An Indiana Girl/Chapter 8

When Harvey had gone the men stood just outside the fence and talked of him. Virgie went through the gate and leaned against the long chain that served to pull it shut, and there waited for him to come into view for the last time on the brink of a far-away hill. Her thoughts followed him over the road as far as she knew it on through the district she could picture from the stories of her friends—then out into the pliable unknown that revolved with a panorama of imaginings.

From where the men stood the road was obscured by a line of trees, but she knew from long intimacy with the hills where best to first sight advancing travelers, and when Harvey came into view again, more than a mile away, she was the only one of the trio to see him. She watched eagerly for him to turn, forgetting altogether his newness to the surroundings, and a merry laugh of triumph was on her lips as she stood in readiness to wave him a farewell which would surprise Kent and her father. She watched the receding vehicle intently, starting twice or thrice as she judged Harvey was about to turn. As the team passed over the brink and slowly sunk from view, leaving only Frank atop the wagon in clear outline against the sky, she thought of a geography lesson wherein a ship passed over a round sea, leaving but its topmasts to the view, and she could have shouted as the last chance was slipping from her. Then he too was gone, and she flushed self-consciously as her eagerness came before her, and her wounded feelings made her resent his lack of recognition. All the joyousness left her heart, and she would have remonstrated, but neither of the men had seen, and she turned hastily and rushed indoors filled with a despair that she could not understand.

"I might think that you two had been brothers at some time long ago if I believed in reincarnation—you look so much alike," laughed Brandt.

"The resemblance is all on the outside," said Kent dejectedly.

"Maybe so, maybe so," Brandt replied, taken out of his good humor, "but the outward resemblance is wonderful nevertheless. I never saw anything so striking!"

"More's the pity that it could not have struck in," Kent replied, musingly. Then went on with a livelier interest in his remarks: "Did you ever observe the interest with which likenesses are discussed—the wonderment with which people take it, and all that?"

"Yes," Brandt assented, not grasping the point, but contented to wait the continuance.

"Then did you ever take into your calculations the millions of us that there are existing now and have existed in the past, and no two ever of the same exact mould? If you have I believe that you will think as I do, and that is that the wonderment should be over our differences within apparently so limited a design instead of a similarity being remarkable."

"I had never thought of that," he replied, knitting his brows and looking at Kent studiously, though not contemplating the subject under discussion so much as he did Kent's unusualness and strange way of making untimely and valueless observations.

"I guess I had better get to work," he said after a time, then stood a moment before he left Kent awkwardly, and Kent sighed and went in to where Virgie was sitting in a blue study.

No word of recognition came from her, nor was his mood one that missed her habitual cheerfulness. He crossed the room and seated himself in the low-silled window, pushed the drapery back carelessly and watched a blue bottle-fly reflectively as the last of his kind buzzed with frantic energy against the green mosquito bar. His carelessness with her dainty curtains caused Virgie to observe him more closely, and in doing so she detected his ill-humor.

"What is wrong now?" she asked, forgetting at once her own dejection.

"Oh! nothing," he replied, taking his eyes from the fly and turning toward her a serious expression.

"Honest, now?"

"Nothing much, anyway," he said. "I am just lonesome."

"Lonesome?" she asked, surprisedly.

"Yes, lonesome," he snapped. "I was thinking of Harvey and where he is going. Somehow it brings back old memories, and they make me lonesome," he went on peevishly. "Out there, where people do things and live, life is worth while," he concluded with a sigh.

"But people work hard here," she suggested.

"Of course they do," he assented. "That is all they do do—is work—manual work, but it is brains—brains—brains, I tell you, that count in the doing of things. What is there here to hold interest? What is there of man-made art, or of letters, or of science, or study? No friendly pitting of brains against brains. Just as Harvey implied, we are early risers that we may be long workers. But we never think or study."

"Mr. Harvey was only joking," she replied resentfully, and yet without the knowing why. She could understand but a portion of his reasoning, and that understanding awakened only antagonism in her breast, but his talk of the world of letters and man-made art was of things outside her narrow life, and she felt incompetent to debate upon them, though in the antagonism he had awakened she sought for reasoning to place against his own, and when the thought occurred to her she continued:

"Of books I know but little, and of man-made art, as you term it, I know less; but we have God-made art, which must be best after all," she ended reverently, and the incongruity of this remark to a preacher of God's word was lost by both of them.

"Oh! I know, but that is just nature. Are we to stand still there and make of nature a means for a bare work-a-day existence? Do you suppose God gave us these things that we might simply grub potatoes and raise corn for food and seed, then more food and more seed again as the years go by?"

"I don't know," she replied dubiously, unwillingly accepting a portion of his argument.

" You do know—you must know, that there are better things than these, and out in the world is where they live and feel and enact them. Oh! Virgie, there is where life is worth while," and he let his thoughts carry him back to the environment that prompted his words.

Virgie watched him intently, waiting for more until she saw he was not to continue, then she too slipped off to the things she knew to those of the outer world, using Harvey in the very situation her mind conceived, and surrounding him with a visionary world of her own conception.

"I find plenty to do here," she ventured without much force, but to incline him to further talk.

"I know you do," he said tenderly, throwing off the reverie that had held him silent, "and, if it were not for your example, I know that there would be much more of my present humor for me. You lead me into interesting things that I could not find for myself."

