"Soon?" he repeated as he rose in the stirrup--"soon--and to claim you always, Alice."

He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back, her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle.

Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his life. It could not come. With him all life had been a pa.s.sion flower, with the rank, strong odor of the sensuous, wild honeysuckle, which must climb ever upon something else, in order to open and throw off the rank, brazen perfume from its yellow and streaked and variegated blossoms.

And how common and vulgar and all-surfeiting it is, loading the air around it with its sickening imitation of sweetness, so that even the bees stagger as they pa.s.s through it and disdain to stop and shovel, for the mere asking, its musky and illicit honey.

But, O mystic odor of the crepe-myrtle--O love which never dies--how differently it grows and lives and blooms!

In color, constant--a deep pink. Not enough of red to suggest the sensual, nor yet lacking in it when the full moment of ripeness comes. How delicately pink it is, and yet how unfadingly it stands the summer's sun, the hot air, the drought! How quickly it responds to the Autumn showers, and long after the honeysuckle has died, and the bees have forgotten its rank memory, this beautiful creature of love blooms in the very lap of Winter.

O love that defies even the breath of death!

The yellow lips of the honeysuckle are thick and sensual; but the beautiful petals of this cl.u.s.ter of love-cells, all so daintily transparent, hanging in pink cl.u.s.ters of loveliness with scalloped lips of purity, that even the sunbeam sends a photograph of his heart through them and every moonbeam writes in it the romance of its life.

And the skies all day long, reflecting in its heart, tells to the cool green leaves that shadow it the story of its life, and it catches and holds the sympathy of the tiniest zephyr, from the way it flutters to the patter of their little feet.

All things of Nature love it--the clouds, the winds, the very stars, and sun, because love--undying love--is the soul of G.o.d, its Maker.

The rose is red in the rich pa.s.sion of love, the lily is pale in the poverty of it; but the crepe-myrtle is pink in the constancy of it.

O bloom of the crepe-myrtle! And none but a lover ever smelled it--none but a lover ever knew!

She ran up the gentle slope to the old-fashioned garden and threw herself under the tree from whence the dying odor came. She fell on her knees--the moonlight over her in fleckings of purification. She clung to the scaly weather-beaten stem of the tree as she would have pressed a sister to her breast. Her arms were around it--she knew it--its very bark.

She seized a bloom that had fallen and crushed it to her bosom and her cheek.

"O Tom--Tom--why--why did you make me love you here and then leave me forever with only the memory of it?"

"Twice does it bloom, dear Heart,--can not my love bloom like it--twice?"

"A-l-i-c-e!"

The voice came from out the distant woods nearby.

The blood leaped and then p.r.i.c.ked her like sharp-pointed icicles, and they all seemed to freeze around and p.r.i.c.k around her heart. She could not breathe.... Her head reeled.... The crepe-myrtle fell on her and smothered her....

When she awoke Mrs. Westmore sat by her side and was holding her head while her brother was rubbing her arms.

"You must be ill, darling," said her mother gently. "I heard you scream. What--"

They helped her to rise. Her heart still fluttered violently--her head swam.

"Did you call me before--before"--she was excited and eager.

"Why, yes"--smiled her mother. "I said, 'Alice--Alice!'"

"It was not that--no, that was not the way it sounded," she said as they led her into the house.

CHAPTER XI

THE CASKET AND THE GHOST

Richard Travis could not sleep that night--why, he could not tell.

After he returned from Westmoreland, Mammy Charity brought him his c.o.c.ktail, and tidied up his room, and beat up the feathers in his pillows and bed--for she believed in the old-fashioned feather-bed and would have no other kind in the house.

The old clock in the hall--that had sat there since long before he, himself, could remember--struck ten, and then eleven, and then, to his disgust, even twelve.

At ten he had taken another toddy to put himself to sleep.

There is only one excuse for drunkenness, and that is sleeplessness.

If there is a h.e.l.l for the intellectual it is not of fire, as for commoner mortals, but of sleeplessness--the wild staring eyes of an eternity of sleeplessness following an eon of that midnight mental anguish which comes with the birth of thoughts.

But still he slept not, and so at ten he had taken another toddy--and still another, and as he felt its life and vigor to the ends of his fingers, he quaffed his fourth one; then he smiled and said: "And now I don't care if I never go to sleep!"

He arose and dressed. He tried to recite one of his favorite poems, and it angered him that his tongue seemed thick.

His head slightly reeled, but in it there galloped a thousand beautiful dreams and there were visions of Alice, and love, and the satisfaction of conquering and the glory of winning.

He could feel his heart-throbs at the ends of his fingers. He could see thoughts--beautiful, grand thoughts--long before they reached him,--stalking like armed men, helmeted and vizored, stalking forward into his mind.

He walked out and down the long hall.

The ticking of the clock sounded to him so loud that he stopped and cursed it.

Because, somehow, it ticked every time his heart beat; and he could count his heart-beats in his fingers' ends, and he didn't want to know every time his heart beat. It made him nervous.

It might stop; but it would not stop. And then, somehow, he imagined that his heart was really out in the yard, down under the hill, and was pumping the water--as the ram had done for years--through the house. It was a queer fancy, and it made him angry because he could not throw it off.

He walked down the hall, rudely s.n.a.t.c.hed the clock door open, and stopped the big pendulum. Then he laughed sillily.

The moonbeams came in at the stained gla.s.s windows, and cast red and yellow and pale green fleckings of light on the smooth polished floor.

He began to feel uncanny. He was no coward and he cursed himself for it.

Things began to come to him in a moral way and mixed in with the uncanniness of it all. He imagined he saw, off in the big square library across the way, in the very spot he had seen them lay out his grandfather--Maggie, and she arose suddenly from out of his grandfather's casket and beckoned to him with--

"I love you so--I love _you_ so!"

It was so real, he walked to the spot and put his hands on the black mohair Davenport. And the form on it, sitting bolt upright, was but the pillow he had napped on that afternoon.

He laughed and it sounded hollow to him and echoed down the hall:

"How like her it looked!"