Peter did not feel the absurdity of such a speech in such a place. He patted her arm, but there was something in the warmth of her flesh that disturbed his austerity and caused him to lift his hand to the more impersonal axis of her shoulder. He proceeded to develop his idea.

"Cissie, just a moment ago you were complaining of the insults you meet everywhere. I believe if I can spread my ideas, Cissie, that even a pretty colored girl like you may walk the streets without being subjected to obscenity on every corner." His tone unconsciously patronized Cissie's prettiness with the patronage of the male for the less significant thing, as though her ripeness for love and pa.s.sion and children were, after all, not comparable with what he, a male, could do in the way of significantly molding life.

Cissie lifted her head and dried her eyes.

"So you aren't going to marry me, Peter?" Woman-like, now that she was well into the subject, she was far less embarra.s.sed than Peter. She had had her cry.

"Why--er--considering this work, Cissie--"

"Aren't you going to marry anybody, Peter?"

The artist in Peter, the thing the girl loved in him, caught again that Messianic vision of himself.

"Why, no, Cissie," he said, with a return of his inspiration of an hour ago; "I'll be going here and there all over the South preaching this gospel of kindliness and tolerance, of forgiveness of the faults of others." Cissie looked at him with a queer expression. "I'll show the white people that they should treat the negro with consideration not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of themselves. It's so simple, Cissie, it's so logical and clear--"

The girl shook her head sadly.

"And you don't want me to go with you, Peter?"

"Why, n-no, Cissie; a girl like you couldn't go. Perhaps I'll be misunderstood in places, perhaps I may have to leave a town hurriedly, or be swung over the walls, like Paul, in a basket." He attempted to treat it lightly.

But the girl looked at him with a horror dawning in her melancholy face.

"Peter, do you really mean that?" she whispered.

"Why, truly. You don't imagine--"

The octoroon opened her dark eyes until she might have been some weird.

"Oh, Peter, please, please put such a mad idea away from you! Peter, you've been living here alone in this old house until you don't see things clearly. Dear Peter, don't you _know?_ You can't go out and talk like that to white folks and--and not have some terrible thing happen to you! Oh, Peter, if you would only marry me, it would cure you of such wildness!" Involuntarily she got up, holding out her arms to him, offering herself to his needs, with her frightened eyes fixed on his.

It made him exquisitely uncomfortable again. He made a little sound designed to comfort and rea.s.sure her. He would do very well. He was something of a diplomat in his way. He had got along with the boys in Harvard very well indeed. In fact, he was rather a man of the world. No need to worry about him, though it was awfully sweet of her.

Cissie picked up her handkerchief with its torn edge, which she had laid on the table. Evidently she was about to go.

"I surely don't know what will become of me," she said, looking at it.

In a reversal of feeling Peter did not want her to go away quite then.

He cast about for some excuse to detain her a moment longer.

"Now, Cissie," he began, "if you are really going to leave Hooker's Bend--"

"I'm not going," she said, with a long exhalation. "I--" she swallowed-- "I just thought that up to--ask you to--to--You see," she explained, a little breathless, "I thought you still loved me and had forgiven me by the way you watched for me every day at the window."

This speech touched Peter more keenly than any of the little drama the girl had invented. It hit him so shrewdly he could think of nothing more to say.

Cissie moved toward the window and undid the latch.

"Good night, Peter." She paused a moment, with her hand on the catch.

"Peter," she said, "I'd almost rather see you marry some other girl than try so terrible a thing."

The big, full-blooded athlete smiled faintly.

"You seem perfectly sure marriage would cure me of my mission."

Cissie's face reddened faintly.

"I think so," she said briefly. "Good night," and she disappeared in the dark s.p.a.ce she had opened, and closed the jalousies softly after her.

CHAPTER XV

Cissie Dildine's conviction that marriage would cure Peter of his mission persisted in the mulatto's mind long after the glamour of the girl had faded and his room had regained the bleak emptiness of a bachelor's bedchamber.

Cissie had been so brief and positive in her statement that Peter, who had not thought on the point at all, grew more than half convinced she was right.

Now that he pondered over it, it seemed there was a difference between the outlook of a bachelor and that of a married man. The former considered humanity as a balloonist surveys a throng,--immediately and without perspective,--but the latter always sees mankind through the frame of his family. A single man tends naturally to philosophy and reform; a married man to administration and statesmanship. There have been no great unmarried statesmen; there have been no great married philosophers or reformers.

Now that Cissie had pointed out this universal rule, Peter saw it very clearly. And Peter suspected that beneath this rough cla.s.sification, and conditioning it, lay a plexus of obscure mental and physical reactions set up by the relations between husband and wife. It might very well be there was a difference between the actual cerebral and nervous structure of a married man and that of a single man.

At any rate, after these reflections, Peter now felt sure that marriage would cure him of his mission; but how had Cissie known it? How had she struck out so involved a theory, one might say, in the toss of a head?

The more Peter thought it over the more extraordinary it became. It was another one of those explosive ideas which Cissie, apparently, had the faculty of creating out of a pure mental vacuum.

All this philosophy aside, Cissie's appearance just in the nick of his inspiration, her surprising proposal of marriage, and his refusal, had accomplished one thing: it had committed Peter to the program he had outlined to the girl.

Indeed, there seemed something fatalistic in such a concatenation of events. Siner wondered whether or not he would have obeyed his vision without this added impulse from Cissie. He did not know; but now, since it had all come about just as it had, he suspected he would have been neglectful. He felt as if a dangerous but splendid channel had been opened before his eyes, and almost at the same instant a hand had reached down and directed his life into it. This fancy moved the mulatto. As he got himself ready for bed, he kept thinking:

"Well, my life is settled at last. There is nothing else for me to do.

Even if this should end terribly for me, as Cissie imagines, my life won't be wasted."

Next morning Peter Siner was awakened by old Rose Hobbett thrusting her head in at his door, staring around, and finally, seeing Peter in bed, grumbling:

"Why is you still heah, black man?"

The secretary opened his eyes in astonishment.

"Why shouldn't I be here?"

"n.o.body wuz 'speckin' you to be heah." The crone withdrew her head and vanished.

Peter wondered at this unaccustomed interest of Rose, then hurried out of bed, supposing himself late for breakfast.

A dense fog had come up from the river, and the moisture floating into his open windows had dampened his whole room. Peter stepped briskly to the screen and began splashing himself. It was only in the midst of his ablutions that he remembered his inspiration and resolve of the previous evening. As he squeezed the water over his powerfully molded body, he recalled it almost impersonally. It might have happened to some third person. He did not even recall distinctly the threads of the logic which had lifted him to such a Pisgah, and showed him the whole South as a new and promised land. However, he knew that he could start his train of thought again, and again ascend the mountain.

Floating through the fog into his open window came the noises of the village as it set about living another day, precisely as it had lived innumerable days in the past. The blast of the six-o'clock whistle from the planing-mill made the loose sashes of his windows rattle. Came a lowing of cows and a clucking of hens, a woman's calling. The voices of men in conversation came so distinctly through the pall that it seemed a number of persons must be moving about their morning work, talking and shouting, right in the Renfrew yard.