The Mystery of the Locks Part 14

This same spirit caused him to haunt the road which she frequented on her visits to and from the town, and quite often he had occasion to appear surprised at her approach when he was not, when he would walk with her one way or the other until it seemed necessary for them to separate. It was not a deep _ruse_--nor did it deceive himself, for he often laughed at its absurdity--but it afforded occupation to a man who was idle more than half his time, and Allan Dorris was like other men in the particular that he wanted to do right, but found it very difficult when inclination led in the other direction. When they met in this manner, each usually had time to say only enough to excite the curiosity of the other, and to cause them to long for another meeting, and thus the winter was pa.s.sed, and the early spring came on; the season of quarreling between frost and suns.h.i.+ne.

On a certain wild March evening, after a day of idleness and longing to see the girl, Dorris put on his heavy coat and walked in the yard, up and down the old path under the trees, which gave evidences of his restless footsteps even in the snows of winter. As soon as he came out he heard the music, and between his strong desire to see the player, and his conviction that he should never enter her presence, he resolved to leave Davy's Bend and never return. He could better restrain his love for her in some distant town than in Davy's Bend, therefore he would go away, and try to forget. This gave him an excuse to enter the church, though he only intended to bid her good-by; and so impatient was he that he scaled the wall, and jumped down on the outside, instead of pa.s.sing out at the gate.

Annie Benton was watching for him when he stepped into her presence from the vestibule, and as he walked up the aisle he saw so much pleasure in her face that he regretted to make the announcement of his departure; but he knew it was the best thing to do, and did not hesitate. He even thought of the prospect that she might regret his determination, and say so, which would greatly please him.

"I have concluded to leave Davy's Bend," he said, as he took the hand she offered him, "and have called to say good-by. As soon as I can dispose of my effects I will leave this forbidden ground, and travel so far that I will forget the way back. The more I see of you, the more I love you; and if I continue to live in sight of your house, I will finally forget everything except that I love you, and do you a great harm. It will not take me long to settle up my affairs, and within a few days, at the farthest, I shall be gone."

The smile on Annie Benton's pretty face vanished at once, as she turned her head and looked from him, at the same time trying to run her fingers over the keys; but they had lost their cunning, and her hands soon lay idly on the keyboards. When Dorris finally caught her head gently, and turned it toward him, he saw that tears were in her eyes. She did not attempt to hide this, and quietly submitted when he brushed them away.

"It pains me to know that you regret this announcement," Dorris said, after looking at her a moment, "though it would pain me more to believe that you did not. It seems to be always so; there is sorrow in everything for me. I have cursed myself a thousand times for this quality, and thought ill of a nature which had no peace or content in it. I have hated myself for years because of the belief that nothing would satisfy me; that I would tire of everything I coveted, and that I was born a misanthrope and an embodied unrest. When I have envied others their content, I have always concluded afterwards that there was something in my nature opposed to peace, and that I was doomed to a restless life, always seeking that which could not be found. I have always believed that my acquaintances have had this opinion of me, and that for this reason they did not grant me the charity I felt the need of. But now that I am going away, and will never see you again, I hope you will pardon my saying that your absence has been the cause of the unrest which has always beset me. Long before I knew you existed I was looking for you; and I know now that all my discontent would have vanished had I been free to make honorable love to you when we first met. In our weakness we are permitted to know a few things; I know this to be true."

"Since you have always wished me to take no interest in this acquaintance of ours," Annie Benton replied, in a tone which might have been only sullen, but it sounded very much like the voice of an earnest woman expressing vexation and regret, "let me at least express in words what I have often expressed in my actions--that I would have long ago shown you that your affection was returned; that you are not more concerned than I am. I have always been in doubt as to what my course should be; but let me say this, in justice to my intelligence, though it be a discredit to my womanhood, you can never love me more than I do you. Nor do you more sincerely regret the necessity which you say exists for your going away."

"I hope I do not take undue credit to myself," he replied, "when I say that I have known this ever since our acquaintance began, and I only asked you to remain silent because I could not have controlled myself with declarations of love from your lips ringing in my ears. You trusted my judgment fully, and refused to hear the reasons why I said our acquaintance was dangerous; and I will deserve that confidence by going away, for I know that is the best thing to do. Sometimes there is a little pleasure in a great sorrow. I have known mothers to find pleasure in talking of their dead children, and I find a fascination in talking to you about a love which can never be realized. Heretofore I have been a man shut up in a dungeon, craving sunlight, hating myself because I came to believe that there was no sunlight; now I realize that sunlight was a natural necessity for my well-being, for I have found it, and it is all I hoped. But I must go back into the dungeon, and the necessity is more disagreeable than I can tell you. I am an average man in every respect save that I feel that I have never had an average man's chance in this matter of love, and fret because of it. That which I crave may be a mistake of the fancy, but I am not convinced of it; therefore I am not as philanthropic as those who have outgrown in experience an infatuation such as I feel for you. I have tried everything else, and have learned to be indifferent, with all my idols broken and dishonored at my feet; but there is a possibility in love which I can never know anything about."

