Chapter IV

IF Peter's thoughts had sought his rival they would have found him at a certain fine old mansion bearing upon the face of the stone gate-post the name ROSELAWN. A well shaded drive swept up to the doorway, hospitably broad, and in seasonable weather open, giving a view of such a hall as can only be found in an old southern house. Family portraits looked down from the walls upon the carefully preserved furniture, recognizing, it may be, with some satisfaction, the presence of articles that had been in favor during their lifetime.

It was Monday morning, and breakfast time, according to the habits of the Armstrong family. The judge was in his place, his wife, comely, neat, and quiet, was in hers, and the three daughters, Laura, Violet, and Bess, had come in severally, and slipped into their chairs after a warm greeting to their father and a rather less impulsive and loving one to their quiet mother.

"Miles not down?" said Violet, the sprightliest of the sisters; a slim girl with a delicately up-tilted face in which dark eyes and a saucily curved mouth prepared one for good-humored but probably pointed banter.

"Down!" repeated that personage, coming in, and dropping discontentedly into the vacant chair next to his mother. "If you had been _up_ and keeping your chickens in order instead of--whatever else you were doing--I could have got some sleep after four o'clock and been down before. I wish you'd think proper to order that black rooster made into fricassee," he continued to his mother, who had no time to reply, however, for Violet put in an instant protest for her pet Captain Jinks, who was such a darling, and so intelligent he could do everything except talk.

Miles dropped the subject, not caring to compromise his dignity by a dispute over such a trifle, but his entire bearing expressed that appearance of unappreciated worth which is so exasperating to women in a family; divining, as they do, that the root of it is invariably some kind of causeless irritation. The girls discovered in a minute that Miles had "got out of the wrong side of the bed" that morning; this supplying a vague, kindly explanation of his acerbities of temper. Undoubtedly he was cross. It showed in his way of receiving a remark that Laura now made. Laura was of the languid type of fair women; heavy-lidded gray eyes, peachy skin, and flesh all wrought into curving lines. A subdued greed of pleasure is the predominating quality of this sisterhood, often existing under the perfect disguise of plaintive, gentle renunciation. When thoroughly understood they weep the profuse tears of spirits feeling themselves above the comprehension of the ordinary mind.

"Please get Wash to hitch Peg-leg to the phaeton right after breakfast, will you?" Laura said. "I must drive over to Miss Annie's to try on my dress she is making for the tournament."

The light of disapproval kindled in Miles' grave face.

"Are you girls going to persist in attending that silly entertainment?" he inquired.

"You certainly didn't used to think it silly," answered the one chiefly addressed. "Time was--and not so very long ago, either--when you rode at tournaments yourself! I haven't forgotten the tournament at Manasses two years ago, when we were visiting cousin Jennie Davis"----

But Miles' head had disappeared, following his hands in a dive beneath the table for his egg-cup, rolled off by a movement of his arm that would have seemed scarcely accidental could this young gentleman have been suspected of an ulterior wish to cut short some embarrassing allusion. Every one is endowed with some propensity tending to the discomfiture of others. Laura's talent in this direction, unknown to herself, lay in bringing up people's outgrown inclinations; so keeping them to the mortified level of a self they conceived they had risen above and would fain forget. Reminiscences of this kind are peculiarly afflicting to young divines, to whom the problem of preserving an appearance commensurate with the severity of their doctrine is often in danger from the good memories of their intimate friends. Can we wonder that the ordained preacher of twenty-two shrank sensitively from reminders of the peccadilloes committed by the gay youth of twenty?

Miles suffered, in the privacy of family life, from the tendency to treat him as an ordinary young man, whereas, he felt that he had become remarkable. To be informed, at the instant of assuming a superior tone, that he had been used to joining in the customs he condemned was sufficiently humiliating. But Laura's observation held a sting for his irritable conscience that she had no idea of. The dropping of the egg-cup had stopped her slow speech, for she had an acute sense of sympathy for awkwardness in a person ordinarily free from it, being herself studiously graceful.

"Let Sally bring you another egg," she was good enough to suggest. The yellow damsel dawdling against the side table put herself to some trouble to carry out the order, for the admiration that was but lukewarm in the house glowed effulgently in the kitchen; the young preacher being idolized by the negroes.

