The Vermont Watchman

SELECTED STORY.

The Gold of Silence.

More harm has been wrought in this world by the gold of silence than by the silver of speech. Especially is this true of matters of the heart.

Farland came to realize it in the end: but as he left the commanding officer and walked in his deliberate way across the hop-room to where Miss Cameron stood, he was priding himself upon his ability to hold his tongue, and, with a wretched sort of vain glory, nerving himself to hold it for seven hours longer.

Miss Cameron was talking to the regimental quartermaster, and when she caught sight of Farland, she grew radiant. The regimental quartermaster observed this, and was, of course, annoyed. He went away and left her with the lieutenant.

It is the fate of a woman to be forever smiling. Few men have learned to distinguish that eternal smile. Those who have, have observed the subtlest tragedies of life.

Farland was not one of them. He was too distinctly manly to understand women. He was, therefore, strengthened in his resolve to keep silence when Miss Cameron's expression in no wise changed as he told her that she must excuse him from the next dance.

"I have just seen the colonel, and he has been pleased to inform me that I must leave at reveille."

"For what portion of the globe?"

She gazed over his shoulder in apparent absorption in something at the other side of the room. If Farland had been a student of the sex he would have known that this was over-acting. It was one of the many of Miss Cameron's charms that she usually fixed her entire attention upon the person at hand.

"Where are you going?" she repeated.

"To join Blake's command. After that, wherever the will of heaven and the craft of the Apache may lead me."

For just one instant her expression changed. But Farland was not acute.

"Upon a scout, then?" she asked.

"Upon a scout, yes. And as I have to leave before reveille, and, as it is now eleven o'clock, there is no time to be lost."

Miss Cameron was smiling again.

"You will not sleep much to-night. Things must be serious."

"They are," he told her.

There was a pause—one of those intervals when the gods bedumb our mental powers that instinct may have fair play. But we defeat their ends. We have trained instinct to lie quiet.

The lieutenant moved uneasily. Miss Cameron, with the delicate much-sung discernment of woman, thought him restless to be gone. She drew herself up to her full height, determined that she was indifferent and hard, and his resolution was enforced.

"You must not let me keep you," she said.

Farland was too well trained to allow his anger and unhappiness to appear in more than an exaggerated unconcern. He took her extended hand.

"Shall you be here when I return?" he asked. His resolution was near to breaking. If her tawny eyes had grown ever so little soft, he would have flung his golden wealth of silence to the winds. But her pride was mighty, and it was aroused.

"My visit comes to an end this week," she said.

"We shall probably meet again," he ventured.

She shrugged her shoulders negligently.

"Probably. One can never be sure that one has seen the last of anybody in the army." And then she added: "Good-by."

She would have been glad to bow her head upon her arms and to have kept her heartache in silence. Instead, she gave the dance which was to have been Farland's to a married captain, and succeeded perfectly in her effort to appear to enjoy it.

And Farland went out, morally and bodily, into the night. His was the code of honor—which considers not the woman—that holds that if a man may not ask a woman to marry him then and there, neither may he tell her of his love. He thought he was doing right, and he was not one to rail at Fate. A little tempest of temptation had ruffled the deep waters of his conscience for a time. But they were calm again. He remembered with resentment the haughtily poised head, and the placid smile, and the last glimpse he had caught of her through the hop-room window—a yellow-gowned figure, swaying to the music in full enjoyment of life.

Well, she would have gone back to Bayard by the time of his return, and one could never be sure one would not forget—after years. He went into the barracks and gave his orders.

When the brass mouths of the bugles pealed their reveille welcome to the sun, as it shone above the mountains, far across the prairie, Farland and his command were trotting toward Mount Graham, and Miss Cameron, still in the yellow gown, stood at her window with her hands clasped before her, and watched the line of the receding column.

Farland stopped at Bayard two months later. The scout was over, and he was taking his command back to Fort Grant. They were to strike the railroad at Silver City, nine miles away, upon the following day.

He meant to see Miss Cameron. There was no longer a reason for silence. He waited with impatience while the commandant arranged for the disposition of the men. Then he walked with him across the parade.