While the girl was listening, there were times when Dorris thought she would interrupt him, and make the declaration which he had forbidden; but she controlled herself, and looked steadily away from him.

"It may occur to you as strange--it _is_ strange--that while I declare my love for you, I run away from it. In explanation I could only repeat what I have said before; that it is for your good that I have adopted this course. Had you listened to my brief story, you would now understand why my going away seems to be necessary; since you preferred not to, I can only say in general terms that nothing could happen, except good fortune, which would surprise me. I am surrounded by danger, and while my life has been one long regret, the greatest regret of all is that which I experience in leaving you. Were I to consult my own bent, I would deny all that I have intimated to my discredit, and make such love to you that you could not resist it; but I love you, and this course would not prove it. We are doing now what millions of people have done before us; making a sacrifice for the right against strong inclinations, and we should meet it bravely. There is no hesitation in my manner, I hope."

Annie Benton turned and looked at him, and saw that he was trembling and very much agitated.

"Then why are you trembling?" she asked.

"Because of the chill in the air, I presume," he answered, "for I am very determined to carry out my resolution. I might tremble with excitement in resolving to rescue a friend from danger, though it would not indicate a lack of courage. You are willing for me to go?"

"Since you say it is for the best," she replied, "yes."

Believing that he had said all that was necessary, Allan Dorris hesitated between going away and remaining. Walking over to the window, and looking out, he saw that the light he had been talking about was fading away from the earth, as it was fading away from him, and that the old night was coming back. A hill-top he saw in the distance he likened to himself; resisting until the last moment, but without avail, for the darkness was gradually climbing up its sides, and would soon cover it.

"You will no doubt think that I should have kept away from you when I saw that my presence was not objectionable, and that our acquaintance would finally result in this," he said, coming back to the girl, and standing by her side, "but I could not; let me acknowledge my fault, and say that I am sorry for it. I could not resist the temptation to enter the only presence which has ever afforded me pleasure, try hard as I could, so I kept it up until I am now forced to run away from it. Do I make my meaning clear?"

"Perfectly," she replied, without looking around.

"Life is so unsatisfactory that it affords nothing of permanent value except the love and respect of a worthy, intelligent, and agreeable woman. It is the favor I have sought, and found too late. It is fortunate that you are not as reckless as I am; otherwise no restraint would keep us apart. But for the respect I have for your good name, I would steal you, and teach you to love me in some far-away place."

"You have taught me already," the girl timidly replied, still looking away.

"Don't say that," Dorris said in alarm. "That pleases me, for it is depravity, and everything depraved seems to suit me. You must say nothing which pleases me, else I will fail in my resolve. Say everything you can to hurt my feelings, but nothing to please me."

"I cannot help saying it," she replied, rising from her seat at the organ, and facing him. "If it is depravity to love you, I like depravity, too."

"Annie," Dorris said, touching her arm, "be careful of what you say."

"I must say it," she returned, with a flushed face; "I am only a woman, and you don't know how much weakness that implies. I am flesh and blood, like yourself; but you have made love to me as though I were an unconscious picture. I fear that you do not understand womankind, and that you have made an idol of me; an idol which will fall, and break at your feet. My love for you has come to me as naturally as my years, and I want you to know when you go away that my heart will be in your keeping. Why may not I avow my love as well as you? Why may not I, too, express regret that you are going away?"

The girl asked the question with a candor which surprised him; there was the innocence of a child in her manner, and the enthusiasm of a woman thoroughly in earnest.

"For the reason that when I am gone it will be in the nature of things for you to forget me," he replied. "You are young, and do not know your heart as well as I know mine. In course of time you will probably form an honorable alliance; _then_ you will regret having said this to me."

"It will always be a pleasure for me to remember how ardently I have loved you," she replied, trembling and faltering, as though not quite certain that the course she was pursuing was right. "I will never feel ashamed of it, no matter if I should live forever. It may not be womanly for me to say so; but I can never forget you. Your attentions to me have been so delicate, and so well calculated to win a woman's affection, that I want you to know that, but for this hindrance you speak of, your dream might be realized. If I am the Maid of Air, the Maid of Air returns your affection. Surely my regard for you may excuse my saying this, now that you are going away, for you may think of it with pleasure in your future loneliness. I appreciate your love so much that I must tell you that it is returned."