But Miles' appetite had been satisfied. He pushed back his plate and looked past his offending sister into space; his mind taking a flight in search of consolation ending at Benvenew, making some pretty notes of a pair of confiding eyes and a sweetly deferential tongue that had never uttered a word hurtful to his self-esteem. Of one devout disciple he was sure. Mingled with his triumph in it was a grateful acknowledgment of the immense advantage in this connection of quality over quantity; the sweetbriar rose being worth all the rest of feminine creation.

"What's that about the tournament?" the judge inquired. Three girlish voices chimed an answer of which he extracted the gist at his leisure; managing to arrive at the important item, that Miles was setting himself above all innocent amusements, and declined to accompany his sisters to the tournament.

"Miles' nonsense be damned!" said the head of the house. "I'll be your beau if he won't. I reckon I'm young enough yet to go about with all of you." The judge was forty-five, and excepting for a little too much fulness of chin, and a slight stiffness in his knees, he might have passed for the handsome elder brother of his son. Secretly, he was proud of the boy and looked upon the extreme views he held as the natural excess of an enthusiastic temperament concentrating itself upon theology. He expected Miles to grow more reasonable when his first zeal should have worn off. But his own disposition was choleric, and while he was looking forward to an amelioration of the strict views held by the young preacher he was frequently tempted to bluster a little upon their points of difference.

The Armstrongs were rather given to disputations, and the household atmosphere was not seldom an uncomfortable one for the neutral mother, who had positive opinions upon only two subjects: the flavor of cookery and the good looks of her husband. She was quite satisfied that her son treated her respectfully, that he had good manners, and that his clothes set well; in less important points he was welcome to follow his own inclinations. During little clashes she was accustomed to occupy herself with considerations about the next dinner. Therefore, Miles was surprised to hear her say:

"I think Miles is very much in the right in not giving his countenance to tournaments. As a minister, he couldn't. They bet on the horses and betting's not right. I heard that Penny Haywood bet fifty dollars last year and lost. I'm sure, Judge, you wouldn't like Miles to bet?"

The judge had given to this unwonted animation the compliment of wide-open eyes and smiling mouth.

"No danger of Miles betting!" he answered, reassuringly. "All I ask is that he shouldn't be so stiff-necked about his sisters taking their enjoyment in the way of all young folks."

Miles had again betrayed singular discomfiture at this new suggestion about himself. The slow, faint color of one who colors seldom and then from mortification, burned in his cheeks, and he arose with a muttered excuse and left the room, turning at the door to say:

"I'll have Peg-Leg put in the phaeton for you, Laura."

The instinct to seek comfort for his wounded self-love would have driven him straight to Benvenew, but it was too early in the day, and he had no excuse. The morning wore away tediously. Unhappily for the young man the things that had once interested him and furnished occupation for his spare hours were now under the ban of his tyrant conscience. He had embraced the course known as "setting a good example," and for the sacrifices involved he found recompense both in his own consciousness of superiority and in the fact that Nellie looked on and admired. Yet, if he was in danger of becoming a prig, there were sound faculties in him that made it quite as probable that some sudden turn would swing him into the path of practical usefulness. At home he met at every turn with just the sort of opposition to confirm his dislike of the easy self-indulgence that swayed the rest.

Everybody else in the Armstrong family did what he or she wished to do; it was for him to do what he thought right, regardless of inclinations. Laura was indolently selfish, Violet energetically set upon carrying out her own plans, and Bess, his junior by a year, was strong-minded; something that in his view was less endurable than pure frivolity. His bitter admiration for her cleverness sometimes found vent in expressions of solicitude for her future husband, to which she always responded that _his_ wife would have her profound sympathy, for his ideas of the family state were founded upon Old Testament precedent, to which the new dispensation and womanhood were altogether opposed.