"Then why not continue in them—not half-heartedly, but like I do—with all your interest?"

He looked at her for a moment, then a smile spread over his face and he said: "I am not big enough to live little things."

"Not big enough to live little things!" she repeated after him. "I do not understand."

"Perhaps not," he said, seriously, "for you have never known the big men and women who live and do little things that make them big, much less the little, superficial people who live or try to live big things and are little still. The latter kind do not exist about here."

"I believe I know what you mean," she said slowly. "You mean people who do things ill or well. Is that it?"

"Well, partly yes and partly no; but, from your limited field for examples, that is as much as you can derive from the things I have said."

"I tell you, Virgie, you cannot know how hard this life is after the other. It is wrong for me to say such a thing, but I feel it, and I am not living a truth when I seem different," he said, his inventiveness ever ready and always convincing where he would bolster up his own changes of mind.

When Kent, in boyhood, wavered in his first purpose, he doubtless found some difficulty to explain the weakening, but, with the practice of years, his reasoning became ingenious, and at times when he brought this faculty to bear upon some newly-conceived desire his arguments were so strong as to awaken his own sympathy, and his heart would grow tender under the fancied abuse of his circumstances. With the ability to arouse almost to the point of tears his own sympathies for himself, it was not surprising that Virgie should follow his seemingly sincere reasoning. She pitied him and wished that he might have the things he craved, though she knew not what they might be.

"Is it so different here, then?" she asked.

"As different as night from dawn," he replied, turning his eyes upward impressively. "And, without you here, I should have gone away long ago."

"Who—me?" she asked, stabbing herself with her finger and looking foolishly pleased.

"No one else but you. You have been much more to me than you can realize. Without you here to help me I would have done these things all wrong and ended in defeat and humiliation," he said in an insincere burst of self-disparagement that made her forget herself and remember only him in quick sympathy.

"Oh! no," she said, with a gentleness that pleased the vanity he had himself been wounding. "You might have done even better."

"Impossible," he replied, shaking his head dejectedly; "that could never have been. If you will not take the credit yourself I must tell you of it. But wait," he said as she turned away, "your modesty must not keep you from hearing. When you have done so much for me why cannot I give you the credit of it? I have learned more Christianity from you than I ever could have from the Book. I have learned more charity, more nobility and more love—yes, more love than ever I knew before—for men and women, and, teaching me these, you have taught me to love——" She turned quickly and looked startedly into his eyes. "Yes—you must have guessed long ago. You have taught me to love you!" he said, remaining seated, but reaching out and laying his hand over hers in the old, friendly way.

"But I have not guessed," she protested.

"Then it has taken until now for you to know," he replied happily, "and now you know from the surest source." He paused. "What have you to say to me, Virgie?" he asked, attempting to see her face as she leaned her head forward. Then, when she did not reply, he resumed: "Of course you must love me in return. It is just your modesty again," he said, reassuringly. "Speak to me—tell me?"

She raised her head with her eyes opened wide. There was a look of pain within them, more of pity and wonderment than of self-condemnation. The avowal was so new and unexpected to her that she felt no remorse for herself—only compassion for him.

He looked into her face eagerly—intently, misconstruing for the time her expression of gentle sorrow, and watched confidently expectant for the change to smiles that would happily herald his victory. She returned his gaze with an intensity born of deep feeling, unconsciously struggling to convey her thoughts without words, and yet he would not or could not understand. With the quickening of her heart her mind moved on in sympathetic unison. She saw the stages of their friendship as it had grown through simple happenings and become endeared to her. She was innocent of the poesy of her surroundings and knew not the reason for the beauties of their friendship. If she could have contrasted the rustic simplicities of her world with the stern hardness of Kent's, and realized the impression their ideally tinted loveliness had made upon him, she might have foretold the craving he would some time have to possess. But she could never have guessed the outcome, with only her simple flower and bird friends to tell her with signs that speak nothing of human ambition, and the awakening was sad. She reviewed in a tice the joys she had derived from their friendship, and realized at the same time that the end for it all had come. Slowly she drew her hand away and looked at him with pitiful pleading for an instant only, as the sorrow at her heart forced out two drops that dimmed her eyes, and her lashes met to take them up as she turned her head.

He caught her chin in his hand, turned her face up to his own and looked into her startled eyes in a temper that clouded his brow.

"Then you do not love me?" he said, and she drew her head away from his grasp, stung by the indignity.

"You were wicked to make me think that you did," he continued, throwing himself out of the window-seat and stalking across the floor. Then she buried her face in her hands and wept for fright at the responsibility that he imposed upon her.

Kent watched her grief with a sense of satisfaction. It tempered some his own disappointment at the first, but, as his humiliation grew, just so much did his anger increase until he ceased to give her sorrow a place in his reasoning, and with a quick resolution he left the room without further word for her.

Virgie watched him leave with mingled feelings of sorrow, anger and perplexity. She felt that she was in some way responsible for the outcome of the affair, and yet—"Had I but known" she kept repeating to herself. The sense of her own innocence aided her to excuse herself. Not entirely, but enough that she came to feel a deep anger and resentment for his accusations of deception, and withal she became so perplexed she was miserable. She sat rocking a long time after he had left, giving these feelings full freedom, and at no time deciding any one thing quite positively.