Читать книгу The Call of the South - Robert Lee Durham - Страница 12

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Colonel Phillips' daughters were enjoying life to the full in their long summer outing on the St. Lawrence. The older, Elise, had just finished with the schools and was free from many of the restraints which the strict and old-fashioned ideas of her mother had put upon her during her girlhood, and was filled with a lively enjoyment of her first untrammelled association with the males of her kind. Helen was still a girl, and her mother yet threw about her all the guards and fences that properly hedge about the days of maidenhood. But this did not in the slightest check the flow of Helen's joy in life, for the matter of sex in her associates was not an element in her happiness. Boy or girl, it mattered not to her, if her fellow in the hour's sport was quick-witted, quick-moving and mischief-loving. The extent of her thoughts of love was that it and its victims were most excellent objects of banter and ridicule; and she found the incipient affair between Elise and Evans Rutledge a source of much fun.

"Are you a hero?" she once asked Mr. Rutledge solemnly.

"Not to my own knowledge," Rutledge answered. "Why?"

"Because if you are you may be my brother sometime. Elise likes you a little, I think, and she thinks your hair would curl beautifully if you didn't crop it so close—but you will have to be a hero. You needn't fear Mr. Morgan. He failed to be a hero when he had the chance, and now his chance is gone. Nobody but a hero can interest Elise for keeps."

"When did Morgan have his chance?" asked Rutledge, amused at the mischief-maker's plain speaking.

"He went to Venezuela in papa's regiment, but never had a shot fired at him the whole time he was gone. That's what he did. Elise cannot love a man like that."

"Perhaps it was not his fault. He may have been detailed to such duties as kept him away from the shots."

"Yes, I think he says he was; but what of that? He wasn't in the fighting, and that's what it takes to make a hero. Oh, I wish I were a man. I would ride a horse and hunt lions and tigers, and I would have gone to the war in Venezuela and nobody's orders would have kept me from the firing-line—I believe that's what papa calls it—the place where all the fun and danger is. When papa talks about it I can hear my heart beat. Elise says she wouldn't be a man for anything; but I've heard her say that she could love a man if he was a man—brave and strong—you know—a man who did things. I would prefer to do the things myself. I wouldn't love any man I ever saw—unless he was just like papa. What regiment were you in, Mr. Rutledge?"

"I wasn't in any regiment," said Rutledge meekly.

"What! Didn't you volunteer?" asked Helen in surprise.

"I did not volunteer"—a trifle defiantly.

"Why?" Helen demanded scornfully. "If I had a brother and he had failed to volunteer I would never have spoken to him again! I thought all South Carolinians were fighters."

"I had other things to attend to," said Rutledge shortly. "Where is Miss Phillips this afternoon?"

"She's out on the river with Mr. Morgan. They will not be back till dinner, so you would just as well sit down here and talk to me.... But I'm sorry you didn't volunteer—you will never be my brother now.... And I was beginning to like you so much."

"I thank you, little girl, for your attempt to think well of me. I see that I have sinned past your forgiveness in not being a hero. Remember that it is only because ninety and nine men are commonplace that the hundredth may be a hero. I am one of the ninety and nine that make the hero possible—a modest king-maker, in a way. A hero must have some one else to fight for, or die for, or live for. He cannot do these things for himself, for that would make him anything but a hero. So you see that the second person is as necessary to the process of hero-making as the hero himself. It's all in the process and not in the product, anyway. It's the hero in act and not in fact, in the making and not in the taking, that enjoys his own heroism and is worth our interest. While he is making himself he thrills with the effort and with the uncertainty as to whether he will get a commission, a lathe-and-plaster arch, or a court of inquiry; and we the ninety and nine, we thrill with the gambling fever and make wagers that his trolley will get off the wire. But when he gets himself done—clean done, so to speak, wrapped in tinfoil and ready for use—then there is nothing left for the hero to do but to pose and await our applause—which is most unheroic; and we, after one whoop, forget him in the excitement of watching the next candidate risk his neck. Besides, the hero's work in hero-making is temporary and limited, for he stops with making one; but we, when we have finished with one, turn to the making of another, and our work is never done. While I am not even one hero, I have helped to make a hundred. Come now—you are generous and unselfish—which would you most admire, one finished hero listening for applause, or a hero-maker, who, without reward or the hope of reward, modestly and continuously assists in thus bringing glory to an endless procession of his fellows?"

"You think you are brilliant, Mr. Rutledge," answered Helen with an impatient toss of her head, "but you can't confuse me by any such talk as that. You needn't think you will be able to persuade Elise by any long jumble of words that you are greater than a hero. A king-maker!" She laughed mockingly at him.

"Don't fear that I will use any sophistry or doubtful method to become your brother," Rutledge rejoined amusedly. "I have only one thing to tell Miss Phillips."

"And what is that?" asked Helen with interest.

"I am inexpressibly pained to refuse your lightest wish," said Rutledge grandiloquently, "but to grant your request would be—telling; and I may—not tell,—perhaps,—even Miss Phillips."

"Do not suffer so," said Helen with an assumption of great indifference. "I don't care to hear it."

"Yes, I predict that you will be delighted to listen to it when it is told to you," said Rutledge confidently. "And it will be beyond doubt. But you are too young to hear such things yet. Be patient. You'll get older if you live long enough."

