habit and crushed by reminiscence to meet the new day.

It was the contrast in Guy's spirit that won Bessie. His was indeed the immemorial spirit of youth--whether it be of the young world, or the young male, or the young South--to accept the issue of trial by combat and give loyalty to one proved equally worthy of sword or hand.

"We're whipped," he told her, "and that settles it. Now there's other work for us than brooding over it. All the same, the South has a future, Bibi, and that means a future for you and me."

"Not in the manufacture of poetry, I'm afraid," she laughed. "You dropped a st.i.tch."

She did not seem to take his prowess, either past or to come, very seriously; and her eyebrows and her inflection went up at the a.s.sumption of the "we" in his plans. But--she listened.

His definiteness was itself effective. She herself did not know what she wanted. Something was wrong; or rather, everything was. She was finding life a great bore. But what would be right, she couldn't say, except that it must be different.

Guy looked sure and seasoned as he poured out his plans; and together with the maturing tan and breadth from his rough life, there was an unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes.

"This enthusiasm is truly beautiful!" she teased.

It was, in truth, infectious.

Why! it was love she had wanted. The four years had been so empty--without Guy.

She went into it alert, receptive, optimistic. But it nettled her that everybody should be so congratulatory, and n.o.body surprised. It wasn't what _she_ would call ideal for two impoverished young aristocrats to start life on nothing but affection and self-confidence.

It did seem as if the choicest fruit always came to _her_ specked.

"Never mind," Guy encouraged her. "Just give me ten years. It will be a little hard on you at first, Bibi dear, I know, but it would be harder at your father's now. And it won't be long!"

There was only one comment of whose intention Bessie was uncertain: "So Guy is to continue carrying you over the bad places, Bessie?"

Hm! She had been thinking it rather a fine thing for _her_ to do. And that appealed to her.

"And think what an amusing anecdote it will make after a while, Guy,--how, with all your worldly goods tied up in a red bandanna, and your wife on your arm instead of her father's doorstep, you set out to make your fortune, and to live meanwhile in the City of Un-Brotherly Love!"

But Bessie had the standards of an open-handed people to whom economy was not a virtue. There had always been on her mother's table for every meal "salt-risin' light bread" and corn pone or griddle-cakes, half a dozen kinds of preserves, the staples in proportion. Her mother would have been humiliated had there been any noticeable diminution in the supply when the meal was over; and she and the cook would have had a council of war had a guest failed to eat and praise any single dish.

Bessie had not realized how inglorious their meagreness would be, until Mrs. Grey, at the daughter's table, grew unctuously reminiscent about the mother's.

"Dear me!" Guy tried afterward to comfort the red eyelids and tremulous lips, "do you want a table so full it takes your appet.i.te at sight?"

"I'm afraid I can't joke about disgrace!" Bessie quivered.

"But, Bibi dear, Mrs. Grey is simply behind the times. The _rationale_ of those enormous meals was not munificence, but that a horde of house-servants had to be fed at a second table."

Certainly Guy and his good spirits were excellent company. And Bessie came of a race of women used to gay girlhoods and to settling down thereafter, as a matter of course, into the best of house-mothers.

But there was a difference between the domestic arts she had been taught as necessary to the future lady of a large household and the domestic industries she had to practise. Supervising and doing were not the same.

For her mother, sewing and cooking had been accomplishments; for her they were work. She had to do things a lady didn't do.

However, she was as fastidious about what she did for herself as about what was done for her. She was quick and efficient. People said Bessie Osbourne had the dearest home in town, was the best housekeeper, the most nicely dressed on nothing. You might know Bessie Hall would have the best of everything!

And when Bessie began to wonder if that was true, she had entered the last circle of disappointment.

The fact was that, after the first novelty, things seemed pretty much the same as before. Bessie Osbourne was not so different from Bessie Hall. She might have appreciated that as significant; but doubtless she had never heard the edifying jingle of the unfortunate youth who "wandered over all the earth" without ever finding "the land where he would like to stay," and all because he was injudicious enough to take "his disposition with him everywhere he went." It was as if she had been going in a circle from right to left, and, after a blare of drums and trumpets and a stirring "About--face!" she had found herself going in the same circle from left to right. It all came to the same thing, and that was nothing. Guy was apparently working hard; but, after all, in real life it seemed one did not plant the adepts' magic seed that sprouted, grew, bloomed, while you looked on for a moment. For herself, baking and st.i.tching took all her time, without taking nearly all her interest, or seeming to matter much when all was said and done. If she neglected things, they went undone, or some one else did them; in any case Guy never complained. If she did what came up, each day was filled with meeting each day's demands. All their lives went into the means and preparation for living. Other people--Or was it really any different with them? Nine-tenths of the people nine-tenths of the time seemed to accomplish only a chance to exist. She had heard women complain that such was the woman's lot in order that men might progress. But it struck her very few men worked beyond the provision of present necessities, either. Was it all a myth, then--happiness, experience, romance? Was this all there was to life and love? What was the sense, the end? Her dissatisfaction reproached the Cosmos, grew to that _Weltschmerz_ which is merely low spirits and reduced vitality, not "an infirmity of growth."

She constantly expected perfection, and all that fell below it was its opposite extreme, and worthless. She began to suspect herself of being an exceptional and lofty nature deprived of her dues.

Guy was a little disappointed at her prudent objection to children until their success was established. Prudence was mere waste of time to his courage and a.s.surance. And he believed, though without going into the psychology of the situation, that Bessie would be happier with a child or two.

"Oh, how can we do any more?" she answered, in her pretty, spoiled way.

"We're trying to cut a two-yard garment out of a one-yard piece now." At least, she was; and so Guy was.

Well, it wasn't a great matter yet. It is not in the early years of marriage that that lack is most felt. And Bessie was not very strong; she never seemed really well any more. She developed a succession of small ailments, la.s.situdes, nerves. She dragged on the hand of life, and complained. The local physician drugged her with a commendable spirit of optimism and scientific experiment. But the drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection became distinctly a whine.

She got a way of surprising Guy and upsetting his calculations with unannounced extravagances. "What's the good of all this drudgery? We're making no headway, getting nowhere; we might as well have what good we can as we go along."

There was a negro woman in the kitchen now, and in the sitting-room one of the new sewing-machines. And Guy, who, so far, had been only excavating for the cellar of his future business house, was beginning to feel that good foundation walls were about to start.

But, even when peevish, Bessie had a way of turning up her eyes at him that reduced him to helplessness and adoration. And she was delicate! "I know,"

he sympathized with her loyally, "it's like trying to work and be jolly with a jumping tooth; or rather, in your case, with a constant buzzing in your head."

The jumping tooth was his own simile. The headaches that had begun while he was soldiering were increasing. He had intermittent periods of numbness in the lower half of his body. It was annoying to a busy man. He could offer no explanation, nor could the doctors. "Overwork," they suggested, and advised the cure that is of no school--"rest." That was "impossible."

Besides, it was all nonsense. He put it aside, went on, kept it from Bessie.

The end came, as it always does, even after the longest expectation, with a rush. He was suffering with one of his acute headaches one night, when Bessie fell asleep beside him. She woke suddenly, with no judgment of time, with a start of terror, a sense of oppression, or--death?

"Guy!" she screamed.

The strangeness of his answering voice only repeated the stab of fear. She was on her feet, had made a light....

He was not suffering any more. He was perfectly conscious and rational. But from the waist down he could not move nor feel.

The doctors came and talked a great deal and said little; they reminded them that not much was known of this sort of thing; they would be glad to do what they could....