The Purchase Price by Emerson Hough (ebook reader screen .txt) 📕

"I don't think so. I believe it was just for this—for this very talk I'm having now with you. I saved you then so that some day I might demand you as hostage.

"I want you to vote with me," she continued, "for the 'higher law.' I want you to vote with the west-bound wheels, with God's blades of grass!"

"God! woman! You have gift of tongues! Now listen to me. Which
shall we train with, among your northern men, John Quincy Adams or
William Lloyd Garrison, with that sane man or the hysterical one?
Is Mr. Beecher a bigger man than Mr. Jefferson was?"

"I know you're honest," she said, frowning, "but let us try to see. There's Mr. Birney, of Alabama, a Southerner who has gone over, through all, to the abolitionists as you call them. And would you call Mr. Clay a fool? Or Mr. Benton, here in your own state, who—"

"Oh, don't mention Benton to me here! He's anathema in this state."

"Yet you might well study Mr. Benton's views. He sees the case of Lily first, the case of the Constitution afterward. Ah, why can't you? Why, Sir, if I could only get you to think as he does—a man with your power and influence and faculty for leadership—I'd call this winter well spent—better spent than if I'd been left in Washington."

"Suppose I wanted to change my beliefs, how would I go about it?" He frowned in his intent effort to follow her, even in her enthusiasm. "Once I asked a preacher how I could find religion, and he told me by coming to the Saviour. I told him that was begging the question, and asked him how I could find the Saviour. All he could say was to answer once more, 'Come to the Saviour!' That's reasoning in a circle. Now, if a man hasn't got faith, how's he going to get it—by what process can he reach out into the dark and find it? What's the use of his saying he has found faith when he knows he hasn't? There's a resemblance between clean religion and honest politics. The abolitionists have never given us Southerners any answer to this."

"No," said she. "I can not give you any answer. For myself, I have found that faith."

"You would endure much for your convictions?" he demanded suddenly.

"Very much, Sir."

"Suffer martyrdom?"

"Perhaps I have done so."

"Would you suffer more? You undertake the conversion of a sinner like myself?"

The flame of his eye caught hers in spite of herself. A little flush came into her cheek.

"Tell me," he demanded imperiously, "on what terms?"

"You do not play the game. You would ask me to preach to you—but you would come to see the revival, not to listen to grace. It isn't playing the game."

"But you're seeking converts?"

"I would despise no man in the world so much as a hypocrite, a turn-coat! You can't purchase faith in the market place, not any more than—"

"Any more than you can purchase love? But I've been wanting not the sermon, but the preacher. You! You! Yes, it is the truth. I want nothing else in the world so much as you."

"I'd never care for a man who would admit that."

"There never was a woman in the world loved a man who did not."

"Oh, always I try to analyze these things," she went on desperately, facing him, her eyes somber, her face aglow, her attitude tense. "I try to look in my mirror and I demand of what I see there. 'What are you?" I say. 'What is this that I see?' Why, I can see that a woman might love her own beauty for itself. Yes, I love my beauty. But I don't see how a woman could care for a man who only cared for that,—what she saw in her mirror, don't you know?"

"Any price, for just that!" he said grimly.

"No, no! You would not. Don't say that! I so much want you to be bigger than that."

"The woman you see in your mirror would be cheap at any cost."

"But a man even like yourself. Sir, would be very cheap, if his price was such as you say. No turncoat could win me—I'd love him more on his own side yonder threefold wall, with his convictions, than on my side without them. I couldn't be bought cheap as that, nor by a cheap man. I'd never love a man who held himself cheap.

"But then," she added, casting back at him one of his own earlier speeches, "if you only thought as I did, what could not we two do together—for the cause of those human blades of grass—so soon cut down? Ah, life is so little, so short!"

"No! No! Stop!" he cried out. "Ah, now is the torture—now you turn the wheel. I can not recant! I can not give up my convictions, or my love, either one; and yet—I'm not sure I'm going to have left either one. It's hell, that's what's left for me. But listen! What for those that grow as flowers, tall, beautiful, there among the grass that is cut down—should they perish from the earth? For what were such as they made, tall and beautiful?—poppies, mystic, drug-like, delirium producing? Is that it—is that your purpose in life, then, after all? You—what you see in your mirror there—is it the purpose of that being—so beautiful, so beautiful—to waste itself, all through life, over some vague and abstract thing out of which no good can come? Is that all? My God! Much as I love you, I'd rather see you marry some other man than think of you never married at all. God never meant a flower such as you to wither, to die, to be wasted. Why, look at you! Look . . . at . . . you! And you say you are to be wasted! God never meant it so, you beauty, you wonderful woman!"

