Hempfield

We all cheered wildly, and Joe Miller, with a carving knife in one hand and a fork in the other, hovered behind, his black face one great smile.

Fergus was quite wonderfully dressed up for the occasion with a very tall collar and a red necktie, and cuffs that positively would not stay up, and his attempt to brush his hair had produced the most astounding storm effects. But he appeared happy, if uncomfortable. As for Harriet, I have not seen her look so young and pretty for years. It was altogether a little irregular and shocking to her, but she met it with a sort of fearful joy.

The old Captain was perfect. He was dressed in his very best clothes – his longest-tailed coat – and wore a flower in his buttonhole, and he told us the most surprising stories of his early life. He was also a very pattern of gallantry, and in several passages with Harriet decidedly got the worst of it.

How I love such moments – as perfect as anything in this life of ours; friends all about, and good comradeship, and jolly stories, and lively talk, and good things to eat. And surely never was there a finer evening for just such a celebration. The cool spring air coming in across the lilacs and heavy with the scent of them, the shaded lamp, the occasional friendly sounds from the street, and finally, and to the amazement of us all, the town clock striking twelve. What a beautiful and wonderful thing life is!

CHAPTER XXI

STARLIGHT

I scarcely know how he managed it – how does youth manage such things – but almost before I knew what was going on, and while the Captain and I were still in the tail-end of a discussion of the administration of William McKinley, and Harriet was putting on her wraps, Nort had gone out of the office with Anthy. We heard Nort laugh as they were going down the steps.

"Never mind," said the old Captain, "let 'em go."

A few minutes later Fergus disappeared by way of the back door which led from his room into the yard. I did not at the time connect the two departures, did not, indeed, think of the matter at all, save to wonder vaguely why the dependable Fergus should be leaving his home, which was the printing-office, at that time of the night.

It was a wonderful night, starlit and very clear, with the cool, fresh air full of the sweet prescience of spring. It was still, too, in the town, and once a little outside the fields and hills and groves took upon themselves a haunting mystery and beauty.

So often and wistfully has my memory dwelt upon the incidents of that night that I seem now to live more vividly in the lives of Nort and Anthy – with Fergus crouching in the meadows behind – than I do in my own barren thoughts.

Exaltation of mood affected Nort and Anthy quite differently. It set Nort off, made him restless, eager, talkative, but it made Anthy the more silent. It glowed from her eyes and expressed itself in the odd tense little gesture she had – of one hand lifted to her breast.

"Most wonderful time that ever I had in my life," said Nort.

"It was fine," returned Anthy. Her low voice vibrated.

"It seems to me, Miss Doane, that it is only since I came to Hempfield that I have begun to live. I was only existing before: it seems to me now as though I could do anything."

He paused. When he spoke again it was in a deeper tone, and his voice shook:

"I feel to-night as though I could be great – and good."

She had never heard that tone before: she saw him in a new light, and suddenly began to tremble without knowing why. But she walked quietly at his side along the shadowy road. They seemed in a world all by themselves, with the wonderful stars above, and the fragrant night air all about them. At the corner where the sidewalk ends they came to the first outlook upon the open country. Anthy stopped suddenly and looked around her.

"Oh, isn't it beautiful," she whispered.

This time it was Nort who made no reply. They stood a moment side by side, and it was thus that Fergus, a hundred paces behind in the shadows of the trees, first saw them – with misery in his soul.

They walked on slowly again, feeling each other's presence with such poignant consciousness that neither dared speak. Thus they came to Anthy's gate: and there they paused a moment.

"Good-night," said Nort.

"Good-night," responded Anthy faintly.

She looked up at him with the starlight on her face. It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time. He had never really known her before. He was dizzily conscious of flashing lights and something in his throat that hurt him.

"Anthy," he said huskily, "you are the most beautiful woman in the world."

She still stood, close to him, looking up into his face. She tried to move, but could not.

"Anthy," he said again, with shaking voice, and stooping over kissed her upon her lips.

She uttered a little low cry and, turning quickly, with her hand lifted to her face, ran up the walk to the house.

"Anthy," he called after her – such a call as she will not forget to her dying day.

And she was gone.

Nort stood by the gate, clasping the wood until his fingers hurt him, in a wild tumult of emotion. And behind him in the shadows, not a hundred paces away, Fergus, with clenched hands.

CHAPTER XXII

FERGUS AND NORT

Fergus MacGregor was approaching the supreme moment of his life. As I have said before, it was a long time before I began to understand that roseate Scotchman. His husk was so thick and prickly that one approached him at his peril. I knew that he was as hard as nails and as real as boiled cabbage; I knew, also, that just within his rough exterior there were unusual qualities of strength and warmth, and I had grown strangely to like him and trust him; but there were reaches and depths in his character that I was long in discovering.

I remember his telling me with some pride that he was a skeptic in religion, "an infidel if ye like," and that the "Address to the Unco Guid," about expressed his views. He could also repeat "Holy Willie's Prayer" to perfection. But I soon found that he was an infidel in much the same terms that his forefathers had been Covenanters – a terribly orthodox infidel, if that can be imagined. Skepticism meant no mushy liberalism with him; it only meant that he had adopted a new creed, and that he would fight as hard for his skepticism as other men fight for their more positive beliefs. But if he had changed his religious views, the moral standards which lay beneath them like the primordial rocks had not been in the least shaken.

