A Master's Degree Part 16

"Look at the foam on the whirlpool, Elinor. See how deliberately it swings upstream. Isn't that a most deceiving bit of treachery?" Vic said as he watched the river.

Elinor looked thoughtfully at the slow-moving water.

"I cannot endure deceit," she said at last. "I like honesty in everything. I said I would tell you sometime about a sacrifice I was forced to make. I'll tell you now if you will not speak of what I say."

How delicious to have her confidence in anything. Vic smiled a.s.sent.

"My father had a fortune from my mother. When he died he left me to the care of my two uncles, and gave all his money to endow chairs in universities. He thought a woman could marry money, and that he was doing mankind a service in this endowment. Maybe he was, but I've always rebelled against being dependent. I've always wanted my own. Uncle Joshua thinks I am frivolous, and he has told Uncle Lloyd that it's just my love of spending and extravagant notions that makes me rebel against conditions. It is n't. It's the sense of being robbed, as it were. It was n't right and honest toward me, even in a great cause, to leave me dependent. Uncle Lloyd would never have done it. I hope he does n't think I'm as bad as Uncle Joshua does. You won't mind my telling you this, nor think me ungrateful to my relatives for their care of me.

n.o.body quite understands me but you."

The time had come for them to join the jolly picnic crowd in the Corral. She would go back to Vincent Burgess in a little while, and this glorious day would be only a memory. And yet, down in the pretty glen, Victor had held her hands and kissed her red lips. And she had been glad down there. The void in his life seemed blacker than the blackness behind the cavern.

"Elinor," he asked, suddenly, "are you bound by any promise--has Professor Burgess--?" He hesitated.

"No," she answered, turning her face away.

"Pardon my rudeness. You know I am not well-bred," he said, gently.

"Victor Burleigh, you ill-bred, of all the gentle, manly fellows in Sunrise! You know you are not."

A great hope leaped to life now, as Vic recalled the query, "If Victor Burleigh had his corners knocked off and was sandpapered down and had money?"--and of Elinor's blus.h.i.+ng confession that it would make a difference she could not help if these things were. The corners were knocked off now, and Dean Fenneben had gently but persistently applied the sandpaper. The money must be henceforth the one condition.

"Elinor." Vic's voice was sweet as low bars of music.

"Oh, Victor, there's something I can't prevent."

She was thinking of Uncle Joshua, whose money had supported her all these years and of her obligation to heed his wishes. It was all settled for her now. And all the while Victor was thinking of his own limited means as the rock that was wrecking him with her.

For all his life afterward he never forgot the sorrow of that moment. He looked into Elinor's face, and all the longing, all the heart-hunger of the days gone by, and of the days to come seemed to lie in those wide-open eyes shaded by long black lashes.

"Elinor, my father's cruel murder and my mother dying alone were one kind of grief. My fight with those deadly poison things to rescue little Bug was another kind. My days of hards.h.i.+p and poverty on the claim, with only Bug and me in that desolate loneliness, was still another. But none of these seem a sorrow beside what I must face henceforth. And yet I have one joy mine now. You did care down in the glen. May I keep that one gracious joy--mine always?"

"You have always won in every game. You will in this struggle. Don't forget the name your mother gave you." Her eyes were luminous with tears. "We must go down to the Corral now. Tomorrow will make things all right. I shall be proud of you and your success everywhere, for you will succeed."

"I may not be worthy of victory," he said, sadly.

"You have never been unworthy. Don't be now." She smiled bravely.

They turned from the west prairie and the sunset, and slowly they pa.s.sed out of its pa.s.sing radiance down to the darkening s.p.a.ces of the old Kickapoo Corral.

And the day with its gladness and sorrow, whether for loss or gain, slipped into the shadowy beauty of an April twilight.

CHAPTER IX. GAIN, OR LOSS?

_Ye know how hard an Idol dies, an' what that meant to me--E'en take it for a sacrifice, acceptable to Thee_.

--KIPLING THE ball game on Friday, the thirteenth, was a great event this year.

The Sunrise football eleven had held the champions.h.i.+p record with an uncrossed goal line in the autumn. The basket-ball team had had no defeat this year. Debating tests had given Sunrise the victory. That came through Trench and the crippled student. And the state oratorical struggle repeated the story, a conquest, all the greater because Victor Burleigh, the athlete, wore also the laurels of oratory. And why should he not, with that fine presence and magnificent voice? As Dr. Fenneben listened to his forceful logic he saw clearly the line for the boy's future, a line, he thought, that could end at last only in the pulpit.

One more battle to fight now and Lagonda Ledge and the whole Walnut Valley would go down in history as famous soil. It was a banner year for Sunrise, and enthusiasm was at fever pitch, which in college is the only healthy temperature. In this last battle Sunrise turned again to Victor Burleigh as its highest hope. Although this was his first game for the season, he had never failed to bring victory to the Sunrise banners, and in all his base-ball practice he was as unerring as he was speedy. And then success was his habit anyhow. So "Burleigh at the bat" was the slogan now from the summit of the college ridge to the farthest corners of Lagonda Ledge; and idol wors.h.i.+p were insignificant compared to the adulation poured out on him. And Burleigh, being young and very human, had all the pleasure the adoration of a community can bring to its local hero. For truly, few triumphs in life's later years can be fraught with half the keen joy these school day victories bring. And the applause of listening senates means less than good old comrades' yells.

