第36章

The stirring air brought a smell of blossoms; the distance took on faint lavender hazes which blended the outlines of the fields, lying like square coverlets upon the long slope of rising ground beyond the bottom-land, and empurpled the blue woodland shadows of the groves.

For the first time, it struck Joe that it was a beautiful day, and it came to him that a beautiful day was a thing which nothing except death, sickness, or imprisonment could take from him--not even the ban of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with the sweetness of it.

"Go ahead!" he whispered."Do that all you want to.If you'll keep it up like this awhile, I'll follow with `Little Brown Jug, How I Love Thee!'

It seems to pay, after all!"

The welcome strains, however, were but the prelude to a harsher sound which interrupted and annihilated them: the Court-house bell clanging out twelve."All right," said Joe."It 's noon and I'm `across Main Street bridge.' "He opened his eyes and looked about him whimsically.Then he shook his head again.

A lady had just emerged from the bridge and was coming toward him.

It would be hard to get at Joe's first impressions of her.We can find conveyance for only the broadest and heaviest.Ancient and modern instances multiply the case of the sleeper who dreams out a long story in accurate color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and shutting of a door.So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady's approach.And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been--in fact it was, in his recollections, later--a blur of emotion.

At first sight of her, perhaps it was pre-eminently the shock of seeing anything so exquisite where he had expected to see nothing at all.For she was exquisite--horrid as have been the uses of the word, its best and truest belong to her; she was that and much more, from the ivory ferrule of the parasol she carried, to the light and slender footprint she left in the dust of the road.Joe knew at once that nothing like her had ever before been seen in Canaan.

He had little knowledge of the millinery arts, and he needed none to see the harmony--harmony like that of the day he had discovered a little while ago.Her dress and hat and gloves and parasol showed a pale lavender overtint like that which he had seen overspreading the western slope.(Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it.She was tall, but if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have been capable of calling her lips "red,"in which case he would not have been Joe, and would have been as far from the truth as her lips were from red, or as her supreme delicateness was from mere slenderness.

Under the summer hat her very dark hair swept back over her temples with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld from being fluffy.It may be that this approach to trimness, which was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe.

Let us say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the hint of floridity was abhorrent to her."Trim" is as clumsy as "slender"; she had escaped from the trimness of girlhood as wholly as she had gone through its coltishness."Exquisite." Let us go back to Joe's own blurred first thought of her and be content with that!

She was to pass him--so he thought--and as she drew nearer, his breath came faster.

"REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!"Was THIS the fay of whom the voice had warned him? With that, there befell him the mystery of last night.He did not remember, but it was as if he lived again, dimly, the highest hour of happiness in a life a thousand years ago; perfume and music, roses, nightingales and plucked harp-strings.Yes; something wonderful was happening to him.

She had stopped directly in front of him;stopped and stood looking at him with her clear eyes.

He did not lift his own to hers; he had long experience of the averted gaze of women; but it was not only that; a great shyness beset him.He had risen and removed his hat, trying (ineffectually)not to clear his throat; his every-day sense urging upon him that she was a stranger in Canaan who had lost her way--the preposterousness of any one's losing the way in Canaan not just now appealing to his every--day sense.

"Can I--can I--" he stammered, blushing miserably, meaning to finish with "direct you," or "show you the way."Then he looked at her again and saw what seemed to him the strangest sight of his life.The lady's eyes had filled with tears-filled and overfilled."I'll sit here on the log with you," she said.And her voice was the voice which he had heard saying, "REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!""WHAT!" he gasped.

"You don't need to dust it!" she went on, tremulously.And even then he did not know who she was.