The primroses of the evening were opening, a great, pale flower bursting out here and there in the grass, until, even as he went, all the ground was starred with them, and the children from the officers' line and the laundresses' row were running, laughing, and screaming, and calling out, to gather the handfuls of fragile bloom that would be wilted before tattoo.

Upon occasions of necessity the commandant's long, lank body could bestir itself; but there was no such occasion now, and Major Cameron resented Farland's haste.

"I say, Farland," he protested, "slow up. What is your hurry. You will not get dinner before retreat, anyway."

Little the lieutenant recked of dinner. But he obliged himself to walk more reasonably. Major Cameron talked of the scout and its outcome.

Farland tried to listen and to answer. In his joyful anticipation he forgot that he was a sorry looking sight to go a-wooing, that his face was burned, his nose peeling, and his clothes ragged and dusty. Self-consciousness was not one of his faults. The major broke off suddenly in the midst of a tirade against Indian agents, those pet aversions of the line.

"I suppose you are about worn out," he said.

"No," said Farland; "not in the least. Why?"

"You appear not to be able to keep your mind upon anything. You have no notion of what I said last."

"You said 'Mescaleros' last."

"But you have no idea whatever what I said about the Mescaleros."

"I am afraid that's so," Farland admitted.

"And over there at the corral you answered three questions that I hadn't asked."

Farland apologized civilly. But he had seen, through the window, Miss Cameron standing with clasped hands and head thrown back, before the open fire. It was a favorite pose with her, and it recalled so much. The major might as well have addressed his concluding remarks to the flagstaff.

They went into the hall, and the commandant opened the door. "There is Clare," he said; "I believe you know each other. I will go and get Mrs. Cameron." He went away and closed the door again.

Farland was not demonstrative. But neither was he one to delay in carrying out a resolve. He took the hand that the girl held out to him, and then went to the fire-place, and rested his arm upon the mantel and looked at her speculatively.

"I am going to be very rash," he said, "and very precipitate."

She smiled incredulously.

"How unlike you!" she said.

"Perhaps; but it is not unlike me to go straight to the point, I think."

She vouchsafed no encouragement.

"It is not," was all she answered. She had long since determined that he was an unscrupulous flirt—worse than that, indeed, because he made more pretensions than most men. Now, when she looked into his keen gray eyes, that consoling fiction vanished. She wondered why he did not speak at once of the one thing that might reasonably be expected to be of interest to herself, at least. But she folded her hands in front of her again, and stood very erect.

"When I saw you last in the hop-room at Grant," he said, "I was to all intents and purposes upon half-pay. My mother was alive then, and I was supporting her."

She looked at him, puzzled. Why should he tell her this now? While there had yet been time he had been chary enough of his confidences.

While there had yet been time—.

She looked at him as he stood there before the fire, young and strong, with his pistol belt showing beneath his faded blouse, the kerchief knotted around his neck, the dusty boots with their spurred heels, his face so absurdly sun and wind burned, glowing with blonde redness in the fire-light. While there had yet been time. She checked an inclination to throw out her arms and cry aloud.

"That is why," he went on, "I did not feel justified in telling you—though you might, I should think, have seen—that I loved you."

She went up to him and put her hand upon his shoulder, and tried to speak.

"Well, what?" he asked. He was submitting dully to some blow, which he saw in her hardening eyes, was going to fall.

"I"—she was forcing the words from her throat with a harsh, dry sound—"I married Captain Whitcomb three weeks ago, because—I did not know."

Farland turned away, and drew a chair near to the fire. The movement was quite natural, quite free from any gesture of tragedy. He was too stunned to feel the pain at once. That would come afterward, and stay through many years. He sat down in the chair and watched the flaming mesquite-root. It was a little hard for him to draw his breath, and the pain was beginning now, too.

Clare stood upon the other side of the hearth, and looked dully ahead of her. Then she drew her hand, slowly, across her eyes.

"I must go home," she said.

Farland did not answer her, and she went out and closed the door.—Gwendolen Overton, in Argonaut.