They were standing close together on the little platform in front of the organ, and the girl leaned against him in such a manner that he put his left arm around her shoulders to support her. Her head rested on his arm, and she was looking full into his face. The excitement under which she seemed to labor lent such a charm to her face that Allan Dorris thought that surely it must be the handsomest in the world.

"Kiss me," she said suddenly.

The suggestion frightened the great brawny fellow, who might have picked up his companion and ran away with her without the slightest inconvenience; for he looked around the room in alarm.

"I don't know whether I will or not," he replied, looking steadily at her. "Were you ever kissed before?"

"By my father; by no one else."

"Then I think I will refuse," he said, "though I would give twenty years of my life to grant your request. What a request it is! It appeals to me with such force that I feel a weakness in my eyes because of the warmth in my heart, and the hot blood never ran races through my veins before as it is doing now. You have complete possession of my heart, and I am a better man than I was before, for you are pure and good; if I have a soul, it has forgotten its immortality in loving this earthy being in my arms. But it is the proudest boast of a loyal wife that no lips save those of her husband ever touched hers, and my regard for you is such that I do not wish to detract from the peace of your future. If I have made an idol of you, let me go away without discovering my mistake; grant me the privilege of remembering you as the realization of all my dreaming. In a year from now you will only remember me to thank me for this refusal of your request."

"In a year from now I will feel just as I do now. I will never change. I will have only this to remember you by, and my acquaintance with you has been the only event in my life worth remembering. _Please_ kiss me."

He hurriedly pressed her lips to his own, and looked around as though he half expected to be struck dead for the sacrilege, but nothing serious resulted, and the girl continued to talk without changing her position.

"I have never regretted the restraint which is expected of women until I knew you, for why should I not express my preferences as well as you? In my lonely, dreamy childhood, I had few acquaintances and fewer friends, and you have supplied a want which I hardly knew existed before. Ever since I can remember, I have longed so much to know the people in the great world from which you came that I accepted you as a messenger from them, and you interested and pleased me even more than I expected. My life has always been lonely, though not unhappy, and the people I read of in books I accepted as the people who lived outside of Davy's Bend, in the cities by the lakes and seas, where there is culture as well as plenty. I have been familiar with their songs, and played them on the organ when I should have been practising; everything I have read of them I have put to music, and played it over and over. Once I read of a great man who died, and who was buried from a church filled with distinguished mourners. The paper said that when the people were all in their seats, the voice of a great singer broke the stillness, in a song of hope, and I have imitated the voice on the organ, and imagined that I was playing a requiem over distinguished dust; but in future I shall think only of you when I play the funeral march. Since I have known you, I have thought of little else, and I shall mourn your departure as though you had always been a part of me. If I dared, I would ask you on my knees to remain."

"I have heard you play the songs to which you refer," Dorris replied musingly, "and I have thought that you played them with so much expression that, could their authors have listened to the performance, they would have discovered new beauties in them. I never knew a player before who could render the words of a song as well as the music. You do it, and with so much genius that I wonder that you have nothing but the cold, pa.s.sionless notes to guide you. One dark afternoon you played 'I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and a savage could have told what the words were. The entire strength of the organ seemed to be united in the mournful air, and the timid accompaniment was peopled with the other characters in the play from which the song is taken. That represented you; but you have had me before the organ, telling all I knew, a hundred times. Although you have refused to hear my story, you seem to know it; for you have told it on the organ as many times as I have thought of it."

"If I have told your story on the organ," the girl said, "there must have been declarations in it that you were a brave, an honorable, and an unfortunate man, for I have always thought that of you. In spite of all you have said to me against yourself, I have never doubted this for a moment, and I would trust you to any extent."

"If I expect to carry out my resolution," Allan Dorris replied, as though in anger, though it was really an unspoken protest against doing a disagreeable thing, "I must hear no more of this; a very little more of what you have said, and retreat will be impossible. But before I leave you, let me say this: You once said I was an odd man; I will tell you why. I seem to be an odd man because you have heard every sentiment there is in my heart; I have kept nothing back. The men you have known were close-mouthed and suspicious, knowing that whatever they said was likely to be repeated, and this made them cautious. Place other men in my situation as to loneliness and misfortune, and I would not seem so unusual. There are plenty of staid business men who are as 'odd' as I am, but they have never been moved to tell their secrets, as I have done to you. Even were your honorable father to express the love he feels for your dead mother, it would sound sentimental and foolish, and surprise his acquaintances; but rest a.s.sured that every man will turn out a strange creature when you get his confidence. I say this in justice to myself, but it is the truth. When you know any man thoroughly, you either think more or less of him."