Even as she was about to speak, drawn by the passion of him, the agony of his cry, there came to the ears of both an arresting sound—one which it seemed to Josephine was not wholly strange to her ears. It was like the cry of a babe, a child's wail, difficult to locate, indefinite in distance.

"What was it?" she whispered. "Did you hear?"

He made no answer, except to walk to her straight and take her by the arms, looking sadly, mournfully into her face.

"Ah, my God! My God! Have I not heard? What else have I heard, these years? And you're big enough not to ask—

"It can't endure this way," said he, after a time at last. "You must go. Once in a while I forget. It's got to be good-by between you and me. We'll set to-morrow morning as the time for you to go.

"As I have a witness," he said at last, "I've paid. Good-by!"

He crushed her to him once, as though she were no more than a flower, as though he would take the heart of her fragrance. Then, even as she felt the heave of his great body, panting at the touch of her, mad at the scent of her hair, he put her back from him with a sob, a groan. As when the knife had begun its work, his scarred fingers caught her white arms. He bent over, afraid to look into her eyes, afraid to ask if her throat panted too, afraid to risk the red curve of her lips, so close now to his, so sure to ruin him. He bent and kissed her hands, his lips hot on them; and so left her trembling.

[Illustration: He bent and kissed her hands.]

It is the blessing of the humble that they have simplicity of mental processes. Not that Hector himself perhaps would thus have described himself. The curve of the black crow's wing on his somewhat retreating forehead, the tilt of his little hat, the swing of his body above the hips as he walked, all bespoke Hector's opinion of himself to be a good one. Valiant among men, irresistible among the women of St. Genevieve, he was not the one to mitigate his confidence in himself now that he found himself free from competition and in the presence of a fair one whom in sudden resolve he established in his affections as quite without compare. In short, Hector had not tarried a second week at Tallwoods before offering his hand and his cooper shop to Jeanne.

To the eyes of Jeanne herself, confined as they had been to the offerings of a somewhat hopeless class of serving persons here or there, this swaggering young man, with his broad shoulders, his bulky body, his air of bravado, his easy speech, his ready arm, offered a personality with which she was not too familiar, and which did not lack its appeal. With Gallic caution she made delicate inquiry of Hector's father as to the yearly returns and probable future of the cooperage business at St. Genevieve, as to the desirability of the surrounding country upon which the cooperage business must base its own fortunes. All these matters met her approval. Wherefore, the air of Jeanne became tinged with a certain lofty condescension. In her own heart she trembled now, not so much as to her own wisdom or her own future, but as to the meeting which must be had between herself and her mistress.

This meeting at last did take place, not by the original motion of Jeanne herself. The eye of her mistress had not been wholly blind all these days.

"Jeanne," she demanded one day, "why are you away so much when I desire you? I have often seen you and that young man yonder in very close conversation. Since I stand with you as your guardian and protector, I feel it my duty to inquire, although it is not in the least my pleasure. You must have a care."

"Madame," expostulated Jeanne, "it is nothing, I assure you. Rien du tout—jamais de la vie, Madame."

"Perhaps, but it is of such nothings that troubles sometimes come.
Tell, me, what has this young man said to you?"

"But, Madame!—"

"Tell me. It is quite my right to demand it."

"But he has said many things, Madame."

"As, for instance, that you please him, that you are beautiful, that you have a voice and hand, a turn of the arm—that you have the manner Parisienne—Jeanne, is it not so?"

"But, yes, Madame, and indeed more. I find that young man of excellent judgment, of most discriminating taste."

"And also of sufficient boldness to express the same to you, is it not so, Jeanne?"

"Madame, the strong are brave. I do not deny. Also he is of an excellent cooperage business in St. Genevieve yonder. Moreover, I find the produce of the grape in this country to increase yearly, so that the business seems to be of a certain future, Madame. His community is well founded, the oldest in this portion of the valley. He is young, he has no entanglements—at least, so far as I discover. He has an excellent home with his old mother. Ah, well! Madame, one might do worse."

"So, then, a cooperage business so promising as that, Jeanne, seems more desirable than my own poor employment? You have no regard for your duty to one who has cared for you, I suppose? You desert me precisely at the time my own affairs require my presence in Washington."

"But, Madame, why Washington? Is that our home? What actual home has madame on the face of the earth? Ah, Heaven!—were only it possible that this man were to be considered. This place so large, so beautiful, so in need of a mistress to control it. Madame says she was carried away against her will. Mon Dieu! All my life have I dreamed—have I hoped—that some time a man