Sauntering discontentedly along the great stretch of piazza Miles heard stray bits of his sisters' talk as they sat at work, and contrasted it with Nellie's sweet, sensible remarks, and the feeling of her perfection grew strong in him. Beginning in agreement of tastes and opinions the intimacy between the two young people had now reached the stage where conscious preference may at any instant change to blind attraction. Sedateness and dignity had marked their intercourse so far; but the impulse Miles felt swelling his breast was the first rise of a wave capable of sweeping away all the pretty dalliances of friendship, and of carrying him out on the swift flowing sea of a great passion. His was a temperament sure to love ardently and he had not dissipated his energies prematurely.

Two o'clock sees our young preacher mounted on his Kentucky thoroughbred mare, Stella, a beautiful chestnut, tractable only with her owner. As he leaped into the saddle she looked so knowing that he, to try her, let the reins hang, and said softly, "To Benvenew!" Whereupon the intelligent creature gave her slender head a light toss, and started off up the slope of the hill at a pace that brought him, in less than an hour, to the grand old park that surrounded that historic mansion.

He had feared to find Nellie, as usual, surrounded by the rest; but as he drew near the little summer-house, covered with a luxuriant grape-vine, now rich in purple clusters, he saw her standing there, a basket on her arm, filling it with the grapes. In a moment he was on the ground beside her, Stella standing still, untied, and docile to his wish as an obedient child.

At the first shy glance she gave him, Miles forgot the smart to his vanity that had sent him to her, forgot everything but that the sweetest girl in the world stood there, blushing under his fixed gaze, her little fingers trembling in his grasp, for when she laid her hand in his he suddenly found it impossible to let it go.

"Come and sit down, please," he said, drawing her inside the bower and seating himself beside her on the rustic bench. "It is an age since I saw you."

"Yesterday?" questioned Nellie, demurely raising her brows.

"I don't count seeing you in a crowd. The last time we really had any time together was at the fair--away back in September. There are so many things I have always wanted to talk with you about. You are the only person that has a real sympathy with me in the work I am trying to do here, Miss Nellie. And you don't know how dearly I value your sympathy."

Now, my innocent, modest beauty had known what it is to hear manly voices sink into tender cadence, declaring her sympathy necessary to all their aims and enterprises in life, nor had the deeper experience of that special pleading, to which this is the preliminary, been wanting. The practical sense her mother had spoken of gave her intimation of the thing that yet lay, half unsuspected, in the depths of Armstrong's mind, like the sweet arbutus under the smothering cedar. The cedar here was the young man's egotism, claiming attention as its right, and some storm wind would have to sweep the prickly covering away before the delicate blossoms of real love revealed themselves.

And the storm wind was even at that moment brewing. It is usually while we are most free from forebodings, most satisfied with ourselves, that the ugly head of misfortune thrusts from around the corner and brings us with a shock to a recognition that the past is perpetually linking itself with the present, and that a forgotten sin is capable of coming to life after we have left it in the desert to starve.

Nellie had begun to murmur that she was happy if anything she could do was a help to him, when her soft speech was interrupted by a flying scout from the house, a small negro boy, whose bare heels scarcely rested upon the ground while he delivered in emphatic voice a message from Mistress Amanda:

"Miss Nell, yo's ter go straight ter th' house, _ef_ yo' please, ter say good-by ter Mr. Beeswax afore he leaves. Lemme tote de grapes."

The basket was seized, and the scout began the march, looking back every instant to be assured that the young pair followed.

They followed with vexation in the heart of one, at least. To the other it was more of a habit to submit her will to others, so her face remained calm and her tones gentle as she replied to the slight remarks Armstrong forced himself to make. At the door the scout left them to deposit his burden in the kitchen and go back after Stella, whom he was burning to mount, not dreaming of the experience that was in store for him.

The young pair entered the parlor and found Mistress Amanda and old lady Powell entertaining a short, keen-eyed, sallow man whose age was not to be easily guessed. His occupation might have been set down as mercantile, and he was, in fact, a commercial drummer.

"Mr. Beesly, let me present you to Mr. Armstrong, our minister," said Mistress Amanda, formally.

The stranger bowed with ironical exaggeration. "I have met Mr. Armstrong before," he said, in what struck her as a disagreeably significant tone. She gave a swift, searching look at the young preacher.

Armstrong was standing with a rigid air of dignity that sat not ill on his handsome person. But he had suddenly grown very pale.