"I don't dare to tell you what is in my mind," Annie Benton said, as she stood beside him, his arm still around her. "It would startle you, and perhaps cause you to change the good opinion you have expressed of me; but there can be no harm in my saying this--every day of our acquaintance has brought me more respect and love for you. Let me pay you the poor compliment of saying that the more I know of you, the more I respect and honor you."

"I believe I deserve that," he replied. "I have more than my share of faults, but it has always been a comfort for me to know that my best friends are those who know most of me. But though I have faults, I am not the less sensitive. I believe that should I kill a man, I would as keenly feel the slights of my fellows as would one whose hands were clean. Should I become so offensive to mankind as to merit banishment, my wickedness would not cause me to forget my loneliness. My mistakes have been as trifling in their nature, and as innocent, as neglect to lock a door in a community of thieves; but I have been punished as severely as though I had murdered a town. The thieves have pursued and beaten me because I carelessly permitted them to steal my substance; and the privilege of touching a pure woman's lips with my own, and folding her in my arms, becomes a serious wrong, though it has only brought me a joy which other men have known, and no harm came of it."

"I do not wish to do anything that is wrong," the girl said, with some alarm, stepping away from him, as if frightened at her situation; "but on the score of friends.h.i.+p, I may say that I shall be very lonely when you are gone. Davy's Bend was never an agreeable place, but I was content with it until you came and filled me with ambition. I wanted to become worthy of the many kind things you said of me; I hoped that I might distinguish myself in some way, and cause you to rejoice that you had predicted well of me, but now that you are going away, you will never know of it even if I succeed. I may regret your departure on this account, if nothing else. I _do_ regret it for another reason, but you reprimand me for saying it."

The dogged look which distinguished him when thinking came into his face again, and though he seemed to be paying no attention, he was listening with keen interest.

"Regret seems to be the common inheritance," he said, after a protracted silence between them. "Your regret makes me stronger; it convinces me that I am not its only victim. Duty is a master we must all obey, though I wonder that so many heed its demands, since it seldom leads us in the direction we would travel. The busy world is full of people who are making sacrifices for duty as great as yours and mine; let us not fail in doing ours. In the name of the only woman I ever loved, I ask you to bid me good-by with indifference. For the good of the best woman in the world, play a joyful march while I leave your presence, never to return."

Without another word, the girl sprang to her seat at the organ, and Allan Dorris having awakened the sleeping janitor, the music commenced; a march of joy, to the time of which he left the church without once looking back.

But on reaching the outside he could not resist the temptation to look once more at Annie Benton; so he climbed up to his old position on the wall, and looked at her through the broken pane.

He saw her look around, as if to convince herself that he was gone, when the music changed from joy to regret while her face was yet turned toward the door at which he had departed. She was thinking, and expressing her thoughts with the pipes, and Allan Dorris knew what she was thinking as well as if she were speaking the words. There were occasional pa.s.sages in the music so fierce and wild that he knew the girl was struggling with desperate thoughts; nor could she easily get rid of them, for the reckless tones seemed to be fighting for mastery over the gentler ones. The old baritone air again; but strong and courageous now, instead of mournful, and it seemed to be muttering that it had ceased to be forbearing, and had no respect for customs, or usages, or matters of conscience; indeed, there was a certain reckless abandon in it which caused the listener to compare it to the roaring song of a man reeling home to squalor and poverty--a sort of declaration that he liked squalor and poverty better than anything else. The mild notes of the accompaniment with the right hand--how like entreating human voices they sounded--a chord of self-respect, of love of home, of duty, in all their persuasive changes, urging the enraged baritone air to be reasonable, and return to the pacific state which it had honored so long; but the baritone air continued to threaten to break over all restraint, and become as wild and fierce as it sounded. Occasionally the chord of self respect, of love of home, and of duty, seemed to gain the mastery, but the wicked baritone broke away again, though it was growing more mild and tractable, and Allan Dorris thought that it must finally succ.u.mb to the eloquent appeal in the treble. "I have been mild and gentle all my life"--it seemed to be grumbling the words, as an apology for giving in, instead of declaring them as an excuse for breaking over all restraint--"and what good has it done me? Am I happier than those who have mingled joys with their regrets? My mild sacrifices have resulted in nothing, and I am tempted to try what a little spirit will do."

But the unruly spirit was pacified at last, and the music resolved itself into a lullaby of the kind which mothers sing to their children; it may have been a recollection of the player's own childhood, for it soon caused her to bow her head on the keyboard, and burst into tears.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE ANCIENT MAIDEN.