Chapter SEVEN: The Beauty of Elizabeth

His interview with Evelyn Langham left North with a sense of moral nausea, yet he felt he had somehow failed in his comprehension of her, that she had not meant him to understand her as he had; that, after all, perhaps the significance he had given to her words was of his own imagining.

He waited in his room until she should have time to be well on her way home, then hurried down-stairs. He was to dine at the Herberts' at seven o'clock, and as their place was but scant two miles from town, he determined to walk. He crossed the Square, only stopping to speak with the little lamplighter, and twenty minutes later Mount Hope, in the cold breath of the storm, had dwindled to a huddle of faint ghostly lights on the hillside and in the valley.

The Herbert home, a showy country-place in a region of farms, merited a name; but no one except Mrs. Herbert, who in the first flush of possession determined so to dignify it, had ever made use of the name she had chosen after much deliberation. General Herbert himself called it simply the farm, while to the neighbors and the dwellers in Mount Hope it was known as the general's place, which perhaps sufficiently distinguished it; for its owner was still always spoken of as the general, though since the war he had been governor of his state.

Rather less than half a century before, Daniel Herbert, then a country urchin tending cattle on the hillside where now stood his turreted stone mansion, had decided that some day when he should be rich he would return and buy that hillside and the great reach of flat river-bottom that lay adjacent to it, and there build his home. His worldly goods at the time of this decision consisted of a pair of jeans trousers, a hickory shirt, and a battered straw hat. For years he had forgotten his boyish ambition. He had made his way in the world; he had won success in his profession, the law; he had won even greater distinction as a soldier in the Civil War; he had been a national figure in politics, and he had been governor of his state. And then had come the country-bred man's hunger for the soil. He had remembered that hillside where as a boy he had tended his father's herds.

He was not a rich man, but he had married a rich woman, and it was her money that bought the many acres and built the many-turreted mansion. Wishing, perhaps, to mark the impermanency of the life there and to give it a purely holiday aspect, Mrs. Herbert had christened the place Idle Hour; but the governor, beyond occasional participation in local politics, never again resumed those activities by which he had so distinguished himself. He wore top-boots and rode about the farm on an old gray horse, while his intimates were the neighboring farmers, with whom he talked crops and politics by the hour.

In pained surprise Mrs. Herbert, a woman of great ambition, had endured five years of this kind of life; with unspeakable bitterness of spirit she had seen the once potent name of Daniel Herbert disappear from the newspapers, and then she had died.

On her death the general became a rich and, in a way, a free man, for now he could, without the silent protest of his wife, recover the neglected lore of wood and field, and practise forgotten arts that had in his boyhood come under the elastic head of chores. Elizabeth, his daughter, had never shared her mother's ambitions. Perhaps because she had always had it she cared nothing for society. She was well content to ride about the farm with her father, whom she greatly admired, and at whose eccentricities she only smiled.

In this agreeable comradeship with his daughter, General Herbert had lived through the period of his bereavement with very tolerable comfort. He had rendered the dead the dead's due of regretful tenderness; but Elizabeth never asked him when he was going to make his reëntry into politics; and she never reproached him with having wasted the very best years of his life in trying to make four hundred acres of scientifically farmed land show a profit, a feat he had not yet accomplished.

Quitting the highway, North turned in at two stone pillars that marked the entrance to Idle Hour and walked rapidly up the maple-lined driveway to the great arched vestibule that gave to the house the appearance of a Norman-French château.

Answering the summons of the bell, a maid ushered him into the long drawing-room, and into the presence of the general and his daughter. The former received North with a perceptible shade of reserve. He knew more about the young man than he would have cared to tell his daughter, since he believed it would be better for her to make her own discoveries where North was concerned. He had not opposed his frequent visits to Idle Hour, for he felt that if Elizabeth was interested in the young fellow opposition would only strengthen it. Glancing at North as he greeted Elizabeth, the general admitted that whatever he might be, he was presentable, indeed good-looking, handsome. Why hadn't he done something other than make a mess of his life! He wondered, too, wishing to be quite fair, if North had not been the subject of a good deal of unmerited censure, if, after all, his idleness had not been the worst thing about him. He hoped this might be true. Still he regretted that Elizabeth should have allowed their boy and girl friendship--they had known each other always--to grow into a closer intimacy.

In the minds of these two men there was absolute accord on one point. Either would have said that Elizabeth Herbert's beauty was a supreme endowment, and more nearly perfect than the beauty of any other woman. She was slender, not tall, but poised and graceful with a distinction of bearing that added to her inches. Her hair was burnished copper and her coloring the tint of warm ivory with the sunlight showing through. North gazed at her as though he would store in his memory the vision of her loveliness. Then they walked out to the dining-room.

The dinner was rather a somber feast. North felt the restraint of the general's presence; he sensed his disfavor; and with added bitterness he realized that this was his last night in Mount Hope, that the morrow would find him speeding on his way West. He had given up everything for nothing, and now that a purpose, a hope, a great love had come to him, he must go from this place, the town of his birth, where he had become a bankrupt in both purse and reputation.