It fretted Helen to be told that she was young, as she was told a dozen times a day—not that she disliked her youth, but because of the suggestion that she was not free to do as she pleased; and her eyes began to flash at Rutledge's taunt and her mind to form a suitable expression of resentment—when that gentleman walked away from her smiling at her petulant anger.

Evans Rutledge had more interest in Helen's words about her sister than he showed in his manner or conversation. He had not told Elise what his heart had told him for many days past, though she did not need spoken words to know. He, manlike, thought that he was keeping this knowledge of his supreme affection for her a secret in his own soul, to be delivered as a startling and effective surprise when an impressive and strategic opportunity should come to tell her of it. She, womanlike, read him as easily as a college professor is supposed to read Greek, and concerned herself chiefly with feigning ignorance of his interest in her.

Elise's true attitude toward Rutledge was a sort of neutrality. She was neither for him nor against him. She was attracted by everything she saw or knew of him, and looked upon him with that more than passing interest which every woman has for a man who has asked or will ask her to be his wife.

On the other hand she was decided she could not accept Rutledge. She had but crossed the threshold of her unfettered young womanhood, and her natural and healthy zest in its pleasures overcame any natural impulse to choose a mate. Added to this were the possibilities held out in her romantic imagination as the increasing newspaper prophecies concerning her father induced day-dreams of court-like scenes and princely suitors when she should be the young lady of the White House, the most exalted maiden in great America, with the prerogative of a crown princess. A temporary prerogative surely, but well-nigh irresistible when combined with the compelling charm of American womanhood, that by right of genius assumes the high positions for which nature has endowed the gentlewomen of this republic, and by right of fine adaptability and inborn queenliness establishes and fortifies them, as if born to the purple, in the social high places of older civilizations.

Elise Phillips, with all her democratic training, with her admirable good common sense, with her adorable kindliness of heart and friendliness of spirit for every man and woman of high or low degree, with her sincere admiration for true manliness and pure womanliness unadorned by any tinsel of arbitrary rank, with all her contempt for the shams and pretences of decayed nobilities parading dishonoured titles, was yet too much a woman and too full of the romantic optimism of life's spring-time not to dream of princely youths wearing the white flower of blameless lives who would come in long procession to attend her temporary court.

And in that procession as it even now passed before her imagination, she kept watch for him,—the ideal of her maiden soul, the master of her virgin heart;—him, with the blue eyes and flaxen hair and the commanding figure that looked down upon all other men;—him, with the look and gesture of power that men obeyed and women adored, and that became tender and adoring only for her;—him, with a rank that made him to stand before kings with confidence, and a clean life that might stand before her white soul and feel no shame;—him, with a strength and courage that failed not nor faltered along the rocky paths by which the laurel and Victoria Crosses grow, and that yet would falter and tremble with love in her presence. Oh, the wonderful dreams of Youth! How real they are, and how powerful in changing the issues of life and of death.

Had Rutledge taken counsel of his mother or heeded her disapprobation of Miss Elise Phillips, he would have saved himself at least from the pain of a flouted love; and if he could have made his heart obey his mother's wish he would have avoided the stress of many heartaches and jealousies, and of slow-dying hope.

Mrs. Rutledge had her young womanhood in the heart-burning days of the Great War, and the partisan impress then seared into her young soul was ineradicable. She had a youth that knew fully the passions and the sorrows of that awful four years of blood and strife: for every man of her house, father and five brothers, had she seen dead and cold in their uniforms of gray; and her antipathy for "those people" who had sent anguish and never-ending desolation into her life might lie dormant if memory was unprovoked, but it could never change nor lose its sharp vehemence.

She had objected to Elise from the moment her son showed a fancy for her, and began quietly to sow in his mind the seeds she hoped would grow into dislike and aversion. She told him that "those people," as she invariably called persons who came from that indefinite stretch of country which her mind comprehended in the term "the North," were "not of our sort,"—that they were intelligent and interesting in a way;—that Elise Phillips was unquestionably fascinating to a young man, that her money had given her a polish of mind and manner that was admittedly attractive; but that she was not fitted to be the life companion of a man whose culture and gentlemanliness was not a product of schools and of dollars but a heritage from long generations of gentle ancestors who had bequeathed to him converging legacies of fine and gentle breeding.

Evans Rutledge, however, was of a new day; and his mother's theory that good blood was a Southern and sectional product found no place in his thought. He was tender, however, and considerate of his mother's prejudices, and was never so rude as to brush them aside contemptuously. He always treated them with deference and tried always to meet them with some show of reason. In the case of Elise Phillips he sought to placate his mother's whim and capture her prejudice by tacitly agreeing to the general proposition while excepting Elise from it by the use of Colonel Phillips' well-worn statement that his mother was a South Carolinian.

"That makes Miss Phillips a granddaughter of South Carolina," said Rutledge to his mother; "and surely there cannot be much degeneracy in two generations,—especially when the Southern blood was of the finest strain."

Mrs. Rutledge admitted that the argument was not without force, but solemnly warned her son there was no telling when the common strain might crop out.

"What's bred in the bone will come out in the blood," she said, "and bad blood is more assertive than good."

Evans loved his mother better than any other soul except Elise, and he would go far and deny himself much to obey even her most unreasonable whim, but his love for Elise was too fervid a passion to be stifled for the sake of a war-born prejudice. He would win her; yes, he must win her; and he waited only the winning moment to plead openly for his happiness.