There remained something deep within him of the old spirit of clan loyalty. Anthy's father had almost brought him up; he had been in the office of the Star for more years than he cared to remember; he had watched Anthy through her unconscious and dreamy girlhood; had seen her blossom into youth and come to the full glory of womanhood. I never found out how old he was, for he was one of those hard-knit, red-favoured men who live sometimes from the age of twenty-five to fifty with scarcely more evidences of change than a granite boulder. He thought himself ugly, and he was, indeed, rough, uncouth, and uneducated in the schools, though in many ways as thoroughly educated a man, if education means the ability to command instantly and for any purpose the full powers of one's mind and body, as one often finds.

I do not know to this day whether Fergus loved Anthy in the sense in which a man loves a woman. Certainly it was no selfish love, but rather a great passionate fidelity to one who, he thought, was infinitely above him, the sort of devotion which asks only to serve, and expects no reward. There are few such people in this world, and they usually get what they expect.

I saw afterward, as I did not see so clearly at the time, how faithfully, jealously, completely, Fergus had served and watched over Anthy, particularly since the death of her father. He lived in the poor back room of the printing-office, worked hard at absurdly low wages, had few pleasures in life beyond his pipe and his beloved books – and watched over Anthy. He had seen, far more clearly than Anthy and Nort themselves had seen it, the growing attachment between them, had seen it with what misery of soul I can only guess.

He had begun by liking Nort in his rough way, partly because Nort had come friendless to our office and needed a friend, and partly because he could not resist Nort; and his knowledge of the true drift of affairs had not led him to hate Nort. But he saw with the clear eyes of perfect devotion just what Nort was – undisciplined, erratic, uncontrolled. He had himself felt Nort's irresistible charm and he dreaded the effect of it upon Anthy. Nort was likely to tire of Hempfield at any time, he might even tire of Anthy, having won her, and break her heart. Moreover, in Fergus's eyes, not Sir Galahad himself would have been good enough for Anthy.

It was not because Nort appeared penniless, not because he was a tramp printer, that Fergus began to set so indomitably against him, but because he was not a man. Fergus had that terrible sense of justice, duty, loyalty, that would have caused him to sacrifice his greatest friend to serve Anthy as quickly and completely as he would have sacrificed himself.

Quite unknown to me, Fergus had been watching the situation for some time, and it was his anxiety which had caused his changeableness of mood. He was not a quick thinker, and, like many men of strong character, moved to his resolutions with geologic slowness – and geologic irresistibility. For a long time he debated in his own mind what he should do. He finally concluded to take the whole matter into his own hands. He would deal directly with Nort.

It was worse than he had expected. He had seen the episode in the starlight at the gate – it burned itself into his very soul – and he had seen Anthy running toward the house with her face hidden in her hands. To a certain extent he misconstrued this incident. He could not see what happened afterward: he could not see Anthy running up the dark stairway in her home, could not see her turn on the full light in her room and look into the mirror at her own glowing face, her own brilliant eyes. She had never before even seen herself! And Nort's words, the very tone and thrill of them – "You are the most beautiful woman in the world" – singing themselves wildly within her, were changing the world for her. Through all the future years, she did not know it then, she was to see herself as some other person, the person who had sprung into glorious being when Nort had called her Anthy. She looked only once at her face – she could not bear more of it – and then threw herself on her bed, burying her burning cheeks in her pillow, and lay thus for a long, long time.

All of this Fergus could not know about, and it is possible that if he had known about it he would still have misinterpreted it. Like many an excellent older person he suspected that youth was not sufficient to its own problems.

Nort never knew, while he stood there at the gate looking up at the dark house into which Anthy had disappeared, how near he was to feeling Fergus's wiry hands upon his throat. But Fergus held himself in, his grim mind made up, considering how best he should do what he had to do.

I suppose life is tragic, or comic, or merely humdrum, as you happen to look at it. If you are old and sour, you will see little in the rages of youth, they will appear to you excessively absurd and enormously distant. You will probably not recall that you yourself, in your time, were a moderately great fool, or, if you were not a fool, you have missed – What have you not missed?

Nort could never remember exactly what he did next. He recalls rushing through shadowy roads, with the cool, sharp air of the night biting his hot face. He remembers standing somewhere on a hilltop and looking up at the wonderful blue bowl of the sky all lit with stars. He could remember talking aloud, but not what it was that he said, only that it came out of the vast tumult within him. From time to time he would see with incomparable vividness Anthy's face looking up at him, he would hear, actually hear, his own thick voice speaking; every minute detail of the moment, every sight, sound, odour, would pass before him in flashes of consciousness. He would live over the entire evening, as it seemed to him, in a moment of time. He did not know that the world could be so beautiful; he did not imagine that he himself was like that!

At its height emotion seems endless and indestructible, but it is, in its very nature, brief and elusive – else men might die of it. Nort's mood began finally to quiet down, the impressions and memories of the night rushed less wildly through his mind. And suddenly – he said it came to him with a shock – he thought of the future. He stopped still in the road. He had been so intoxicated with the experiences he had just passed through that it had actually never occurred to him what they might mean; and according to Nort's temperament the new vision instantly swallowed up the old, and, as it was cooler and clearer, seemed even more wonderful. He remembered saying very deliberately and aloud:

"I must work for Anthy all my life."

It came to him as a very wonderful thing that he could do this! Why, he could do anything for her: he could slave and dig and die! He could be great for her – and let no one else know how great he was! He could win a battle, he could command men, he could write the greatest book in the world, and no one should know it but Anthy! Oh, youth, youth!

His mind again became inordinately active: the whole wonderful future opened before him. He began to plan a thousand things that he might do. He would imagine himself walking home with Anthy, just as he had done that night, thrilling with the thought of her at his side, and he would be telling her his plans, and always she would be looking up into his face just as she had been doing at that last moment!