It was a relief when they returned to the drawing-room. There the general excused himself, and North and Elizabeth were left alone. She seated herself before the open fire of blazing hickory logs, whose light, and that of the shaded lamps, filled the long room with a soft radiance. She had never seemed so desirable to North as now when he was about to leave her. He stood silent, leaning against the corner of the chimneypiece, looking down on all her springlike radiance. Usually he was neither preoccupied nor silent, but to-night he was both. The thought that he was seeing her for the last time--Ah, this was the price of all his folly! At length he spoke.

"I came to-night to say good-by, Elizabeth!"

She glanced up, startled.

"To say good-by?" she repeated.

He nodded gloomily.

"Do you mean that you are going to leave Mount Hope?" she asked slowly.

"Yes, to-night maybe."

Her glance no longer met his, but he was conscious that she had lost something of her serenity.

"Are you sorry, Elizabeth?" he ventured.

To pass mutely out of her life had suddenly seemed an impossibility, and his tenderness and yearning trembled in his voice. She answered obliquely, by asking:

"Must you go?"

"I want to get away from Mount Hope. I want to leave it all,--all but you, dear!" he said. "You haven't answered me, Elizabeth; will you care?"

"I am sorry," she said slowly, and the light in her gray-blue eyes darkened.

She heard the sigh that wasted itself on his lips.

"I am glad you can say that,--I wish you would look up!" he said wistfully.

"Are you going to-night?" she questioned.

"Yes, but I am coming back. I shan't find that you have forgotten me when I come, shall I, Elizabeth?"

She looked up quickly into his troubled face, and it was not the warm firelight that brought the rich color in a sudden flame to her cheeks.

"I shall not forget you."

There was a determined gentleness in her speech and manner that gave him courage.

"I haven't any right to talk to you in this way; I know I haven't, but--Oh, I want you, Elizabeth!" And all at once he was on his knees beside her, his arms about her. "Don't forget me, dear! I love you, I Love you--I want you--Oh, I want you for my wife!"

The girl looked into the passionate face upturned to hers, and then her head drooped. And so they remained long; his dark head resting in her arms; her fair face against it.

"Why do you go, John?" she asked at length, out of the rich content of their silence.

"I haven't any choice, dear heart; there isn't any place for me here. I have thought it all over, and I know I am doing the wise thing,--I am quite sure of this! I shall write you of everything that concerns me!" he added hastily, as he heard the tread of the general's slippered feet in the hall.

North released her hands as the general entered the room. Elizabeth sank back in her chair. Her father glanced sharply at them, and North turned toward him frankly.

"I am leaving on the midnight train, General, and I must say good-by; I have to get a few things together for my trip!"

General Herbert glanced again at Elizabeth, but her face was averted and he learned nothing from its expression.

"So you are going away! Well, North, I hope you will have a pleasant trip,--better let me send you into town?"

And he reached for the bell-rope. North shook his head.

"I'll walk, thank you," he said briefly.

In silence he turned to Elizabeth and held out his hand. For an instant she rested hers in it, a cold little hand that trembled; their eyes met in a brief glance of perfect understanding, and then North turned from her. The general followed him into the hall.

"It's stopped snowing, and you will have clear starlight for your walk home,--the wind's gone down, too!" he said, as he opened the hall door.

"Don't come any farther, General Herbert!" said North.

But the general followed him into the stone arched vestibule.

"It's a fine night for your walk,--but you're quite sure you don't want to be driven into town?"

"No, no,--good night." And North held out his hand.

"Good night."

North went down the carriageway, and Herbert reëntered the house.

North kept to the beaten path for a little while, then left it and tramped out across the fields until he came to a strip of woodland that grew along a stony hillside. He followed this ridge back a short distance and presently emerged upon a sloping meadow that overhung a narrow ravine. Not two hundred yards distant loomed Idle Hour, somber and dark and massive. He found a stump on the edge of the woods and brushed the snow from it, then drawing his overcoat closely about him, he sat down and lit his pipe.

The windows of Idle Hour still showed their many lights. At his feet a thread-like stream, swollen by the recent rains, splashed and murmured ceaselessly. He sat there a long time silent and absorbed, watching the lights, until at last they vanished from the drawing-room and the library. Then other lights appeared behind curtained windows on the second floor. These in their turn were extinguished, and Idle Hour sank deeper into the shadows as the crescent moon slipped behind the horizon.

"God bless her!" North said aloud.

He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and retraced his steps to the drive. He had but turned from this into the public road when he heard the clatter of wheels and the beat of hoofs, and a rapidly driven team swung around a bend in the road in front of him. He stepped aside to let it pass, but the driver pulled up abreast of him with a loud command to his horses.

"Heard the news?" he asked, leaning out over the dash-board of his buggy.

"What news?" asked North.

"Oh, I guess you haven't heard!" said the stranger. "Well, old man McBride, the hardware merchant, is dead! Murdered!"

"Murdered!" cried North.

"Yes, sir,--murdered! They found him in his store this evening a little after six. No one knows who did it. Well, good night, I thought maybe you'd like to know. Awful, ain't it?"