Vincent Burgess, A.B., Greek Professor from Boston, seemed to have forgotten entirely about types and geographical breadths and seclusion for profound research amid barren prairies. He was faculty member on the Athletic board now and enthusiastic about all college sports. Sunrise had done this much for him anyhow. In addition, the young educator was taking on a little roundness, suggestive of a stout form in middle life.

But Vincent Burgess had not forgotten all of the motives that had pulled him Kansas-ward, although unknown to Dr. Fenneben, he had already refused to consider a position higher up in an eastern college. He was not quite ready to leave the West yet. Of course, not. Elinor Wream was only half through school and growing more popular as she was growing more womanly and more beautiful each year. His salvation lay in keeping on the grounds if he would hold his claim undisturbed.

Burgess had come to Kansas, he had told Fenneben, in order to know something of the state where his only sister had lived. He did not know yet all he wished to know about her life and death here. Her name was never spoken in his father's presence after she came West, so great was that father's anger over her leaving the East. And deep in Vincent's mind he fixed the impression that his daughter had died as unreconciled to her brother as to her father himself.

This was all his own business, however, and hidden deep, almost out of sight of himself, was a selfish motive that had not yet put a visible mark on the surface.

Burgess wanted to marry Norrie Wream, and he wanted her to have all the good things of life which in her simple rearing had been denied her.

The heritage from his father's estate included certain trust funds ambiguously bestowed by an eccentric English ancestor upon someone who had come West not long before his death. These funds Vincent held by his father's will--to which will Joshua Wream was witness--on condition that no heir to these funds was living. If there were such person or persons living--but Burgess knew there were none. Joshua Wream had made sure of that for him before he left Cambridge. And yet it might be well to stay in Kansas for a year or two--much better to settle any possible difficulty here than to have anything follow him East later. For Burgess had his eye on Dr. Wream's chair in Harvard when the old man should give it up. That was a part of the contract between the two men, the old doctor and the young professor. Until the night when Bond Saxon forced him to take an unwilling oath, Burgess had had a comfortable conscience, sure that his financial future was settled, and confident that this a.s.sured him the hand of Elinor Wream when the time was ripe. With that October night, however, a weight of anxiety began that increased with the pa.s.sing days. For as he grew nearer to the student life and took on flesh and good will and a broader knowledge of the worth of humanity, so he grew nearer to this smoothly hidden inner care. And, outside and in, he wanted to stay in Kansas for the time.

In the weeks before the big ball game, Victor Burleigh seemed to have forgotten the glen and the west bluff above the Kickapoo Corral. The girls who would have subst.i.tuted for Elinor in the afternoon ramble took up much of the big soph.o.m.ore's time, and he never seemed more gay nor care free. And Elinor, if she had a heartache, did not show it in her happy manner.

On the afternoon before the ball game, a May thunderstorm swept the Walnut Valley and the darkness fell early. As Dennie Saxon waited on the Sunrise portico before starting out in the rain, Professor Burgess locked the front door and joined her. Victor Burleigh was also waiting beside a stone column for the shower to lighten. Burgess did not see him in the darkening twilight and Burleigh never spoke to the young instructor when it was not necessary.

"I must be nervous," Professor Burgess said, trying to manage Dennie's umbrella and catching it in her hair. "I had a letter today that worried me."

"Too bad!" Dennie said sympathetically.

"I'll tell you all about it sometime."

He was trying to loose the wire rib-joint from Dennie's hair, which the dampness was rolling in soft little ringlets about her forehead and neck. Half-consciously, he remembered the same outline of rippling hair, as it had looked in the glow of the October camp fire down in the Kickapoo Corral when she was telling the old legend of Swift Elk and The Fawn of the Morning Light. She smiled up at him consolingly. Dennie was level-headed, and life was always worth living where she was.

"I'll be your rain beau." He took her arm to a.s.sist her down the steps.

So courteous was his action, she might have been a lady of rank instead of old Bond Saxon's daughter carrying her own weight of a sorrow greater than Lagonda Ledge dreamed of. As the two walked slowly homeward under the dripping shelter of the trees, Vincent Burgess felt a sense of comfort and pleasure out of all keeping for a man in love elsewhere.

Victor Burleigh watched them from the shadow of the portico column.

"I believe Trench is right. He insists that Burgess likes Dennie, or that he is mean enough to deceive Dennie into liking him. A man like that ought to be killed--a scholar, and a rich man, and Dennie such a brave little poor girl with a kind, weak-kneed, old father on her heart.

Norrie ought to know this, but who am I to say a word?"

"Victor Burleigh, won't you release the fair princess from the tower?" a girl's voice called.

Vic turned to see Elinor framed in the half-way window of the south turret. And in that dripping shadowy light, no frame could want a rarer picture.

"I've fallen into the pit and am far on the road to perdition," Elinor said. "I hurried down this way from choir practice and Uncle Lloyd's gone and left the lower door locked. It thundered so, and Dennie didn't come into the study, and n.o.body heard my screams. But if I perish, I perish," she added with mock resignation.

"If you'll let up on peris.h.i.+ng for half a minute, Rapunzel, I'll to the rescue," Vic cried, "if I have to climb the dome and knock the _per aspera_ out of the State Seal and come down through the hole, _per astra ad aspera_." And then he rushed off to find an unlocked exit to the building.

From the Chapel end of the circular stairs, he called presently.

"Curfew must not ring for a couple of seconds. Rise to the surface, fair mermaid."

Elinor came up the winding stair into the dimly lighted chapel at his call. The two had avoided each other since the April day in the glen.

They were not to blame for this chance meeting now.

"When you are in trouble and the nights are dark and rainy, call me, Elinor," Vic said as they were crossing the rotunda.